Three down: Jays lose, Yankees clinch, and worse!
On Bo's gaffe, Vlad's gaffe, bad Berríos, Buck's rant, Ticketmaster frustrations, Aaron Judge, Blue Jays Happy Hour, and more!
The Blue Jays fell to the Yankees on Tuesday night, forcing them to watch their rivals celebrate clinching the American League East title that most pundits felt the Blue Jays would win this year, instantly erasing many of the good vibes of Monday’s dramatic walk-off victory. But what made this one tougher to swallow than a lot of Jays losses of late wasn’t so much the failure to win, or the Yankees’ stupid success, but the manner in which this one was lost.
So let’s talk about it! Here’s three down…
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Down: José Berríos
Oh, don’t worry, we’ll get to the bottom of the sixth inning. But first, more of the same from José Berríos!
Now, I think there’s really only one person out there who has been arguing that Berríos has been fine except for the times he’s been really, really bad. Which is good! Because that’s simply not true.
Was it the good or the bad Berríos who took the ball on Tuesday night? Was it the good Berríos who struck out seven and walked just two over 5 1/3 innings? And was it the bad Berríos who gave up nine hits and five earned runs?
Was it good Berríos having bad luck when Anthony Rizzo's blooper to no-mans land dropped to put runners on first and second with no outs in the fifth?
Or was it bad Berríos having good luck when Rizzo was thrown out at third by Raimel Tapia on batter later?
Or was it all just Berríos? The 2022 version of him, at least.
The strikeouts in this one were something of an outlier for Berríos, whose K/9 (7.81) and strikeout rate (19.8%) this season are the worst he's produced since his rough rookie year at age 22. The hard contact was not. Yankees batters put the ball in play at 95 mph or above 50% of the time. That’s well above the 43.8% hard hit rate he's surrendered here in 2022, which places him among the worst in the league. His hard hit rate sits in the 12th percentile, comparable to his lowly percentile rankings in other quality-of-contact categories, like exit velocity (14th), expected batting average (6th), expected slugging (6th), and barrels (14th).
There is a ton of blue on his Baseball Savant page, and it’s been there all season long.
I mean, I suppose that numerous bad outings would indeed blow up these rankings on someone, and there have definitely been several of those, but I think if we step back from that odd notion we see a story here that lines up much better with the way it’s felt to watch this guy all season. He’s giving up too much hard contact and failing too often to put batters away.
That's a deadly combination for a pitcher because the effects can cascade. Kevin Gausman, for example, hasn't been as bad as Berríos at limiting hard contact this year, but he's been below average as well, ranking in the 46th percentile. And yet he's having either a great season (or a very good one, depending on which version of WAR you use) because he's been elite at getting batters to chase pitches outside the zone, suppressing walks, and well above average in terms of getting swing-and-miss and strikeouts. The batters who have hit their way on against him have struggled to come around to score because he doesn't walk anyone, he strikes out a ton, and even his ungodly BABIP does still result in plenty of outs.
Save for the BABIP, Berríos has been worse by all of those measures. And speaking of cascading effects, I think if we drill down into some numbers we can see how several small steps backwards can compound into a giant leap backwards.
Take, for example, what Berríos has done once he's got to two strikes this year as compared to last year.
First of all, he is failing to even get into two-strike counts as often this year, with only 49.8% of plate appearances against him reaching two strikes, whereas last year that number was 55.9%. And it's not like he's walking guys more often before he gets there, as his walk rates are identical (5.8%) in both years. Instead, what we're seeing is more balls in play before Berríos gets to two strikes. Last year 10.3% of his zero- or one-strike counts resulted in balls in play, this year it's 13%.
While that may look like a fairly small difference, in real terms this has led to 131 hits from such counts this season, compared to just 100 last year — and that's despite the fact that right now Berríos is still 400 pitches, and 50 batters faced, short of the totals he ended up with last year.
Turning out attention to his work with two strikes we again see declines that look small but can end up being pretty big. The percentage of two-strike pitches that he's thrown in the zone has dipped from 44.8% in 2021 to 40.2% in 2021. I think that's probably understandable given the way some of his pitches have been getting hit this year — and given some of the concerns about tipping that we've heard about him througout the year — but it has led in part to a small-but-significant reduction in his number of called third strikes. Last year 6% of his at-bats in two-strike counts ended with a strike three call, of 56 in total. This year that number has dipped to 3.8%, or 29 in total. That's a difference of nearly one per start. The same goes for his swinging strike rate in two-strike counts, which has dipped from 15.9% (148) to 15.1% (115).
