Ten offensive numbers that jump out to me about the season's first 10 games

You can take the word "offensive" here however you like!

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The 2024 Toronto Blue Jays season has been underway for 10 games now, as they finally head into their home opener this evening. The unveiling of the new-look lower bowl of the Rogers Centre, and all its attendant bells, whistles, stunt foods, and new spaces freshly named for mid-tier corporate brands—BeautiTone Balcony? Canada Dry Bleachers?—that perhaps betray that the simmering unease about this franchise and its direction reaches beyond just loudest portions of the fan base, will be a welcome distraction, albeit a brief one, from what's been happening on the field.

New seats, new sightlines? That's exciting stuff.

New pricing tiers? Too few new players for a team that fans were already fed up with? Uh… less so.

These Jays haven't even stumbled out of the gate, necessarily. At 4-6 following a very tough season-opening road trip through Tropicana Field, Minute Maid Park, and Yankee Stadium, they have at least avoided getting buried. They're not the Marlins, and we're a long way from there yet. But with the Seattle Mariners arriving for three games this week, and the miserably awful Colorado Rockies set to follow, it would be a good thing for these Blue Jays to play something that might actually pass for inspired baseball.

I mean, obviously “inspired baseball” isn’t really a thing, but you get what I’m saying. They need to score more runs. And, somewhat surprisingly, do a better job of preventing them as well.

It is, of course, the offence that will get the attention here though. And rightly so. As much as I would like to implore fans to consider the sample size before deciding to posture like they’ve had it with this team, I can’t criticize anyone who is recognizing those same feelings we all had last year about the way this offence functions—or, too often, does not. It turns out replacing Brandon Belt with Justin Turner, Matt Chapman with Isiah Kiner-Falefa, Kevin Kiermaier with Kevin Kiermaier, Whit Merrifield with Ernie Clement, and continuing to probably not play Davis Schneider as much as they should has not yet become a recipe for success—or for unabashed love from fans.

None of this is surprising in the least—except, it seems, to the people who actually run the Blue Jays.

But let’s not rely on mere feelings here. Let’s take a look into some numbers, shall we? Specifically, some numbers on the offensive side of the ball that have jumped out to me here in the early going…

.222

The Blue Jays' BABIP, at .223, is the worst in baseball to this point in the season. But you'll notice that the number I've written above is, in fact, not .223. Normally we might use BABIP as a somewhat crude proxy for luck. Were there not other tools at our disposal, I would probably—against my better judgement, considering I've seen their swings—be looking at that .223, the fact that it ranks last in MLB, and wondering if maybe a few bad breaks had indeed been a bigger factor than it feels in the Jays’ lack of success thus far. That line of thinking becomes harder to swallow, however, when we see that their .222 expected batting average is also abysmal. Their xBA ranks third-last in MLB, and their other expected stats (26th in xSLG, 23rd in xwOBA) hardly paint a picture of a hidden offensive juggernaut either. They simply haven't been striking the ball effectively—a fact also testified to by their rankings for barrels-per-plate-appearance (26th), average exit velocity (29th), and hard hit rate (28th). Damage indeed.

13-for-66

The Blue Jays were one of the best teams in baseball at hitting with runners in scoring position over the final two months of last season, ranking fourth in MLB with a 131 wRC+, and yet they were so awful from May 1st through the end of July (82 wRC+) that the impression fans were left with was that this was one of the least clutch teams in the history of the sport. That impression has been allowed to linger into this season thanks in part to the combined 3-for-14 with RISP they produced as they were bounced from the playoffs by the Twins back in October, and now that they've started 2024 going 13-for-66. Over time, teams and players generally perform to same level with RISP as they do overall—Matt Chapman, for example, is a 118 wRC+ hitter for his career, and a 118 wRC+ hitter with RISP, even though his marks in his two seasons as a Blue Jay were wildly divergent: 122 and 77—and so it should come as little surprise that a Jays team struggling to hit is struggling when it counts most. It still sucks to see though, especially because this nightmare genuinely did end—even if most fans didn’t notice it.

3.6

The Jays so far have averaged just 3.6 runs per game—a mark that is obviously not good enough, especially when they haven't exactly been pitching well either. But that's a full run below the level they were at last season, when so many fans were evidently traumatized by the limp output they saw. In fact, just one team last season, the Oakland A's, and five others dating back to the start of 2016, scored at that clip or worse. These Jays, flawed and annoying as they may be, are not going to wind up among the worst offensive teams of the last decade. And so when people act like what they’re seeing from this group is just more of the same as last year, it’s simply not. The RISP thing that went away has now come back, and the offensive output has been worse. At least for ten games. It’s definitely not what you want. But it’s also not something you’d expect to become the new normal. Will whatever the new normal is be good enough? That’s the much bigger question.

