Berríos gives up hard contact, but Bo slams the door shut on the Red Sox
On José Berríos getting hit, Bo Bichette hitting back, George Springer, Cavan Biggio, vaccine mandates, Chris Coghlan, Mike McCoy, and more!
José Berríos was a bit shaky again, and the offence took a little while to get going, but the Blue Jays hung tough and slammed their way to victory in game one of a four-game set against the Red Sox thanks to a Bo Bichette blast.
So let’s talk about it! Here’s three up!
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Up?: José Berríos
José Berríos got a nice ovation when he left the game after a brisk seven-plus innings of work with the Jays sitting on a 2-0 lead. The two runners he allowed to start the eighth did mar his record by coming around to score, but I guess you can’t argue with a night of two runs on five hits and one walk over seven full innings of work. Except… maybe you can?
Berríos is great, and I don’t think anybody should be worried about how he hasn’t quite been right as yet this season. But hoo boy, he got away with a whole lot tonight.
Eleven batted balls of over 95 mph, including six above 100. Eight batted balls with an expected batting average of .630 or above, and four more between .410 and .560. But only five hits on the night!
Hey, we’ll take it. I guess it’s the results that matter most. But that didn’t quite feel like one of Alek Manoah’s battling-despite-not-having-his-best-stuff kind of outings. That felt like one that Red Sox fans should be pissed about. Which, actually, might even be better in a way.
Anyway! He’ll be the ace of the staff by the end of the year. No need to sweat it.
Up: DINGERSSSSSS!!!!
Six runs, three dongs. Do you want to know the terrifying truth? Or do you want to see the Jays sock some dingers???
Here’s Gurriel on an 0-2 slider in the fifth — after seeing an 0-1 slider from Nathan Eovaldi on the previous pitch — to give the Jays an improbable lead!
Before the game, per a tweet from the Star's Gregor Chisholm, Jays GM Ross Atkins spoke glowingly of Gurriel.
"It's much a more patient approach with a very aggressive, electric, high bat speed swing, that to me, looks like one of the better offensive players in the game right now," he said. "If he can hold that up, that would really be powerful for us."
Lourdes, with a homer and a double in this one, is up to a 129 wRC+ for the season now. That'll play.
Now here’s Matty Chapman torching an Eovaldi cutter for a 107 mph blast that went 442 feet (and yet somehow only had a .990 expected batting average!).
Chapman bounced back from his 0-for-5 in Houston on Sunday and now sports a respectable 118 wRC+ for the season, and seems to be holding steady with a strikeout rate in the 25% range — which, while high, is much better than the rates he posted in his last two years in Oakland. The best is yet to come, I think.
And speaking of the best yet being to come, Bo Bichette has had a miserable start to this season at the plate, but absolutely not tonight!
Or, well, absolutely not on his last at-bat of the night!
The Red Sox had tied it up in the top of the eighth after Berríos’s exit, but the Jays managed to load the bases, bringing Bo to the plate with one out in the bottom of the frame.
Some were skeptical…
…but he showed why nobody has actually started doubting his superstar status in the league just yet. The approach is weird sometimes, but when it works — which a lot (he led the American League in hits last year!) — it really works. Case in point.
I won’t quote you his numbers at the moment, as they’re rather grim, but let’s hope that this is the beginning of a genuine turnaround for the Jays’ one-of-a-kind shortstop.
Up: George “Superman” Springer
Though it would end up less important than some of the offensive displays that would come after it, this play from George Springer to rob Kevin Plawecki of extra bases in the top of the fifth was certainly no less spectacular.
Pillar-esque! Except Springer doesn’t suck at the plate!
Incredibly, this was only the 35th time that George Springer has played a game at Rogers Centre as a member of the Blue Jays. Most of those came last year, and an awful lot — if not all — of them came when he simply wasn’t 100% healthy. Jays fans had yet to really get a taste of what the 32-year-old can do in the field, to the point where some found it odd that the elite glove of Bradley Zimmer was placed in right field in this one, with Springer allowed to stay in his usual spot in centre.
“George is a pretty good fielder too,” quipped manager Charlie Montoyo before the game, according to the Sportsnet broadcast. (Or something like that — I’m paraphrasing!)
Yeah, it turns out! This one was 101.7 mph off the bat and required a full-out dive. You love to see it! (Uh, be careful out there though, eh George?)
Other notes
• Cavan Biggio was placed on the Covid-IL by the Jays prior to Monday’s game, with right-hander Bowden Francis taking his place on the roster. Having Covid sucks, and I wish him a speedy recovery — and hope to hell that none of his teammates come down with it! — but the timing of the announcement certainly raised some eyebrows. Biggio has offered the Jays less than nothing so far here in 2022. Right now there are better defensive options a pretty much any position he can play, and better left-handed bats on the bench at this point too.
Through 28 plate appearances thus far he has just one single and three walks to his credit.
