Stray Thoughts... - That old familiar feeling

On a dull thud, projected wins, some positive Manoah-jo, the leadoff hitter, Erik Swanson, Ross Atkins, John Schneider, fun with (minimal) bat speed, and more!

Image via the Toronto Blue Jays/@BlueJays

Man, the ingredients were there on Sunday afternoon for the Blue Jays to head to Baltimore on a real high. Fans were still glowing from Saturday’s outstanding, offence-powered comeback win. Alek Manoah looked as good as we’ve seen since 2022. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. continues to show signs of life, assuming rocket singles count for that.

Two hits, one walk, and one run later and here we are again.

The Jays have topped six runs twice in their last six, which I guess you could call progress. But that still means they’ve hit that mark in only 17.5% of their games this season. That’s just a little over half of last year’s rate, which—considering how awful the 2023 season felt—is completely insane. Only the White Sox, Marlins, Rockies, and Cardinals have a worse run differential at this point.

It’s ugly. It doesn’t feel good. What else can be said?

I mean, I suppose I could say that when FanGraphs' Jeff Sullivan looked into it in June of 2015, he found that even at that point in the season, pre-season projections did a better job of projecting a team's eventual record than either their win-loss pace or their run differential.

I could also say that FanGraphs' Depth Charts—which use a combination of ZiPS and Steamer with expected playing time adjusted manually—has seen enough to project the Jays to go 63-59 the rest of the way. That gives them just the 11th highest projected RoS winning percentage in MLB, and the seventh in the American League. Combine the RoS projection with what clubs have done so far and Depth Charts has the Orioles, Mariners, and Rays as the AL Wild Card teams, with the Jays at 81-81—four games back of the 85-projected-win Mariners and Rays, with the Rangers, Guardians, and Royals all at 83 projected wins, and the Astros and Red Sox at 82.

They’ve still got a fighting chance, if you believe it. But this certainly hasn’t felt much like a team that’s going to exceed its projections to a greater degree than any of those ahead of them—or anybody else, frankly.

Those numbers would have been better—and I might have had a better feeling about things—if they had given that Manoah performance the run support it deserved on Sunday, and given us what might have felt like a genuine turnaround series. But obviously they didn’t. Ugh.

Stay tuned for some stray thoughts…

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(Bang! Bang!) Alek’s Silver Lining

I haven’t written very much this season about Alek Manoah for the simple reason that he hadn’t really done anything to indicate he was going to be much of a factor on the field for the Jays. It’s not exactly a fun story: hotshot prospect quickly becomes one of the best pitchers in baseball and then just as quickly completely falls apart. And though there was optimism for him heading into the spring, and a lot of chatter about how he’d slimmed down and what that meant for how hard he was working to get himself right, that didn’t last long.

Manoah pitched in the Jays' fourth game of the spring, against the Tigers in Lakeland, and gave up four earned runs in just 1 2/3 innings. His first inning went: Single, HBP, HBP, GIDP, two-run double, lineout. His second: HBP, lineout, groundout, walk, two-run double.

Not exactly encouraging, especially after all we’d seen in 2023. Worse yet, he was then scratched from his next start due to shoulder soreness, was forced to miss a side session because of the same issue, and then didn’t pitch again in the Grapefruit League.

Well, now he has done something to indicate he can be a factor.

Manoah looked outstanding on Sunday.

He went pitch-for-pitch with the sneaky-good Bailey Ober, equalling him in terms of whiffs by generating 15—though all those swings-and-misses didn't translate to strikeouts quite as well as his opponent’s ones did, with Manoah racking up just six Ks to Ober's 10. Still, his 32.6% whiff rate was higher than any he produced in 2023, and higher than all but his first two starts of 2022.

Manoah's changeup was the talk of this one, particularly because the rate at which he used it against lefties (31.7%) was vastly different than in his first start of the season (2%). However, it's not completely out of the ordinary for him to use it that much, as he's had eight starts in his career with a rate above 30% and five more above 25%. What's maybe just as interesting was that he threw his fastball to left-handers more often than in any start last year, which is almost certainly because he was throwing it harder than last year, averaging 93.8 mph just a week after averaging 94 for the first time since early September 2022.

Against right-handers he was the same sinker-slider guy we've seen since the middle of '22, though a slightly more extreme version of it, with his 50% sinker rate to RHB being higher than in all but five starts in his career, including the one a week ago. And the velocity on that pitch was better than in all but one start last year, too.

Velocity was up across the board. Spin was up. As you can see below, he did a good job of keeping his changeups and sliders away from the heart of the plate, while still making them competitive pitches. The horizontal break on his slider—something we tracked a lot last season—was down a bit, but maybe that was intentional. Maybe he wasn’t chasing chase with the pitch. The two sliders we see below that are low-and-away, way off the plate to righties, were actually thrown to left-handed hitters.

