Stray Thoughts... - Wednesday, August 23rd

On the differences between the Jays and Orioles, Vlad's GIDPs, the Manoah situation, John Schneider, YuCy Kikuchi, Paul DeJong, Brandon Belt, Miguel Hiraldo, Adam Macko, Phil Lind, and more!

Image via @BlueJays

The Mariners can’t stop winning, the Blue Jays are on the outside looking in on the wild card race, and now here are the Orioles. It’s a big week in the American League, and that’s not even just because I guess I’m going to keep going with this “Stray Thoughts…” format again!

Here’s what’s been sticking in my craw lately…

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I’ll be honest here, friends. This site keeps the lights on for me, but it isn’t a cash cow. And I could live a lot more comfortably than I do right now if I was willing to put some of my work behind a paywall and push a bunch readers who are on the fence into becoming paid subscribers. But, the thing is, I know that times are tough for a lot of people and I really don’t want to become inaccessible to anyone. So, if you can afford it, and you value what I do and aren’t already a paid subscriber, I’d ask that you consider upgrading your free membership to a paid one. Thanks. — Stoeten

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Trash birds

The Jays gutted out a win in their first game in Baltimore this week, relying on more great pitching from Yusei Kikuchi and their outstanding bullpen, an utterly crucial play from Bo Bichette in the bottom of the ninth, and more lefty power (finally) from the guys who were brought in over the winter to provide it. It was a great start, and a nice statement—insomuch as a single baseball win can ever be a statement (i.e. basically never)—from a team that’s had its act together much better in the second half than earlier in the season, when many of their painful in-division losses piled up. It was good. It felt good. It was about time.

Things could still go sideways from here in this series, of course. But I hope to hell that's not what happens. Not even so much because of anything to do with the playoff race, but more because the idea that the Jays can't—as opposed to simply haven't—beat the Orioles, or have been "outclassed" by them, or have already fallen so far behind them in the long-term sense that they might as well just fold, is as misguided as it has been insufferably enduring this season. With their respective records being what they are I know I'm fighting a losing battle here, but it really needs to end. (Yet, absent anything but a sweep this week, I understand it probably won’t.)

Yes, the Orioles have passed the eye test if you only look at them in their games against the Jays, just like Ryan Mountcastle looks like a superstar if you've only watched those games. But the overall numbers tell a different story. And if you take this year's games against the Jays away, the Orioles are 69-45; the Jays would be 67-48.

The Orioles are a good team with some scary prospects still coming that will make them a threat for as long as their lying garbage owners deign to continue to pay to keep their best players around. That much is true. It's also true that, coming into this series, they trailed the Blue Jays this year in wRC+ (107 to 104), starters' ERA (3.75 to 4.41), bullpen ERA (3.48 to 3.58), DRS (73 to 27), and had the same number of home runs.

We all know what the difference has been: hitting with runners in scoring position.

But do we all know that the Jays came into this week’s series with a 140 wRC+ with RISP in the month of August?

This stuff just isn’t sticky, folks! The coaches didn’t just finally get smart!

I won’t bore you by going through these things yet again, though as usual I will try to be clear that knowing any of that doesn’t make those three months of frustration we watched suck less. I know that plenty of self-inflicted damage has already been done by the Jays, as we all recognized at the time. I know that it doesn’t mean this stuff is going to start regressing perfectly toward the mean now for both teams and everything will work out fine for the Jays.

What it does mean, however, is that, if you think this Orioles team is good, you can’t credibly call the 2023 Blue Jays a failure of roster-building. There really isn’t much to separate these two clubs by, as Tuesday’s win finally felt like it showed. It’s a weird sport. Embrace it.

Fraud Guerrero Jr.

Had Tuesday’s game gone a different way, I think a lot of focus in the aftermath from Jays fans would have ended up way back at its beginning. The top of the first inning ended with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. coming up with runners on first and second and one out, then immediately grounding into a double play.

Cue groans! Cue all sorts of frustrated venting! Cue, for some reason, Sportsnet offering up red meat to all the mean-spirited misanthropes in the form of a stat utterly lacking in context!