Now, clearly he’s better than that and will turn it around to some extent, but I must admit I’ve been chuckling somewhat at the Biggio discourse I’ve been seeing on Blue Jays Twitter and various blogs the last few days. His problems, unfortunately, aren’t likely going to be fixed with a confidence-building trip to the minors or the right mentality. His problems run deeper than that, and the signs have been there for quite some time.
In other words, I think Drew is bang on right here:
I’m not saying that the Blue Jays won’t at some point send Biggio to the minor leagues, or that it couldn’t help him pull a little bit of the way out of the deep funk he’s in, but if you’re a Biggio fan I’d probably be less convinced that a trip to Buffalo will help him figure it out and more concerned that he might not make it back.
Even when Biggio was good the underlying numbers were concerning — and certainly didn’t look like those of a hitter that pitchers should shy away from as much as they had been earlier in his career. Here are his percentile ranks per Statcast for 2020, when he produced a career best 122 wRC+ and was one of the Jays’ most important hitters.
He didn’t have enough plate appearances to be ranked in many of these categories last year, but I can tell you that his xBA, xSLG, and xwOBA all were down from the marks he produced in 2020. Obviously they’re even farther down this year. And, predictably, his walk rate for 2022 currently stands at just 10.7% — good, but down from the marks above 15% he produced in his first two seasons, and certainly not good enough to carry such an otherwise limp bat.
If I were to try to take some positives here, I'd point out that last year he did manage to hit some balls harder than in his past, despite his average exit velocity being about the same as his previous two seasons. Coming into 2021 he'd never hit a ball harder than 104.6 mph, yet that year he hit ones above 105 mph three times, including one at 109.6. If he can do that more regularly, maybe that changes the equation — and based on the fact that he's struck the ball on the sweet spot just 15.4% of the time so far in 2022 (down from 32.8% last year, which is almost exactly his career mark), there's obviously room for improvement.
But then I go back to the chart in Drew's tweet and I see exactly what he sees: a guy who pitchers recognize can't hurt them, who has struggled with top end velocity, especially high in the zone (of 328 hitters to have seen at least 1,000 total pitches since the start of 2021, Biggio’s .131 xwOBA ranks 305th against pitches at 96 or above in or just off the upper third of the plate), and who is maybe cheating on the fastball and susceptible to offspeed stuff a whole lot more.
Can that be changed by a spell in Buffalo? I can't say no, but colour me skeptical. I think it's more likely that this simply is who he is, and that — until he shows a greater ability to do damage — the Jays are going to have to be meticulous about finding the right matchups to get anything out of him going forward. I hope I'm wrong on that, but the speed at which second base has become Santiago Espinal's job tells me that the Jays see it too.
He just can’t be the guy he was in 2019 and 2020 if pitchers are exploiting his flaws this much more ruthlessly.
• After much hew and cry about big stars for the Yankees and Red Sox missing games in Toronto because of their vaccination status, we learned today that for this week’s series with the Jays, Boston will be without, uh… Tanner Houck and Kutter “don’t say my name to a Dutch person” Crawford.
Not exactly a murderer’s row who will be missing out on these games. Which, though obviously not a competitive advantage for the Jays, is quite obviously good! Mandates work! Unvaccinated morons should get vaccinated!
(To that point, a just-released study from the Canadian Medical Association Journal has found that unvaccinated people have disproportionate impact on spreading COVID when mixing with vaccinated people. Which, of course, unvaccinated people absolutely already knew, they just couldn’t give a shit. 🖕)
• Some other pre-game injury notes, per Charlie Montoyo:
• Montoyo added, per a Gregor Chisholm tweet, that Ryan Borucki was unavailable on Sunday due to a blister, but was again available here on Monday. Since he wasn’t needed, that presumably means he’ll be available on Tuesday as well.
• I know it’s not apples-to-apples, because we can’t sell (as many) pharma or political ads here, so the dollars are just different. But seriously, this team should be able to spend as much as anyone.
• A big shared anniversary in Blue Jays Twitter Land tonight, as not only was it the fifth anniversary of the Chris Coughlan Play — which led to this spectacular piece of digital ephemera…
…it was also the anniversary of the beginning of the Mike McCoy flight map, which by the end of 2011 showed how he’d logged over 21,000 miles in the air, travelling between wherever the Blue Jays were playing, and wherever their Triple-A affiliate in Las Vegas was, as he rode the yo-yo constantly for an entire season.
Heady days!
• Lastly, a great, extensive profile of Bo Bichette was published on Monday morning by Joon Lee of ESPN. It’s really a heartwarming piece about Bichette coming into his own as a leader on this Jays team, and the support and sincerity he brings to his teammates. And I’m not going to lie, it sure feels better to read after that grand slam than it did earlier in the day!!!!!
Next up: Monday, 7:07 PM ET: Jays vs. Red Sox (Kevin Gausman vs. Nick Pivetta), TV: Sportsnet One, Radio: Sportsnet 590
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Man...that Coghlan video, though!
I learned some Dutch today, bedankt!