Compare that to his start in D.C., when his slider location against right-handers looked more like we saw last year: a bunch over the heart of the plate, and a bunch trying to tempt batters to chase but that were too far off to get swings.

Only one of the pitches below resulted in a swinging strike.

So, there were good signs everywhere, maybe the best of which was that he seemed comfortable throwing everything in his arsenal—plus the fact that 55 of his 78 pitches went for strikes.

Obviously our optimism here should be of the cautious variety. He did make a mistake to Carlos Santana that, thanks to Ernie Clement’s second error of the day, cost him three unearned runs. And people forget that he had a pair of seven-inning shutout outings in Kansas City and New York early last year. Performances like this are in there for Alek, it’s delivering them consistently that’s become the problem.

But still, any sign of greatness from Manoah is a real positive. Hell, anything that isn’t straight-up obviously bad is a welcome change. We’ll see where it goes from here, but we’re at least not talking about whether to send him down. We’re at least not talking about Paulo Espino.

Dr. Springlove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Decline

George Springer should be moved down in the lineup. Let’s start there. Let’s make that clear.

We all can see it, sadly. John Schneider can see it. And we've all been seeing it for a while now.

Springer's wRC+ peaked at 155 in 2019, then dipped to 143, then 140 in his first year with the Jays, 133 in his four-win 2022, then to just 104 last season. Currently it sits at 66.

I fully believe that he's better than that. Don't forget that he started with a 68 wRC+ last season before rebounding to a 133 in May, a 120 in June, dropping again to 60 in July, then rebounding again to 129 in August and 110 in September.

But I don't bring those stronger months up to advocate for him, even though expecting a similar bounceback may be part of the Jays' reasoning for giving him more time. The signs of decline are clear, and Jays fans know from their experience with José Bautista—who went from a wRC+ of 160 to 148 to 123 to 81 in his final year in Toronto—that it can happen quickly, and can be very difficult to pull out of for players on the wrong side of their early 30s. And, more practically, if you look at the Jays' rest of season ZiPS projections, Springer's 110 wRC+ mark is well below Davis Schneider's 126. In fact, eight of his teammates have more optimistic projections going forward than Springer does.

Even if the decline isn’t as severe as it has felt so far this year, this not a guy who should end up having the most plate appearances on the team when all is said and done. A move from the leadoff spot should, and I think almost certainly will, happen. It's not even some sort of crazy third rail because he’s always been a leadoff guy or is (theoretically) chasing Rickey Henderson’s leadoff home run record, either. From the tail end of last July and for almost the whole month of August, Whit Merrifield was the Blue Jays' primary leadoff man, with Springer mostly hitting fourth.

But I sort of get it.

For one thing, Springer is a respected guy, a veteran, a leader—though maybe not an especially vocal, rah-rah type one—and a champion. Guys like that are always going to get more rope than someone less established. He also may have earned himself a reprieve in Philadelphia back on Wednesday, singling, stealing second, and then scoring a run in the top of the fourth, while also making a spectacular diving catch, in a game the team badly needed to win after the ugly loss on Tuesday.

For another thing, while it would indeed be very bad to let one of the team's lesser hitters accumulate more plate appearances than anybody else over the course of the season, on a game-to-game basis who is hitting where doesn't matter nearly as much—and certainly not in a way that's proportionate to the amount of vitriol John Schneider has been getting lately each time fans see Springer's name once again at the top of the lineup.

I'm no mathemagician, but while I don’t know if it would be quite right to say that hits are distributed completely randomly, it is at the very least very random-ish. This means it's really hard to control when you're going to get the clusters of hits and walks that lead to run scoring and—better still—rallies. The best you can do, more or less, is stack the guys who are most likely to get hits/on-base together—and to have as many good hitters as you can. Plenty of work has been done on lineup optimization by people far smarter than I am, and it's certainly much more nuanced than that, but, ultimately, no matter how you structure your lineup you're fighting an uphill battle against cluster luck.

Yes, you want your best guys bunched at the top of the order, because you also obviously don't want to end a close loss with a bad or obviously struggling hitter having received one more at-bat than someone clearly better. But that honestly doesn't happen a ton. I went through all of the Jays' losses by three runs or less this season and the ones in which someone like Schneider, Jansen, or Turner had fewer trips to the plate than Springer numbered just three (one of which saw Springer hit a ninth-inning single), plus the rain-shortened game in Kansas City.

This happening one time is too many, sure. But good players make outs all the time, and bad or struggling players avoid outs sometimes too. It's more likely that you'll have a better outcome in that single extra at-bat with a better player there, in that specific situation. You may even get a game-changing outcome, though that depends on a whole bunch of other variables, like what the player’s teammates ahead of and behind him did. And you do want to optimize the chances that your players most likely to hit a home run (guffaw!) or a double come up with someone on in front of them. But we’re really talking here about stuff that’s impacting the margins—which is why this absolutely matters in the long term—much more than it does the day-to-day.