Obviously some of these numbers are coloured by the blow-ups, but even if you extremely generously remove all the starts in which Berríos has allowed four or more runs this season, his K/9 is 8.79. Better, certainly, but still off from the 9.71 mark he produced in 2020, and his 9.56 last year (which was 9.98 over his 12 post-trade starts for the Jays).
More balls in play, more hard contact, fewer strikeouts. That’s the story of Berríos’s season much more than the Jekyll and Hyde thing, which seems for some reason to very deliberately elide the fact that Berríos has not been good enough even when he’s been “good.”
Answering the “why” of all this can be a bit trickier. This isn’t the first season in which Berríos has seen his hard contact rate rise, and he’s never been an elite strikeout guy. These are not not red flags. Some fans love the fantasy that the AL East is so vastly different from other divisions that any pitcher coming from the NL or the AL Central is immediately suspect, which is a notion I’ve never bought. Others will bring up the fact that Berríos has a 3.64 ERA for his career versus teams below .500, but a 4.92 ERA against teams at or above .500 to suggest he’s “actually just bad,” which I… uh… don’t particularly want to think about.
(I’d say here that, while that discrepancy is pretty stark, you’d be hard pressed to find a pitcher with a better ERA against better opponents, and the first name I checked — Roy Halladay — suggested that was correct (3.07 to 3.66). Then I looked up Alek Manoah and of course he’s been better against teams above .500. (2.89 against teams below .500, 2.44 against those at or above). Lmao.)
Personally, I’m with Eno on this one.
Indeed, it wouldn’t shock me at all if Berríos showed up next spring and started pitching like the guy we’ve always known him to be. That’s a long way from me wanting to see him take the ball at any point in October though!
Down: Sloppy seconds
Turns out two things that seem diametrically opposed can both, in fact, be bad. The baserunning displays in Tuesday night’s crucial sixth inning from Bo Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. were bad! The commentary on it from Buck Martinez in Sportsnet’s broadcast booth after the fact? Also kinda bad!
Or, well, actually, let me walk that back a second. To be fair to Buck, who we all love, he certainly wasn’t wrong to point out that Vlad, especially, needed to do better after he far spent too long admiring a blast that didn’t clear the fence — much like Teoscar Hernández had done the night before — and ended up turning a double into the team’s second straight ugly out at second base.
In fact, I think he got it absolutely right at first, before veering a bit too heavily into chest-thumping “play the right way” stuff that’s going to be the only part actually heard by the armchair junior hockey coach types hanging out at the local Timmies.
"You can make one mistake by not running out of the box," he said. "But you can't make two."
That, I think, is perfect.
Mistakes are obviously not good, and I'm not saying they should be hand-waved away or left unaddressed, but they’re part of the game, too.
I think Dan Shulman was bang on when he noted that the Jays seem to have a tendency to tighten up these things for a while, only to have them creep back in, and when he added that “it’s really hard to play with the good teams in October if you’re giving teams an extra out or costing yourself an extra out.”
Yet this idea that there's some team out there — presumably the Rays (and definitely the Rays when Buck and Tabby get together in the booth) — playing perfect, clean, mistake-free baseball is simply false. That mythical team doesn't exist. One needs to only watch the games with this in mind to see it. But it's harder to recognize it when folks are only watching their team and being fed tall tales straight out of little league.
Do the Blue Jays make too many mistakes? Absolutely they do.
But is Ricky Romero absolutely correct here? Of course he is.
And I think I have some idea of what might have been driving the impulse among some fans to overreact to this.
This was the end part of Buck’s rant:
This John Schneider’s 67th game as manager and these are the types of things he’s going to change the culture of. I believe that he’s the right guy to manage this team going forward. He understands that there’s a certain way to play championship baseball. He won in the minor leagues in three different leagues. He understands what it takes to win.
Yeah, Vlaidmir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette! Or, at the very least, good players.
Schneider’s championship teams in the Florida State League (2017) and the Eastern League (2018) featured Vlad and Bo, among many other familiar names. His title in the Northwestern League in 2011 featured (at least at the end of the season) the pitchers who would go on in 2012 to become the Lansing Three.
Which isn’t to say that I don’t agree that Schneider seems like he’ll be a fine manager for this team once the interim tag is inevitably lifted. It’s just funny that we’re talking about a manager understanding what it takes to win when we’re talking about mistakes made by literally the same players he won with.