Now, no one is going to tell you that Vlad has played well this season, or up to expectations, or hasn’t been incredibly frustrating or disappointing. But, as with some of the stuff we were talking about above, the beautiful thing about statistics—the reason they became so vital to this industry 20 years ago—is that they are a great supplement to the eye test and, often, can tell you things that your eyes don’t necessarily see.

Seventy GIDPs? Yes, that’s a lot. But context matters.

Some context:

• Vlad has been very durable in his career, and he's also been fortunate enough to hit behind some excellent hitters. Since 2020 he ranks 3rd in MLB for plate appearances, and seventh for plate appearances with runners on base. The fact that he's had so many more opportunities with runners on than the vast majority of hitters inflates a counting stat like GIDP.

• Vlad's 70th GIDP moved him out of a tie since 2020 with José Abreu. Immediately behind them on that list are Carlos Correa, Nolan Arenado and Pete Alonso. In other words, this part of the leaderboard is not exactly the domain of poor hitters. It is, in fact, the domain of hitters whose teams want them hitting with runners on.

• And hey, I wonder why 2020 was chosen as the cutoff? Why not go back to his first season, 2019, or simply look at this season?

The reason is obvious, of course. Vlad isn't in first in GIDP if those are our parameters, and so that doesn’t align as well with the point of the tweet. The point of that tweet, in that moment, from Sportsnet, was to tap into fans’ exasperation with Vlad.

Fair enough, I guess. I don’t want to pick on the social media person here too much. It's not like it was inaccurate, just weird to me. I do know where it’s coming from. Vlad has been frustrating. It’s good for a team broadcaster’s account not to only tweet things that are going to get them accused of “shilling” or “doing a Wilner impression.” I just think it’s also good to remind fans, before their rage-eyes pop out of their heads, stuff like the fact that Vlad actually has a 129 wRC+ this season with runners on base—much better than he's produced overall—and that he's been the Blue Jays' most clutch hitter according to FanGraphs (whose clutch metric measures how much better a player has performed in high leverage situations than he has in all others).

Is that damning with faint praise? Obviously! But it’s not inaccurate either. And worth reckoning with—especially when everyone’s convinced their eyes have been seeing something far different.

Man oah-verboard?

Alek Manoah was officially demoted to Triple-A Buffalo nearly two weeks ago, but he's yet to take the ball for the Bisons during this stint, and it emerged on Tuesday that he's actually in Toronto.

Huh?

You wouldn't have to think very hard to come up with some of the conclusions fans were ready to jump to when news of this first broke. He's refusing to report! He's mad at the Jays! They're incompetently handling him again!

All of those things may technically be true, but according to manager John Schneider—aka the guy who seems to trend on Twitter every single day for doing absolutely bog standard MLB manager things for some reason—this is all being mutually decided, and Manoah's absence from Buffalo has the team's blessing.

“We're just trying to work through the right time to get him back rolling again,” Schneider told reporters, including Ben Nicholson-Smith of Sportsnet, prior to Tuesday's game.

Seems like that's going to make it difficult for Manoah to jump back into action if the Jays need another starter in the near future, but doing that with any kind of urgency doesn’t appear to be the main concern here. And that's probably fine.

I obviously don't know anything about anything on this, but my sense is that when people think "refusing to report"—a term no one has used in this case—the connotation can only be negative. But the situation that immediately comes to mind here for me was ultimately a good one: Tommy La Stella's refusal to report to Iowa after being demoted by the Cubs in 2016.

Now, I want to be careful not to make too direct a parallel here. At the time La Stella was saying that he was contemplating retirement (he's currently in his seventh season since all this, including an All-Star campaign for the Angels in 2019), and that's way beyond anything we could or should reasonably speculate on with Manoah. But La Stella was burned out. He'd been working his ass off and it wasn't translating. He had been a big leaguer for the better part of three seasons and here his career seemed to be going backwards. And the club stuck by him, and continued to pay him too.

“He wanted to be with the Chicago Cubs or nowhere, to the point where he was willing to give up his career,” former Cubs manager Joe Maddon told the Athletic's Ken Rosenthal back in 2018. “We knew he was sincere about it. We knew he needed some space. We knew he needed our support, plain and simple.”

