The good, the Vlad, and the ugly: What the numbers can tell us about Blue Jays hitters so far
Most of the Blue Jays hitters are in a total funk. But is it really just that, or is there more to it? I took a look at the numbers they’ve produced so far in an attempt to find out.
Check it out below. But first, two things!
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Is it preposterously early to be drawing conclusions from any of the statistics that the Blue Jays’ (mostly) slumping hitters have compiled so far here in the 2021 season. But that doesn’t mean that the numbers don’t tell us anything.
And so, with most of the Jays’ healthy regulars having had enough plate appearances to show up on the percentile rankings leaderboards at Baseball Savant, let’s poke around a bit and see what we can see. Shall we?
Bichette hits the ball hard, and can hit it a long way. He has five home runs this season, already matching his 2020 total despite having 55 fewer plate appearances so far than the did all of last year. He swings at a lot of pitches outside the zone (Chase Rate), but that’s a byproduct of the bombs-away approach he takes early in counts. He’s certainly not afraid to take a big cut and miss, but overall he isn’t swinging and missing at an inordinate number of pitches (Whiff%).
His expected stats (xwOBA, xBA, and xSLG) seem low for a guy who barrels the ball as much as Bichette is so far this season, and who makes a healthy amount of contact (his contact rate is about league average so far, and his contact rate on pitches in the zone is even higher). But it’s still very early, samples are small, and things are still in the process of evening out.
One area where some evening out will only take a few hits to even out dramatically is in his vaunted two-strike approach. Bichette has been in a two-strike count in 38 plate appearances so far and has struck out 19 times (50%) and is yet to take a walk. Back in 2019 his walk rate after reaching two strikes was an incredible 9.8%, and in both 2019 and 2020 his strikeout rate after reaching two strikes was below 38%. Last year he produced a 78 wRC+ with two strikes (a good number given how advantageous a two-strike count is for the pitcher). This year so far? 11.
He’ll get better. There’s no reason to doubt his ability to still become an All-Star second baseman. *COUGH*
It’s become somewhat unfortunately fashionable to dump on Cavan Biggio in some Blue Jays fan circles these days. And here’s why!
Biggio can take a walk, though right now he isn’t doing so at the elite rate he did last season, when he was in the 92nd percentile. He's been visibly more aggressive with his swings so far this year, especially early in counts, which is why his 100th percentile chase rate from 2020 has dropped so precipitously. It’s an admirable attempt at an adjustment, but really seems like he needs to get back to doing what he does best. Unfortunately, it’s the really only thing he does well at all. And racking up walks is not going to be so easy the more that pitchers understand how unlikely it is that he’ll be able to do damage on pitches in the zone, or hit good velocity at all.
He’s a guy who teammates and coaches seem to love, who will do whatever the team asks of him, who is an intelligent ballplayer with good instincts and Hall of Fame bloodlines. But, beyond the eye, the physical tools may just not be there.
And all of this is to say nothing of the defence!
Grichuk had a single and a home run on Tuesday night in Boston, which took his wRC+ for the season from 113 — a number slowly dwindling after his hot start to the season — back up to 131. Even with that performance, however, he's got just nine hits, two walks, and a .366 slugging percentage since the middle game of the Jays' series in Texas (the second series of the season). His wRC+ over that span is just 68. And, well, it’s all rather Grichuk-like, isn’t it?
He can hit the ball very hard, but nothing else really stands out. (Offensively, at least. He’s been a pleasantly sure hand on the defensive side of the ball so far, even if the metrics above show that he’s a long way off in terms of being elite at getting to everything hit his way.)
In his Cardinals career, Grichuk made 1,386 plate appearances and produced a .249/.297/.488 line with a 108 wRC+. After Tuesday's game, Grichuk now has 1,384 plate appearances for the Blue Jays. He's got a .246/.296/.477 line and a 103 wRC+.
There have been good stretches and bad stretches. Good seasons — a 138 wRC+ with the Cardinals in 2015, a 115 wRC+ with the Jays in 2018 — and below average seasons — a 95 wRC+ for St. Louis in 2017, a 90 wRC+ for the Jays in 2019. He always seems to find his way back to being exactly what he is.
There are no two ways about it, this is dismal.
Thing is, this wretched start is not all bad news for Gurriel. To illustrate that, I’m going to crib an idea that Nick Ashbourne used last week at Yahoo! Sports and show you what Gurriel’s 10-game rolling wOBA looks like.
“He’s had similar slumps and they tend to be followed by impressive hot streaks,” Ashbourne wrote. “Nothing to see here, yet.”