+6

I'm not here to make excuses for the way the Blue have hit the baseball so far this season—it's been hard to watch and, as I said, even the expected numbers have been brutal—but I do find this a fascinating stat: the team that has been at the plate for more Outs Above Average compiled by opposing defenders than any other in baseball so far this season is indeed the Blue Jays. Opponents of the Jays' lineup have been +6 OAA, with five runs prevented, according to Statcast. I don't think you can call it luck, and adding another half run to their R/G would only move them into 20th, so let's not make too huge a deal of it. But it's another reason to think things just can't possibly be as bad as they seem.

32.9%

After a steady drop since an uninspiring 51.7% peak on March 28th, the Jays' odds of making the playoffs, at least according to FanGraphs, have now sunk to just 32.9%. That's the lowest they've been since the team missed the playoffs in September 2021. It's lower than last year's biggest dip (33.6%) and well below where it bottomed out in 2022—79.2% on July 11th, two days before Charlie Montoyo was fired. Stark stuff! The American League, and the AL East in particular, remains ridiculous.

I know this isn’t a number that’s purely about the lineup, but let’s be serious. It is. Anyway! Now let’s move on and have a look at some individuals…

10 mph

Average exit velocities for batters don’t stabilize until after 40 or so batted ball events, so this string of numbers I'm about to type out is bookended by a couple of unreliable values, but that only makes it a little less alarming. When Alejandro Kirk debuted in the big leagues back in 2020, his average EV over 20 BBEs was 95.0 mph. Since then it's gone to 92.3, 90.5, 87.6 last season, and so far this year—albeit in just 26 BBEs—it's tumbled to 85.0. Ten full miles per hour lower! His hard hit rate has trended similarly, as has just about everything else to do with his bat. He's done a very nice job becoming a much better defensive catcher over the years but, man, this guy used to hit rockets. And with Danny Jansen on the IL, we’re seeing this flaccid version Kirk’s bat a lot. It’s a problem.

22.7%

It appeared this spring as though Daulton Varsho was tinkering in a particular way with his swing, trying to make it more consistently flat and line-drive-oriented throughout the zone. Esteban Rivera of FanGraphs very much approved. “It’s typically not optimal for a hitter to change the angle of his bat [as] much through his swing [as Varsho does],” he explained in an excellent, Varsho-centric piece. “If you hit the ball hard, you can probably make it work better than most, but Varsho doesn’t have that kind of room for error. Taking the bat off its natural plane of movement will likely result in lots of mishits. Unsurprisingly, Varsho was among the league leaders in pop-up rate in 2023. This swing profile is far from ideal, especially because he doesn’t have the power to overcome the deficiencies.”

Well, it's early days, but the start of the season for Varsho has been rough, and the number that most underlines it—at least in my view—is the one above. He is second in MLB for pop-up rate, at a whopping 22.7%. That's nearly double where he was at last season. And indicates that his swing probably still isn’t right—though I’m not sure anybody needed anything more than their eyes to tell them that.

0

There are things I've liked about what Bo Bichette has been doing so far in 2024. Both his walk and strikeout rates would be career bests if the season ended today, with his 11.1% walk rate being just over double his career mark of 5.5%. His swinging strike rate is down for the fifth consecutive year so far, and his called strike rate would be a career best. He's only swinging a little more than before, but doing a great job of making contact in the zone (93.6%). Yet he's also seen his pull rate drop. He's not hitting line drives (just 16% of his batted balls) and a ton of his flyballs have been on the infield. He does have the neck spasms that held him out a couple games in Houston to point to, not to mention the fact that he's only managed just 36 PA so far, but zero home runs, an average exit velocity of just 84.0 mph, and not a single barrelled ball are not numbers we'd associate with one of the league's best hitters. He did have a streak of 14 games without a barrel last April, though, so it's not completely unusual at least.

-5.6°

Kevin Kiermaier's contact rate on pitches in the zone has been just 75%. His swinging strike rate has been bad, and his strikeout rate is a rounding error away from 30%. These are the kinds of numbers you might be willing to tolerate from a guy chasing power—which is something that Kiermaier, somewhat oddly, suggested this spring he was trying to do—but that's not what's happening here. Or, if he's trying, it's not working. On 16 batted ball events—like anything else here, a sample far too small to get actually worked up about—his launch angle sits at just -5.6°. Everything is going straight into the carpet. But hey, at least the Jays didn’t already have a left-handed-hitting centre fielder on the roster when they brought Kiermaier back!

24.4%

I think it's against the law to make a post like this and not bring up Vlad at any point, and if we’re talking about weird numbers for him, it's got to be the strikeouts, right? Vlad has struck out in 24.4% of his plate appearances so far this season, which is noticeably above his 16.1% career clip. But the thing is, I’m fully willing to believe this genuinely is the product of being a little more selective. According to Statcast, last year he swung at 15% of pitches outside of the zone, while this year he's down to 12.7% so far. And if you look at pitches classified as in the shadow of the zone—the ones that are roughly one ball width inside or outside of it—he's gone from swinging 23.3% of the time to 20.6%. He's swinging less overall, and maybe also trading some swing-and-miss as he tries to chase the power that's been disappearing for him since his huge 2021. He’s been… OK? Of course, as with all things Vlad—and this lineup—and franchise!—somehow! still!—it very much feels like a work in progress.

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