Having a struggling guy at the top of the lineup for a little longer than you should is far from killing you. It’s not optimal-optimal, but upsetting an important player, or putting too much on the shoulders of Davis Schneider too soon, isn’t necessarily optimal either. It should change. A different look to this lineup, even just for the sake of rearranging deck chairs, would feel awfully nice. But acting like it's some egregious, job-disqualifying disaster that's costing the team games is overly dramatic. And it's not like the Jays aren't aware of this stuff or thinking about it.

I don't know, man. It's OK. Chill out. There are far bigger problems with this team right now.

Quickly…

• Another tough one on Sunday for Erik Swanson, who has fallen down the bullpen pecking order a little bit—he hasn’t been asked to come in and protect a lead since he blew up and took the loss in the first game of the series against the Nationals—but could clearly use tumbling even more. That said, I can understand going to him there. He got the out he was asked to in Philly on Tuesday, then on Saturday had a solid, efficient inning. Not the craziest thing in the world to get him back out there and hope to build some confidence with another strong showing in a spot that wasn’t fully do-or-die. Just didn’t work out.

• Speaking of manager stuff, a lot of people sure think John Schneider is going to end up getting fired before the year is through. And while that may be true—and while I’ve certainly been very wrong on this very subject before—I’m still having a hard time seeing it. Yes, Ross Atkins’ track record of understanding how people are going to react to stuff is comically abysmal, but even he must know that if he fired another manager he’ll instantly become the one taking all the heat. Which, frankly, he should be anyway.

• USA Today’s Bob Nightengale suggests in his latest that if Schneider is made the scapegoat it is “expected” that Don Mattingly will take over. 1) Well, if we go by the Rule of Bob then clearly this isn’t going to happen. 2) I don’t see how that solves anything. 3) Bob also says that the Orioles are looking for late-inning relievers and, among others, have their eyes on Jordan Romano. The absence of the name Yimi García shows how unserious this piece is, I think. (OK, the presence of the name Bob Nightengale does as well). 4) Come on man, at least give us DeMarlo!

• Thing is, I think firing Schneider would be tantamount to Ross signing his own walking papers, honestly. And I think people have seen how little the end-product changed after Charlie Montoyo was let go anyway. Save, of course, for the fact that the Jays now have a guy who actually does get angry and is willing to show he’s got his players’ backs by bursting from the dugout to scream in an umpire’s face, which is apparently something we hate now. The initial catharsis among those who believe Schneider is holding this team back would be incredibly short-lived I think.

• Something else that’s not exactly holding the team back but could probably be better is the way the Jays are using the 26th spot on their roster. I completely understand why Dan Vogelbach can’t get into more games, but it sucks to see him languish on the bench—especially in spots where he could actually prove useful!—and not be able to get into any kind of rhythm. Still, as Dan Shulman noted on Sunday’s broadcast, Spencer Horwitz has seen some time at second base this year, as well as in left field, and he’s hitting a ton in Buffalo. The Jays have already showed with Addison Barger that they’re willing to give a guy a chance to see if he can make a quick offensive impact, even if it means throwing defence out the window sometimes. Having a guy in that lefty bench bat role who you can hide in the field occasionally would make all the difference as far as the ability to carve out a real role goes. Unfortunately for Vogelbach, that’s not him. It’s probably time to bring Horwitz up, play him a few times and, if he hits, play him some more. What you do if he doesn’t is harder to say, but that’s what Barger, Orelvis Martinez, and maybe even eventually Joey Votto are for.

• Moving on, Statcast has finally made bat speed data public! Sadly, what they haven’t done is make year-over-year changes visible, as we only have data going back to early April of this season. Sorry, Springerheads, but we just don’t know how far he’s fallen off since 2022.

What we do know is that there are a lot of ways to be a good hitter, and bat speed isn’t the be-all, end-all. The Jays, for example, rank last in baseball for bat speed. This seems bad, probably is bad, but it needs context. For example, Davis Schneider (70.2 mph) is the closest to average among Blue Jays hitters (70.1), with both Danny Jansen (69.2) and Justin Turner (65.4) grading out below. We also can look at things like who is squaring the ball up at the highest rate, which is where Jansen (34.4%, just behind Alejandro Kirk for the team lead) and Turner (28.2%) do much better—and noticeably better than high bat speed guys like Vlad (75.6 mph, 21%) or Daulton Varsho (73.2, 17.4%).

It's not easy to know what to make of all this just yet, especially without previous seasons to compare to. But while there are many ways to excel at hitting, I think it's fair to say that an ideal hitter would have both high bat speed and a high rate of squaring the ball up, which... yeah... that tracks...

• Lastly, bring on the trash birds! Eat Arby’s! Nothing matters! Let’s do something fun for once! Hit the baseball please for the love of god! We’re dying out here!

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