It’s harder than ever to win in the Major Leagues. You don’t see a lot of repeat winners now. Things are changing from year to year. So you’ll have to set a standard of ‘This is how the Blue Jays are going to play. We’re going to put our trademark on this game and we’re going to do it every single day.’
Until you get there, you’re going to ride rollercoasters. You’re going to have good days, you’re going to have bad days. But I think John Schneider is the guy to lead this team forward and I can tell you he’s steaming about the way this game has developed tonight.
A lot to unpack here. First, yes, it’s harder to win than ever, but that’s because there are more playoff teams than ever. The 1992 Blue Jays played 12 games in the playoffs. This year a team could reach their 12th playoff game and still only be just barely more than halfway through their LCS. And while there is no doubting that one way to give yourself as good a chance as possible in the playoffs is to play as mistake-free as possible as a matter of course, often that is not enough. There are so many games and series in the playoffs that luck plays a bigger factor than ever. The 88-win Atlanta Braves won the World Series last year!
It’s better to make fewer mistakes, obviously, but I promise you plenty of teams prone to occasional bouts sloppiness have won the World Series. Miss me with the “if they do this in the playoffs they can’t win!” kind of stuff until they actually, y’know, do it in the playoffs. And let the manager manage — which is exactly what Buck is saying here.
Unfortunately, he’s also fairly strongly implying that that rollercoaster season the Jays have had is in some way related to any of this, which is dubious at best. The idea that teams having good days and bad days — as fundamental a part of the sport as the commisioner being a gormless stooge — can be overcome by always running hard to first base is patently absurd.
Frankly, I think there are plenty of situations where it’s not just OK for a player to go all out, but preferable. Lourdes Gurriel Jr. is on the IL right now because of a hustle play that actually meant something, but the logical endpoint of this all-out, all-the-time chest-puffery is guys getting hurt for no good goddamn reason. And when, as Buck himself mentioned on Tuesday’s broadcast, the cool air in Toronto this week has made it so that certain balls that have felt like they’re going to leave the yard haven’t cleared the fence, I think we can cut a little bit of slack on that front too.
You can make one mistake, but you can’t make two. A wise man said that once!
As for the setting-a-standard stuff, that’s a good thing to aspire to, and a thing to which the Blue Jays absolutely do aspire — i.e. their organizational mantra to “get better every day.” It’s also something that you’d probably hear eventually mentioned if you picked any year and any team. Yes, even the Rays. A very convenient and long-standing trope among cranks!
You can’t just say ‘well, they’re young.’ No, they’re not young. They’re playing in their third and fourth years in the big leagues now. You have step up. If you want to be a champion, you have to play like a champion.
Again, just so we’re clear, mistakes aren’t good! They should be avoided as much as they possibly can be. But it’s so easy for people to be completely unreasonable about this stuff, and I guess I’d just prefer it if we were a little more careful with it. These guys, more than previous generations, are stuffed to the gills with information they have to juggle over the course of each and every game — they face more pitchers with more looks and more weapons than ever, their positioning is micromanaged by the pitch when in the field, they have to be aware situationally on the diamond, on the base paths, know who’s got what kind of arm, etc. etc. Those types of things are not new but the quantity of data is, and I think that in a moment when you feel like you’ve just done something truly special it’s not a big deal to let go of all that overwhelming stuff, to ease off of the rigid focus required to hit a guy throwing 99 with a wipeout slider, and take it all in a little bit and enjoy yourself. It doesn’t mean that guys don’t care.
I also think that the idea that one can Champion their way to being a Champion by playing like a Champion has an ugly flip side where fans end up ascribing personal or moral failings to players for fairly trivial stuff we see on the field in the course of games, and that we see it in the kinds of comments Ricky is responding to.
It’s good when team broadcasters “tell it like it is” and call out things that deserve calling out — and make no mistake (HEYO!), Buck is absolutely right that John Schneider wasn’t pleased with what he saw on Tuesday night…
…I just think that we end up with unnecessary anger and vitriol when we let myths about what “should” happen on the field overtake the reality of what does happen.
It’s fine. It’s not good, but it’s fine.
Down: Whatever the hell happened with Ticketmaster
I saw a bunch of tweets about this on Tuesday but haven't seen much coverage, but it seems like a pretty big deal to those affected — and pretty shitty, too. Apparently the Jays, or Ticketmaster, or Ticketmaster and the Jays, used the “Next Level” — a phrase that's been in their marketing materials and social media throughout the season — as the presale code for a slate of playoff tickets that were going on sale this week, which led to a bunch of people who "weren't supposed to" getting the code and buying up tickets. This — according to the video below, plus several Twitter users, including ones that reached out to me about this in private — led to the cancellation of those ticket sales, with the money not being refunded in time for those who purchased to re-buy when they went on sale.
