Stray Thoughts... - Vlad’s (Contract is) Offical(ly Crazy)
PLUS: Good vibes from Boston, Beastin' Lucas, and a whole lot more!
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The Toronto Blue Jays feel like a team that can win some ballgames. What a refreshing concept!
After a wholly disappointing series with the Mets, the team has rebounded to win the first two of a four-gamer in frosty Boston, ensuring that they will at worst be at the .500 mark when they arrive to meet up with the Orioles at Camden Yards in Baltimore on Friday. With their current best-in-the-AL-East record of 7-5, and considering how daunting their early-season schedule has been—and will continue to be—you could hardly be unhappy with where they’re at so far. Even if you can't help but also think, thanks especially to a pair of one-run losses in Queens, that their record could and should be even better.
It hasn’t been all sunshine, of course. Though the team sits 10th in fWAR from their position player group, and 11th by wRC+, their six home runs are tied for the lowest total in baseball. And the Jays are the only team among that group to have reached the 12 game mark. They’ve hit just one home run for every 66.2 plate appearances so far, which puts them dead last in baseball by five full PA. The Yankees and Dodgers are averaging a homer every for every 16 trips to the plate.
That will need to change, obviously. And the 2.85 ERA produced so far as a group by their starting pitchers will surely not hold. But 7-5 is 7-5. They're playing at a 94-win pace, if we want to get somewhat delusional here.
But what really strikes me about this start to the season is the feel of it. How it’s simply nice to see things lining up well for the team right now, game to game, in ways that we haven’t been used to very often over the last couple of years. The offence has been mediocre with runners on, they're not hitting for power at all, and yet because they've had good enough fortune with sequencing, strong starts from guys at the bottom of the order, and received excellent starting pitching, defence, and work from the back-end of the bullpen, they've managed to manufacture enough runs consistently enough to not just hang around in games but win them. How often could you really say that about the 2024 team?
Yes, at some point the pitching will slip somewhat, and the bottom of the order will cool, but ideally when that time comes the top of the order will be be tapping into their power more regularly, and the overall RISP numbers (100 wRC+ currently) will have met their bases empty ones (127 wRC+) somewhere in the middle. And because you know that more power is sure to come from Vlad, Bo, and Tony Taters, it feels like the components of a good team might genuinely there in a way that it never really did last year—or even the year before. That will be especially true if, when he returns, Daulton Varsho can look anything close to the way he did at the plate this spring, and if they can find some hot hands down in Buffalo to ride as the season moves along.
Clearly there are plenty of reasons to believe that things won’t at all play out that way, but right now things feel… pretty OK. And as I think the previous two years have showed us, feel—vibes, whatever you want to call it—has a ton more to do with the enjoyment we’re able to get out of the game than we sometimes appreciate.
This Blue Jays roster may not be all that much better on paper than the ones from 2023 or ‘24. It may not be better at all, even. But if it feels like they have a chance to win every night, if it feels like their starter hasn’t blown the game by making just a single mistake, that we won’t have to follow along wire-to-wire on a knife’s edge, that they still have a chance to win a ballgame if they get down by a run or two, that they can hold their own against the good teams instead of just the bad ones—if the season doesn’t turn into a grim slog toward inevitable playoff defeat or worse—then I don’t necessarily care that much about how much or little WAR they produce in the process. I just want to avoid having to remind myself every single goddamn day that a run prevented is worth the same as a run scored, or that “it’s still early.” Those things may be 100% fully axiomatic—the latter at least until mid-July (unless you’re the White Sox)—and I may have nothing but disdain for the oafs who make their entire personality getting dumbly red and mad whenever they hear those phrases, but I can nonetheless acknowledge that having no choice but to cling to that stuff is simply no way to live as a baseball fan.
Obviously the bar is set pretty low here if it’s not even April tinth yet and the Jays being two games above .500 has left me thinking there might be a way we can avoid all that, and undoubtedly Vladdy finally getting his contract extension and the lifting of the poisonous cloud that’s been hanging over this team and the discourse about it for literal years is contributing significantly to the glow, but this—all of it—is exactly the start this team needed
The Red Sox series continues this evening in Boston, as Kevin Gausman takes on former unsigned Blue Jays draft pick Tanner Houck (12th round, 2014). For my money, Houck can not only not possibly be as good as he was last season (3.12 ERA, 3.9 fWAR), he can certainly not be as good as he was again the 2024 Blue Jays, who he held to a preposterous .188/.246/.250 slash line over three starts (17 1/3 innings). Right? RIGHT???
Now here are some stray thoughts...
Vlad to be Here
The Blue Jays did the thing. They actually did the thing! Ahhhhhhhhh!
