They're calling him up, and it's the right move at the right time
The Blue Jays tried to pull off a big ol’ six-foot-six, 260 pound change of subject on Monday night when word broke that they will be calling up Alek Manoah from the minor leagues this week. And you know what? It worked. So let’s talk about it (and not, you know, literally anything else that went on with the team this weekend save, perhaps, for Vladdy being an absolute beast)!
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It's really not difficult to be fair. Not even when you're a sports fan in the throes of outrage over a gut-punch long weekend against a frustrating-as-hell rival in the middle of a stupid-as-hell 11 game win streak.
Other than a few snide remarks I’m sure are to follow, that's all I'm going to say about a string of games I’m sure we'd all very much like to memory-hole as quickly as possible. Fortunately, the Blue Jays have given us a way out of The Charlie Discourse and any thoughts of The Doomed Weekend by letting word leak out on Monday night that Alek Manoah is being called up and will pitch on Wednesday!
It’s a move that’s exciting and risky and necessary and curious all rolled into one. It’s also a situation where “it’s not difficult to be fair” comes into play again — albeit in a very different way than not conformation bias-ing every decision you dislike or that goes awry, and every imperfectly spoken phrase, into fireable offences and incontrovertible proof that the manager is a dummy in way over his head. The issue with fairness when it comes to Manoah’s arrival is, of course, about expectations.
Uh, including my own.
Though, honestly, as much I’ve been shouting “CALL HIM UP!” at every turn since March, or writing about why the argument to hold him down wasn’t going to last much longer, and as much as a huge number of Blue Jays fans have been hanging on every pitch of his, I don’t think anybody is under any illusion that Manoah is going to arrive in the majors and keep on dominating like it’s spring training or Triple-A. Not anybody reasonable, at least. Charlie is actually right about this one.
We expect good things. We’re definitely hopeful. And it’s hard not to believe at this point that Manoah has all the makings of a big leaguer. But we’ve all been through the Nate Pearson Experience over the last year, too. And I don’t imagine there will be nationally televised coverage of Manoah’s pre-game warmups on Wednesday, like there was for Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s first batting practice, either.
Really, all that Blue Jays expect, I think, is that Manoah will sail over the incredibly low bar set by everyone else who has been given a shot at being either the Jays’ number four or number five starter so far this season.
Most fans, that is.
There are, however, fans on the other end of the spectrum. Fans who think this is a bad idea borne of desperation that will end up biting both the player and the team.
Was the timing of the news being leaked a mark of desperation? I definitely buy that, though I can hardly blame the Jays for wanting a PR win after four or five soul shattering days on the field. But I wouldn’t call bringing a guy who Triple-A hitters can’t touch up to the big leagues a desperate move. I’d simply call it doing right by your big leaguers, who are not blind to what Manoah did in the spring and is doing in the minors, and clearly could use the help right now.
I’d also say it’s something that the Blue Jays didn’t just think up in the wake of any of the weekend’s multiple agonizing losses. Here’s an exchange on this very subject that Ross Atkins had with Stephen Brunt on Sportsnet’s Writers Bloc last week:
BRUNT: What are the metrics that tell you its time? When you watch a guy doing what he's doing right now — and, again, I understand, limited professional experience, last year was a weird year, but a guy who in a relatively small sample has utterly dominated at the level below the major leagues. What tells you, 'OK, now'?
ATKINS: If we had that metric then we wouldn't need front offices, right? We would no longer need people in chairs (like mine). It really, at this point, becomes much more subjective. But it's just understanding how to weight all of the different factors, and all of the different potential implications, and not just as they relate to just Alek Manoah. So, there isn't a metric. As a matter of fact, any metric that you would find would be very encouraging toward suggesting that he should absolutely be in that discussion.
Well, the opportunity is certainly there. But whether or not Manoah can execute as well as his stats indicate is a question that has arisen in some corners based on his most recent start. There are definitely people out there convinced that he was hanging sliders all over the place against the WooSox, which, having re-watched the outing over the weekend, is an assessment I don’t think is accurate. That’s not to deny that there were at least some that he hung, but I think some were deliberately top shelf, and front door to right-handers, and back foot to lefties. Plus, his slider is also incredibly hard for hitters to pick up off of his fastball(s), and his whole arsenal kept opposing hitters off balance enough that we shouldn’t look at individual pitches in a vacuum and more at the totality of his work anyway. Which was spectacular.
Besides, even if they were all mistakes, if Triple-A hitters are unable to touch them what is being accomplished by holding him down?
But don’t just take my word for all this. Here are about two-thirds of the pitches Manoah threw that night, as seen from a much better angle than the one found on the TV broadcast.