Do I have this right??? Here is how the Gate 14 Podcast described it. (I'll transcribe below.)
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“Breaking news, if you bought Toronto Blue Jays playoff tickets off of Ticketmaster using code 'Next Level,' the scumbags over at Ticketmaster, and the Toronto Blue Jays, cancelled every single order and you won't get your money back for over 10 business days — which, by the way, is after the Wild Card series. Un-fucking-believable. They cancelled it because it was designated for season ticket holders, but these brain-dead human beings used the code 'Next Level.' Un-fucking-believable. So now, all Blue Jays fans, season ticket holders or not, have to wait in a queue (Wednesday) battling robots for the tickets to get these tickets. Insane! Un-fucking-believable!”
“I found out online. They never even sent an email,” a different fan explained to me in a DM. “Not even sending back full amount. Shorting $60 for processing. Unbelievable.”
It doesn’t seem like things went much better for some folks when the tickets went on sale today either. This thread — which is far too long for me to post in full, as it gives minute-by-minute updates until 10:47 AM when (SPOILERS!) Robin gave up trying to get tickets — will make your blood boil…
Some people did seem to have success, and I can’t claim to know the scale of the clusterfuck here, but it all sounds… not great!
Lastly…
• I did this on Twitter yesterday and it worked, so I’m running it back. As you can see in the chart below from Props.cash — player prop research made easy! — Aaron Judge has only hit three home runs against the Blue Jays this season. In fact, he’s failed to hit a home run against them now in 10 straight games.
Makes you think! (No, not about how often the Jays are walking him — what are you, some kind of a Yankees fan???)
• Aaaaand lastly lastly, sorry about the lack of podcasts of late but Nick’s schedule has been tight and we’re still not sure if our issues with the Callin app have been resolved. We’ll be testing tonight, and hopefully that means we’ll be able to go live after the final out. Keep your eye on my Twitter and I’ll announce it if we do. Or you can get yourself the Callin app and give us a follow there!
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I think there are a few things that are contributing to why people were so irked by last night, even if Buck did veer off the deep end a bit towards the end of his rant.
First, unfairly or not, Vlad is going to be measured against last year when he was the best player in baseball save for a unicorn. There have been more ups and downs this year, his stats are down, and some of those habits from 2020 seep in at the plate at times. He's still really good! And has 30 HRs and is playing better defense than any of us could have hoped for a couple years ago, but the measuring stick is last year, and with people disappointed in his play more broadly, the small mental mistakes chafe at people more.
Second, and again, probably unfair to lay all this at his feet, but it's felt there's been something a bit off about team all year, even in good times. They won 6 straight series to start September, but there’s been questions about Berrios all year, and the bullpen, and the core hitters save for Springer, it feels their slumps last just a few too many games to feel comfortable in the playoffs. Expectations were high for this team, and that exposes the “COME ON” moments more than if it felt they were really in a groove.
Third, and this is really only tangential and somewhat connected to my second point, but there wasn’t that big moment at the deadline to sustain some positive fan momentum into the last 2 months of the season. I’m not going to relitigate the deadline and given how aggressive they’ve been in the past, I think trusting Shapiro and Atkins that the acquisition cost would have astronomical is more than fair, but it does feel a bit like they’re playing out the string even though we’re heading to the playoffs. In 2015 there was excitement for the playoffs, sure, but each game was an endorphin high. This feels more like “let’s get this over with and get onto the playoffs”
This was an unnecessarily long way of saying there’s kind of a funk and malaise around a really good team – for whatever reason – so there’s going to be more complaining about that moment than otherwise would have been the case if there was more excitement around this run.
Yes both Vlad and Teo lollygagging is not a good look, but this is sort of where baseball 'fun' culture is going these days right? After Bautista got lambasted for the Batflip (which would be a great name for a blog), all of a sudden it's the cool thing to do - players admiring their blasts - until they don't go out. I'm sure the same thing has happened to a LOT of players.
The Bo thing...I hate that 'rule'. In the good old days, sure if you were way off the bag and got tagged you were out. But this holding your glove against them until they lose contact by a cm is just tacky. And I know we've benefit from doing it as well. It's a grey area though because it's totally within the rules...but to me it just looks stupid and is pretty unsatisfying. Now, faking throwing the ball back to the pitcher...that's a different story entirely!