Via an email blast here on Wednesday afternoon, the club announced that they have officially signed Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to a 14-year, $500 million contract extension that begins next season and runs through 2039.
It’s an astronomical figure for a player who has hardly been a model of consistency thus far in his career, and who, because of his position alone, will struggle to give the Jays value-for-dollar over the life of the deal. It’s also a deal that’s about so much more than dollars-per-WAR, and anyone trying to analyze it strictly through that prism can safely be dismissed as completely unserious. (Looking at you, Chris Rose.)
That doesn’t mean that it can’t ultimately become a bad deal, of course. But that’s far from the point right now. And it’s very much worth noting here that Vlad certainly hasn’t had nearly the same kind of inconsistency in terms of the underlying metrics that make front offices drool as he has in his actual production. Like, even in his .789 OPS/118 wRC+ season back in 2023, which was just about as bad a year as he’s capable of, he was in the 89th percentile or above in bat speed, exit velocity, hard hit rate, xwOBA, xBA, xSLG, and strikeout rate.
He’s an immense talent, and there’s simply no need to nitpick fake money. Not at least until 2034. So… you can absolutely miss me with this kind of garbage…
But OK, OK, I think we’ve been over most of this stuff already. What’s notable about today’s official announcement, and the subsequent reporting on the deal, are some of the new details that have emerged. For example, in addition to some previously known provisions, like the lack of deferred money or opt-outs, Shi Davidi reports that Vlad also gets a full no-trade clause in the deal. Shi’s tweet also confirms something that Ken Rosenthal had reported on a few minutes prior, which is that the deal includes a $325 million “signing bonus,” which will be spread over the duration of the deal. Shi adds that “$20 million of that bonus is payable this year, before the contract takes effect.”
What’s going on there, you ask? Kenny Ken Ken explains:
For Guerrero, the benefit of getting the bulk of his money in a signing bonus would appear twofold. Signing bonuses are allocated to an athlete’s state of residence. Guerrero resides in Florida, a state without income tax. So, he presumably will avoid paying state tax on the bonus, generating millions in savings.
The other benefit is that signing bonuses are not contingent on the performance of services. Guerrero would receive his annual payout if Major League Baseball canceled games due to a work stoppage, a possibility with the sport’s collective bargaining agreement expiring on Dec. 1, 2026. He also would receive it if the league canceled games for some other reason, such as a pandemic.
None of this changes any of the luxury tax calculations—he’ll count for $35.7 million of the Jays’ CBT number over the life of the deal regardless.
“The benefit to the Blue Jays in paying out more in signing bonus than salary — if it exists at all — is unclear,” Rosenthal adds.
So… that’s fun, I suppose.
More fun? Having Vladimir Guerrero Jr. play his entire career as a member of the Toronto Blue Jays. (And not ever, ever, ever, ever having to talk about getting an extension done with him again!)
“The name Vladimir Guerrero Jr. will forever be synonymous with the Toronto Blue Jays,” said club president and CEO Mark Shapiro, per the release.
“As proud owners of the Blue Jays, we’re committed to building a championship team and we’re thrilled to have Vlad’s leadership as one of the best players in the game,” added company owner Edward Rogers, presumably through severely gritted teeth.
“Franchise players like Vlad don’t come along very often,” added GM Ross Atkins, deftly eliding the profoundly dumb “generational player” trap that set off wayyy too much discourse last fall. “He has already reached impressive performance levels and his future is even brighter.”
And, for the sake of completeness, let me give you the release’s stock quote from Vlad, too.
“I love our Blue Jays fans; they have supported me my whole career and made me feel appreciated every day. My family and I have a special connection to our second home in Toronto, and I feel fortunate to carry on my dad’s legacy and represent an entire country. I am very proud to wear the maple leaf and to be part of an organization with the same goal – to bring World Series championships back to Canada.”
And here’s an even better one from his scrum with reporters ahead of Wednesday’s game in Boston…
Hell yeah!
Incredible!
And… honestly? I feel like all along I’ve mostly been in just about the most optimistic camp about this that a Jays fan could be, and even I’m surprised that they actually, finally, seriously pulled it off. Credit to the Jays and Rogers for knowing they’d been beaten and not letting that fact get in the way of doing what needed to be done for the sake of the franchise. And, of course, massive kudos to Vlad and his camp for getting an absolute dream deal without even having to get to free agency. It didn’t have to work out this way for him—just ask Bo—but they played it absolutely perfectly once it it became clear that he held all the cards. Take that man’s money!!!
Now, let’s fuckin’ goooooooo! Get hyped!!!
(Clip via @BlueJays—and kudos to their social team as well. They always meet the moment with aplomb.)