It’s hard to tell which pitch is which from those clips, but what I can tell you is that the real pitch of concern for me there is the changeup.
Manoah throws his slider in the lower 80s, his change is in the upper 80s, and his fastball — either four- or two-seamer — is generally in the mid-90s. During my re-watch of last week’s start, I logged the velo reading from the TV broadcast bug for each pitch and only counted seven that were in the range where his changeup usually lives. That’s not the most precise way to do this, but it’s the best I could come up with. And by that measure he threw the changeup three times in the first inning — twice to Jonathan Araúz and once to Danny Santana, both switch hitters batting from the left side. Araúz took one for a ball after showing bunt at 0-1. At 2-2, Manoah got one over for a strike, which Araúz popped into the seats behind third base. The one to Santana was a 1-0 pitch in the bottom third of the zone that was golfed to left for an easy out. The lone change he threw in second was a middle-middle offering on 2-1 that Chris Hermann took deep. The only one he threw in the third was a first pitch strike to the second hitter he faced, Jarren Duran, who was taking it all the way. He threw one for ball one to the first batter of the fifth. His last one was a ball to Araúz in the sixth.
What I saw lined up with what all the scouting reports say: The change is still very much a work in progress. It needs more development, for sure. But development for Manoah doesn’t necessarily need to take place in the minors — something Ross Atkins has made quite clear.
“Based on his effectiveness, and based on how his minor league development goes,” he told reporters back in March, “a lot of that progress and workload development can be in the major leagues.”
Or maybe it doesn’t even matter very much at all.
Still, it’s entirely fair to be worried about how well he’s going to be able to do against left-handed batters. In his limited Triple-A sample, left-handers have produced a .549 OPS against him, whereas for right-handers the number is .310. Both are incredibly impressive stats, but shielding him a bit from lefties at the big league level at first probably makes a lot of sense. Which is exactly where the Yankees come in.
Right now the Yankees have just four left-handed hitters on their active roster: Mike Ford, Brett Gardner, Rougned Odor, and Tyler Wade. As a group that quartet is slashing .197/.288/.317 for the season season. Obviously New York’s best right-handed hitters can punish anyone, but playing the Yankees is actually a pretty good landing spot for Manoah in his debut. In fact, I think it’s possible the Jays wouldn’t have called him up so soon if not for the schedule.
Speaking of the schedule, looking beyond the Yankees, Manoah would next be lined up to pitch on Monday, May 31. That’s an off-day for the Jays. They play the Marlins for two next Tuesday and Wednesday and then have an off day on Thursday before hosting Houston in Buffalo.
Thinking out loud here: maybe the Jays will give Robbie Ray the Tuesday start against the Marlins on regular rest, bumping Manoah to Wednesday, then skipping their fifth starter’s spot on the off-day Thursday, which would setup Ryu to go Friday against the Astros on extra rest, then Matz and Ray on regular rest for the final two games against Houston. After another off-day, Manoah would then face the White Sox. Barring any more shuffling, his turns from there until to all-star break would line up against Boston, Baltimore, Baltimore, Seattle, and Baltimore.
Whoever the fifth starter is by that point — say, Thomas Hatch or Nate Pearson — would get those teams, too. Half the time it would be like they never even left Triple-A!
And the the thing is, like I said above, nobody serious is asking Manoah to come up and dominate major league hitters the way he’s dominated in the minors so far. It would be fun as hell if he did, obviously, but there’s undoubtedly going to be a learning curve. The main question is can he satisfy the Jays’ needs while also satisfying his own developmental needs?
I don’t know if we know the first part until we see him in the majors, but we know Triple-A isn’t doing much for the second. If you bring him up and it goes so badly that he needs to go back down, you at least make it clear what he needs to work on, right?
That’s perhaps not the most elegant way to think about handling a pitching prospect, but it’s not like the Jays have the luxury of doing it by the book at the moment. Based on what Atkins was saying last week, there isn’t really a book on this stuff anyway.
When asked earlier this month about why the club chose to bring George Springer back sooner than they probably should have, Atkins justified the move like this: “as we are trying to compete and trying to win, if we have objective reasons to take the next step and put him in a position to make our team better, then we're always going to do that.”
They seem to be living by the same maxim with Manoah.
Though Springer’s return didn’t exactly set a great precedent for that kind of a choice, I trust Manoah’s confidence to stay intact more than I’d trust Springer’s quad at 75%. And with confidence, and the dominance he’s displayed over the last three months, and the way he’s been setup for early success against a righty-heavy lineup, I think Jays fans should feel very good about Wednesday night. They’re making the right move here.
The guy who’s next up on the Blue Jays hype train certainly knows it.
Top image via the Toronto Blue Jays/@MLBPipeline