Now, plenty of guys struggle and get demoted without it becoming a story, so Manoah’s situation being in any way similar is also a conclusion we should be careful about jumping to. But obviously it's been a really tough season for Alek, and it's been plain to see at times—on his face, in his body language, in his post-game interviews—that, mentally, it has been a grind. It was acknowledged the first time he was sent down that this was part of it.

Whether or not that’s actually what’s going on here is not really any of our business until someone involved wants to say. But I think something along these lines is at least as plausible as any of the “he hates this team and wants out” or “they’re mishandling him” possibilities that weirdos immediately want to jump to. It certainly would explain why information has been so slowly forthcoming. And why we haven’t heard, for example, that he’s been moved to the inactive list and suspended without pay.

For me, Manoah and the Jays need to do everything they can to get him right and ready for 2024, not to jump into action down the stretch so he can get shelled again in the name of eating a few innings. Not to sit in the bullpen on mop-up duty for the month of September at the expense of adding another strong reliever to the roster. And if this is part of that process, fair play to them.

Schneid-y senses

As I mentioned above, Yusei Kikuchi pitched well again on Tuesday. He was baffling guys with his great stuff, he piled up a bunch of strikeouts, he kept the ball in the ballpark, he didn't walk a guy until his last batter of the game, and he was unflappable despite there being a bunch of traffic on the bases throughout his night.

He maybe wasn’t as good as he has been during his recent run…

(Btw, seriously, that props.cash promo is a good deal. Monthly subscriptions. Not just one month. Monthly! Give it a try. STOETEN25)

…but he didn’t do anything to dissuade me from thinking that he may just end up proving to be the Jays’ number two starter down the stretch, particularly with this bullpen. And two of the three earned runs he allowed didn’t even feel like his fault.

The first scored on a throwing error by Danny Jansen, who made an ill-advised attempt to get the trailing runner at second base on a double steal, and compounded the poor decision by bouncing his throw, which ended up in centre field. The other came on a Jordan Westburg double surrendered by Yimi Garcia, who replaced Kikuchi after the starter was lifted after just 82 pitches.

Cue the FYURR SHNEIDERRRHHH!! brigade, which… apparently… is a thing that exists?

I mean, I suppose I shouldn’t act surprised. This happens—has happened—with literally every manager in the history of the sport. It just seemed especially odd to me in this one, assuming that the people outraged were actually able to see the game through the clouds of steam constantly pouring from their miserable skulls.

What were they watching???

Kikuchi’s fifth inning went like this:

• Single to the right-handed number nine hitter on a down-and-in slider Kikuchi didn't bury, which was discussed for the next several pitches on the broadcast, especially because his reaction made it clear that he was upset with his execution.

• Single to Rutschman, hitting from the right side, on a slider Kikuchi didn't bury.

• Hard-hit line out (96.4 mph, .480 xBA) to the right-handed-hitting Mountcastle on a slider Kikuchi left in virtually the same spot as the previous two.

• Strikeout of the lefty Henderson.

• Walk to the right-handed Hays without a single slider thrown.

The curveball has been a massive pitch for Kikuchi this season, and has understandably received a ton of ink, but to right-handed batters he's only barely used it more than the slider (21-22% in July/August for the curve versus 18-20% for the slider). If he's not executing the slider, it's a problem. If opposing right-handers seem to be on the slider as he goes through the order for a third time—which they did—it's a problem. If a right-handed hitter is about to come up in a big spot given all of that, it's a problem.

Forget even that Schneider obviously collaborates with the unassailable Pete Walker on pitching decisions (and with Gil Kim and the video room on the decisions to challenge calls that seem to irk people so much), which makes the outrage even less sensible. Giving Kikuchi the hook at that point made complete sense!

What am I missing here? Why do I see Schneider’s name trending on Twitter every game because of a bunch of tweets acting like obviously he’s doing something stupid again, like he always does?

I can’t tell you that he’s great or anything, but he’s a completely typical MLB manager doing the same things 29 managers would do—or strongly consider doing—just about every time there’s a decision to be made. Love the passion! But… weird.