Lucas with the Lid Off
I don’t want to tell anybody how to live his life, but if I was Easton Lucas, right now I would be finding a way to blow up this image so I could hang it on my wall for the rest of eternity…
Now, that’s not to say that I don’t expect Lucas, a 6’4” lefty claimed from the Tigers via waivers last August, is never going to see his Baseball Savant page look quite so gorgeous again. But if the page stayed anything close to like this it would be a hell of a story for a guy who came into the season with ZiPS projecting him to an ERA (4.57) worse than 33 other members of the Blue Jays organization.
On Tuesday, Lucas went toe-to-toe with a fellow lefty, Red Sox ace Garrett Crochet, and somehow managed to come out on top. And not in a small way, either! Fewer hits, fewer runs, fewer walks, fewer home runs, more strikeouts, and more swing-and-miss than last season’s MLB K/9 leader (min. 100 IP).
Lucas now has two outstanding starts under his belt, the second one— against a tough Red Sox lineup full of right-handed hitters—somehow even more impressive than the first.
It’s… it’s really quite something…
Can he keep anything close to this level of performance up? And how is he—a 28-year-old who still has rookie eligibility, who came into the season with a 9.82 ERA over 18 1/3 big league innings, and who put up an atrocious 8.64 ERA this spring—doing it?
Well, to the first question I’d certainly say no, but that’s only because no one can. But even if we were talking about more realistic numbers, that would still have to be my answer. I mean, we’re now eleven or twelve starts into Bowden Francis being a thing and I still have no clue how long I’d guess that’s going to last. So, after two starts that are so beyond anything Lucas has done anywhere else in his career? Truly impossible to say.
But as to the second question, we can certainly point to some things that can start to explain how he’s doing it—or, at the very least, why this version of Lucas is different from the one who didn’t catch on with the four previous organizations he’d been with since he was drafted back in 2019.
Shi Davidi has a nice piece on the topic up at Sportsnet here on Wednesday, with quotes from several members of the Jays:
Manager John Schneider suggests that Lucas has “done a really good job of taking advantage of every resource available and understanding, at this point in his career, how his stuff works and really how good he can be.”
Pitching coach Pete Walker is a believer, saying that “if he can execute pitches, he certainly has the stuff to get major-league hitters out.”
Bo Bichette lauded his teammate for pitching with “no fear” at Fenway.
Lucas himself spoke about finding “something that clicked at the end of spring training” and how he’s worked to be more under control and better at combatting adrenaline that he felt was disrupting his fastball command.
But the best quote came from catcher Tyler Heineman, who was Lucas’s battery-mate on Tuesday:
“If his fastball has the life at the top of the zone that that it’s capable of having, players have to respect that,” explained Heineman. “And then to drop in a changeup that has the same arm-speed, you’re going to get a lot of weak contact and swing and miss on it, especially when people are geared up for fastball. With sliders it’s all about location, in general, but especially to righties. If you’re locating a fastball up and throwing a slider off of that, being able to show that you can throw a fastball down as well, it’s really beneficial because they can’t really zone you up in any area.”
The must-follow stat guy, Thomas Nestico, producer of the excellent chart below, concurs:
“Easton Lucas delivered a great start for the Jays today as he shut down the Red Sox over 5.1 IP with 8 K. Lucas pounded the zone with fastballs as batters couldn’t keep up. His production has been a godsend for Toronto!”
As you can see in the tjStuff+ column from the chart, Lucas isn’t working with overpowering stuff overall, which is why command and pitch mix is key. And that’s where some of the tweaks he’s made come in.
Some pitch-type things that jump out from his Savant page include the fact that his average release point has moved up a about 2.5 inches since last year, that he's throwing his slider about 4 mph harder, and with much less horizontal movement, and that he's added a sweeper.
With those changes have come changes to how he uses his arsenal, too.
A year ago, right-handed batters were mostly seeing fastballs (48%) and cutters (32%) from Lucas, but now the cutter is almost entirely gone, his fastball usage is up significantly (58%), and his changeup—which he started throwing with much less spin (~500 rpm) a year ago—is now being thrown to RHB 27% of the time. Also significant: the percentage of four-seamers that he’s thrown in the zone to RHP has jumped from 49% to 70%, and his changeup Zone% has gone from 7% to 41%. Francis-y stuff here!
Meanwhile, his slider usage against lefties has dropped from 31% to 13%, and the new sweeper (33%) has taken its place as his secondary offering there.
So we have a new weapon against lefties, way more changeups and overall in-zone aggression against right-handers, and a very different slider being used to hitters on either side of the plate.
