The Blue Jays have traded for... Steven Matz?

Mets lefty heads to Toronto for a trio of plateauing prospects.

Remember last week, when the erroneous reports that the Jays had signed Michael Brantley rather unfortunately took the wind out of the sails of an exciting 24 hours for Jays fans, in which the team had signed both Kirby Yates and George Springer?

Well, fast forward seven days and within a 24-hour period they’ve done a great piece of business by adding free agent infielder Marcus Semien. They’ve officially announced Springer, who brings star power and a World Series MVP award north on the biggest contract the club has ever signed. And now they’ve… decided to give innings to Steven Matz?

Maybe give the fan base a full day to be excited before throwing them a head-scratcher, eh Ross? Why make it look like the organization is going straight back to taking the cheap route?

Now, to be fair to the Jays — though perhaps a touch unfair to a trio of prospects of yore — they didn’t really give up anything of significance in this deal. Going to the Mets are former top pitching prospect Sean Reid-Foley, who is down to his last minor league option year and has lost the plot over the last two years, Yennsy Díaz, a middle reliever at best who has been hanging around the 40-man roster since 2019, and Josh Winckowski, maybe the most interesting of the three.

“Winckowski has a chance to pop in 2021 because he was pitching hurt in 2019 and still got guys out,” wrote Eric Longenhagen in FanGraphs’ recently released list of the top 39 Jays prospects. “He looked rusty during instructs but was also up to 97 and added a new splitter to an already decent slider.”

Interesting words, though Longenhagen has him listed below the main 39, among the club’s “depth arms” along with the recently DFA’d Anthony Castro (who earlier on Wednesday cleared waivers and was outrighted to Buffalo).

Still, though. Steven Matz?

I don't think it's a coincidence that the Matz' best year (2016: 3.40 ERA, 3.39 FIP, 2.5 fWAR) was also the only one where he did a decent job of keeping the ball in the ballpark, giving up fewer than one long ball per nine innings. He was a little homer prone in 2019 (1.52 per nine) but did a decent job over 30 starts, but then things went sideways for him in 2020. Matz gave up 14 home runs in 30 2/3 innings of work last year, on his way to an awful 9.68 ERA and 7.76 FIP, while also dealing with a shoulder injury that cost him half of September for good measure.

It would be easy to immediately look to the shoulder injury as a reason why he struggled so badly, but I think the more compelling explanation can be seen though changes in his peripherals. Matz gained a not-insignificant amount of velocity in 2020, averaging 94-95 in every appearance except for the two on either side of his DL trip. In his three previous seasons he'd averaged just 93.

To go along with that he saw a jump in the spin rate on his sinker (i.e. his primary fastball) — something the Blue Jays would certainly have taken note of.

What's interesting about the spin rate increase, though, is something pointed out by Jeff Zimmerman in a RotoGraphs piece back in December. The jump was even bigger than expected, however, "the pitch was supposed to sink, but instead it dropped one less inch, and its groundball rate dropped from 43% to 27%. It wasn't much of a sinker."

Matz' overall ground ball rate dropping to 32.6% from his career norm of 47.5%. Perhaps it also contributed to his .341 BABIP on the season, and that ugly home run rate, too. Sinkers that don't sink are not very effective pitches!

If he can get that pitch back on track, the Jays might have something here. There's reason to believe the worst of numbers will bounce back once his sinker stops catching a horrific amount of the plate.

Plus his awful 58.6% strand rate would seem unsustainable, too. Hell, there might be a real chance that Matz can be a better version of himself than we've ever seen, if Pete Walker and Matt Buschmann can help him harness his new velocity and spin rate while retaining his ability to throw strikes. (Among 151 pitchers with at least 400 innings from 2015 to 2019, Matz ranks third in terms of pitches thrown in the strike zone — an area the Jays could use some improvement in.)

I honestly don’t hate the trade in a vacuum. But we’re asking quite a lot of that patented Walker Magic. And, more importantly, what even are we doing here?

The Jays now have another pitcher on a big league contract who will expect to get innings. Because he was acquired in trade, so hasn’t been promised anything by the club, those innings may not necessarily have to come at the start of games — as a left-hander he would be an interesting option to have “piggyback” someone like Nate Pearson — but this move makes it a little bit harder to see the team bringing in a free agent starter to throw something approaching a full workload.

It’s not impossible that they could still add, so hopefully that’s not true. Hopefully they can subtract someone from the mix and still bring in a free agent like Taijuan Walker, Masahiro Tanaka, James Paxton, or Jake Odorizzi. But that’s probably what they’d have to do to make it happen at this point.

If we assume that the league is going to limit the number of pitchers a team can carry to 13 (as they were going to do for 2020 before the pandemic changed their plans), things are getting a bit crowded on the pitching front.

The five-man rotation right now looks like: 1. Hyun Jin Ryu, 2. Nate Pearson, 3. Robby Ray, 4. Steven Matz, 5. Tanner Roark.

The eight-man bullpen would then look something like this: 1. Kirby Yates, 2. Rafael Dolis, 3. Jordan Romano, 4. Tyler Chatwood, 5. Ross Stripling, 6. Ryan Borucki, 7. Shun Yamaguchi. 8. A.J. Cole.

Cole is on a minor league contract, so maybe he doesn’t make the team, but it’s not like it will be terribly difficult to replace him in that spot. In this scenario Julian Merryweather, Patrick Murphy, Thomas Hatch, Anthony Kay, and Trent Thornton would all then be slated for Buffalo.

So much for giving some of the club’s young pitchers opportunities to grow!

The thing is, that group would look a whole lot better if the Jays added just one more quality starter. I wrote about that in last week’s mail bag and said that, even with the numbers crunch, they should just do it anyway. Someone will inevitably get hurt, underperform in spring, or — worse case Ontario — you have to let Cole walk or eat some money to cut bait on Yamaguchi. But is that realistic or just wishful thinking?

I don’t know. But I do know what I’m sure is wishful thinking, and that’s the Blue Jays getting bounce-backs out of all three of Roark, Ray, and Matz while keeping Ryu fully healthy for a second straight year and getting Pearson as many innings as they can. Their depth isn’t awful, but why risk testing it so much when you’ve already got what looks like it could be a championship calibre offence?

Top image: "Steven Matz" by IDSportsPhoto is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0