Quickly…

• As expected, the recently DFA’d Paul DeJong has quickly caught on with another club, signing a contract with the San Francisco Giants that was made official on Tuesday. You gotta Hand it to him.

• Speaking of the Giants, my Blue Jays Happy Hour cohost Nick Ashbourne—new episode coming tonight!—had a well-timed one for Yahoo on Tuesday about former Giant Brandon Belt. In particular, he looks at Belt's season in thirds: the awful start, the BABIP-driven and unsustainable-looking second third, and his incredibly impressive most recent third. “There's a chance he's got even more in him, too,” Nick tells us, “as the combination of power and strikeout avoidance he's managed recently is remarkable — and driven by outcomes almost impossible to achieve via good fortune.” Let’s gooooo.

• According to Baseball America's JJ Cooper, the league is set to have the lowest rate of wild pitches and passed balls this year since 2005 (despite the fact that velocity and movement have obviously come on leaps and bounds since then). The folks at PitchCom have an answer as to why: them. There's no excuse for pitchers and catchers to get crossed up anymore. It makes sense.

• Jays prospect guru D.M. Fox points out that Miguel Hiraldo—whose stock has dropped so much over the years that he wasn't even protected from selection in last year's Rule 5 draft—might be starting to figure things out, posting a .324/.427/.632 line for New Hampshire over the last month or so. Interesting! Though he adds that Hiraldo's “defence... leaves a lot to be desired.”

• Very interesting announcement on Tuesday from Alex Fast, whose resumé includes creating the CSW% stat, being a vice president at the excellent Pitcher List, and spending years with MLBAM helping to incorporate Statcast data into products like RBI Baseball. He's now MLB's Director of Product and Content Strategy. I don't know what precisely that means, but the league giving good, smart people big titles like that seems good!

• Prospect Adam Macko shoved for Vancouver on Tuesday night, striking out a career high 11 batters over five two-hit innings against Spokane. Disliking the Teoscar trade at this point would be real bizarre!

• Some interesting news about Wednesday’s game between the Jays and Orioles:

• Kremer has a 4.50 ERA and a 4.87 FIP for the Orioles this year. Joshua Howsam notes that “In two games against Dean Kremer this year, the Jays have hit .354/.380/.521.” Sad trombone addendum: “They've also only scored 3 runs in 11 1/3 innings.”

• It’s been nice not to have to think about the stupid Yankees very much in the second half of this season, but if you’d like to check in on how things are going down there, may I suggest this piece? In it Twitter favs Hunter Felt and Stacey Gotsulias come together for the Guardian to catalogue the misery going on in the Bronx. Delicious.

• Jerry Reinsdorf actually firing Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn, then immediately hiring Tony La Russa as a consultant is just so, so, absolutely, incredibly funny.

• Lastly, and speaking of executive stuff, over the weekend Rogers executive Phil Lind, who the Globe and Mail writes “persuaded Ted Rogers to acquire the Toronto Blue Jays in 2000 and played a major role in the company's purchase of specialty sports channel Sportsnet,” passed away at the age of 80.

I'm not sure Rogers getting into either of those businesses was actually a good thing—some will tell you that the company saved the team, but some will also tell you that a disinterested, self-serving owner deserves a statue out front of the SkyDome, so...— but you can’t say Lind wasn’t a big, if little known, figure. He was a major ally of the club's chairman, Edward Rogers, during the family's Succession-like boardroom drama in 2021. His name has also been frequently invoked when Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins thank executives for their support on things like major free agent signings or massive ballpark renovations.

That he had some kind of stature in the organization doesn't make it clear that this will mean anything for the future of the club or the way it operates, but it's not necessarily unfair to wonder. And to maybe worry. Despite some incredibly frustrating results on the field this season, the Jays are spending bigger than ever, and ownership seems to be fully bought-in on Mark Shapiro's project. For now.

Could that change? Obviously, and for a number of reasons that might have nothing to do with Lind’s absence. But it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on. Especially with the team heading toward a potential inflection point, with team control over Bo Bichette (and Vladimir Guerrero Jr.) winding down.

Condolences to his friends and family.

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