If he’s executing his pitches, that seems like a pretty good formula—and so far he’s done exactly that. Whether the league will catch up—or, more precisely, how much they’ll catch up—is the big question here that we can’t answer yet. What I think we can feel comfortable saying, though, is that there’s probably not much to glean about this new guy from whatever Lucas was prior to this season. And when there are tangible changes like that happening in tandem with better results, those results are far easier to believe in.
As for how durable any of this will be, we can only wait and see what happens in his subsequent starts. And, by every measure, he’s certainly earned at least a few of those.
Quickly…
• Speaking of hot starts by guys who were on nobody’s radar, how about this George Springer guy! Where’d he come from???
• Seriously though, it says here that my guy is running a .692 BABIP, but I really don’t think you can fluke all this—even in such a small sample:
Yowza!
• OK, I actually have a couple thoughts/observations regarding Springer. For one, he’s got a slightly more open stance this year, which is something we can now see at Baseball Savant. However, I’m not sure that’s as strong a candidate for what’s driving this offensive outburst as some other things. To simplify, because I could make a whole post out of this and no longer have time today because I had to squeeze in all that Vlad stuff, according to FanGraphs he’s swinging at just 58% of pitches in the strike zone, which is down from a career rate of 70%. Savant also tells us his in-zone swing-and-miss rate is at 33%, up from 19% last year—which was pretty much in line with his career going back to 2017.
That 2017 season is notable as the year he became much better at avoiding strikeouts. In the first three years of his career he’d struck out at a 26% rate, but for the following eight years he brought that number down to 19%. This year it’s back up to 28%.
Also notable is that this season he has already produced three of his top ten exit velocities since the start of last year—i.e. 30% of his top ten exit velocities over that span have been produced in just his most recent 8% of games played.
Now, I’m pretty sure he’d said at some point this spring that he didn’t want to change who he was as a hitter, but this looks quite a lot to me like a guy less worried about striking out and more interested in putting his best swing on pitches he can do damage with. In other words: The classic old man thing, essentially trading strikeouts for power. And it sure seems to be working!
It’s obviously hard to say anything concrete here based on so little data, but maybe his awful spring was a wake-up call? It would be great if he could keep up some semblance of what he’s doing, that’s for sure!
• Now that Vlad’s officially done, is it time to start thinking about extending Bo? There’s been a lot of talk this week about how Vlad will own just about every meaningful offensive record in Blue Jays history by the time all is said and done, but it would be a whole lot of fun if he had some ongoing competition for those, wouldn’t it?
Unfortunately, my guess is that the Jays would probably lean this way…
• Still speaking of Vlad stuff, uh… yeah… strong agree with this one…
• Hey, remember when it seemed like a fun and smart idea to give Yariel Rodríguez some run as a one-inning guy? Because he’d had so much success doing that when he was in Japan? And then he looked great doing it in the series finale against the Orioles? Well… uh… yeah… about that…
• Speaking of things I might have been wrong about but it's too soon to tell, Myles Straw, everybody! It's been a terrible situation for him to come into, given how he was acquired, but he's been a really nice role player so far. I'm not exactly ready to buy in on the bat just yet, but credit to where it’s due. Hell, at this point I'd probably even take him over Nathan “Loose Hand” Lukes and his thin blue line Batman tattoo once Varsho comes back. Woof.
• The Jays' Single-A affiliate in Dunedin walked 22 times on Tuesday night—which also marked the pro debut of the club’s most recent top draft pick, Trey Yesavage—setting a full-season minor league record (or, at least, a record since 2005, when such stats started being officially kept or something). Yeah... turns out they weren’t exactly spittin’ on them out there. Lol.
• The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand is reporting that MLB is looking into selling off MLB.tv, with the likely landing spot some kind of already existing network or digital platform. That’s interesting and possibly good news for fans who are sick of regional blackouts in the States, but… uh… I don’t see it changing anything to do with the very obvious and deep integration between the Jays and Sportsnet. I’ll probably have some more thoughts as additional details emerge though.
• Andrés Giménez: Superstar, or super-duper star?
• Hey, and speaking star middle infielders, Arjun Nimmala, everybody! The teenager was given a somewhat aggressive assignment to Vancouver to start the season, especially considering his early struggles last year in Florida, but has responded with a .313/.421/.500 line through his first 19 plate appearances. Encouraging.
Uh... also this:
• OK, I think that’s it for me for now! Enjoy the game everybody. Fuck Boston! Vlad for life! Go Jays!
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I would like nothing more than to Springer have a comeback season.
Happy to see the content start to roll out Stoeten #greatstuffasalways Hope this means you’re all settled.
Fuck, it feels great to have good vibes with this team again. Let’s goooooo