It’s hard to argue, looking at the data. And the fact that Gurriel has been this cold straight out of the gate makes his percentile ranks uglier than they would have been if this kind of a stretch had come in the middle of a season. But none of that makes any of this feel any better.
Gurriel badly needs to start to come around — both at the plate and in the field. I’m looking at the defensive numbers in the chart above, and the fact that it appears as though he’s managed to get some of the best jumps in baseball and turn them into one of the game’s worst defensive performances would be awfully funny if it weren’t so accurate.
Jansen has yet to qualify for most leaderboards, so there’s not a whole lot to look at here. I included him, however, because even that middling rank in terms of maximum exit velocity seems quite high. Those rolling xwOBA numbers (his past 50, 100, and 250 plate appearances going left to right) aren’t nearly as tragic as I would have expected either.
He’s been awful, yes, and it feels like a continuation of his young career’s downward trajectory. But it’s only been 34 plate appearances for him so far this season, and only 660 in his career. The book on him as a prospect was that he was never going to be a masher, but had a good eye, could hit line drives, take a reasonable number walks, and maybe would be good for an average number of home runs — a profile that, for a guy who can squat behind the plate every day, is pretty good.
He’s certainly not anywhere near crossing that bar yet, but it’s important to remember that the bar is lower in this case. And though it’s possible that he may simply not be able to hit big league pitching well enough for our usual assumptions about BABIP to hold true, the fact that he has just a .220 BABIP for his career and a .091 BABIP so far this season says that more is still to come from his bat. Will it be enough? That’s the big question.
First, though, he’s got to get the strikeout rate to come down a bit. It’s at 26.5%, up from 20.6% for his career. Then we can talk about the quality of his contact.
I’ve included Kirk here for similar reasons as I did Jansen, because while we aren’t seeing where most of his numbers place him, that maximum exit velocity ranking certainly seems a bit strange. It is, of course, yet another reminder of how early in the season it truly still is. Kirk was hitting piss rockets all spring. His average exit velocity for spring training was nearly as high as Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s. There’s no reason to think any differently of him now than there was a few weeks or a few months ago. The kid is an exciting offensive prospect at a position that is usually a black hole on that side of the ball.
I try to avoid falling back on clichés to explain baseball things as much as I can, but it sure feels like Marcus Semien could use some time out of the leadoff spot, doesn’t it? For both his sake and the team’s.
Beyond that, I'm not sure what else there is to say about him to this point. He's striking out too much (27%), but the discrepancy between his solid exit velocities and his low expected batting average (and BABIP, which currently sits at just .178) at least gives me hope that there's a good bit of bad luck in what is already a small and noisy sample.
That's maybe not how it feels like things are with him right now. He didn't really see to find his groove this spring, and it's easy to think about his poor 2020 and wonder if convincing ourselves that one hot playoff series proved those numbers were a mirage was as misguided as it sounds.
Semien is a great defender and he's taking his walks, so you still want him on the field despite the slump — albeit not at the top of the lineup. But it hasn't felt yet like the guy who had an MVP-calibre season just two years ago is anywhere near showing up.
It’s, uh, probably worth watching to see if he ever starts actually using the whole field again…
… but otherwise I think we’re just going to have to ride this one out and just hope against diminishing hope that 2019 Semien somehow returns.
Rowdy puts a real charge into the baseball, and after a rough start to the season is quietly starting to look a little more like the guy who was on his way to a big-time breakout last season. The walks still aren't there yet, but he had a 34.8% strikeout rate heading into last week's series against the Yankees and has struck out just 16.7% of the time since.
Again, as with everything in this post, we're talking about absurdly small sample sizes. But if that kind of plate discipline holds there is plenty of hope for his season yet.
Fans understandably want all of these guys to get going and to do it all at once. It has been an incredibly frustrating start to the Jays’ season so far, especially given the way the bats have let down a pitching staff that has performed better than expected given the injuries and disarray.
The good news is that you can find positive signs for every one of the hitters we’ve looked at here, though some you’ll need to squint harder to see than for others. The bad news is that it might take a few weeks before they really get on track and we start to feel it. Finally getting George Springer — who plays for the Toronto Blue Jays! — into the lineup, and getting Teoscar Hernández back, which could happen as soon as this weekend, will go a long way.
I'm just going to focus on the Vlad part of this column
Wow, that Semien spray chart is sobering. I was happy to finally see him moved out of the leadoff spot last night, though in Montoyo's defense, there weren't exactly many others getting on base much better than him.