Weekend (plus Monday) Up!: The Jays keep winning, but can't seem to gain ground
On another Manoah gem, Vlad's bomb, rough Odor, Ross Stripling, Cavan Biggio, Lourdes Gurriel Jr., Kevin Gausman, José Berríos, playing the Tigers more, ActiveTO, a new Blue Jays Happy Hour, and more!
Not that I’m saying anything that a great many Canadians already know full well, but Comerica is a great place to watch a baseball game Detroit is a blast of a city to visit. It’s a shame that the once-mighty rivalry between the Jays and Tigers, two former AL East foes, has been scaled back the way it has since Detroit joined the AL Central in 1998, following the addition of the Tampa Bay Rays to the AL East and the Milwaukee Brewers’ move to the National League. I was fortunate enough to get down for Saturday afternoon’s game, and while that would be the only one of the three-game set that the Jays would lose, it being the debut of top prospect Gabriel Moreno was a pretty good consolation. Plus, it was still a great weekend for both me and, more importantly, the team.
So let’s talk about it! And, because I was late getting this finished, we’ll talk about Monday’s romping victory over the Orioles, too. Here’s Weekend (plus Monday) Up!…
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Up: Friday: Jays 10 - Tigers 1
José Berríos didn't quite have the same dominant stuff as his previous outing in this one, but he didn't exactly have to be that guy either, which makes his outing somewhat difficult to judge. Tigers starter Elvin Rodriguez, fresh on having Jomboy tell the world that he was blatantly tipping his pitches, didn't fare any better against the Jays than against the Yankees in his previous start. George Springer led off the game with a four-pitch walk, Bo Bichette doubled him home on the first pitch he saw and then, a couple batters later, Alejandro Kirk made it 2-0 Jays before the Berríos had even thrown a pitch. Add in three homers in the second inning and the game was basically academic from there. Berríos seemed to take the effiency route afterwards, ultimately throwing 71 of 102 pitches for strikes, picking up just five strikeouts through eight innings of work, but not allowing a hit until Miguel Cabrera's fourth inning single — one of just five the Tigers would register on the day, along with one walk, all off of Berríos.
It's probably not one for the "see, Berríos is fine!" file, but what are we going to do? Complain? Hardly.
I'm not really sure what else to even say about this one. Hits are fun! Getting guys like Springer and Bichette in-game rest is fun! Alejandro Kirk being such an important part of this team now that he gets a break in the ninth inning is fun! 10-0 wins? Also fun. Good start to this series right here!
Down: Saturday: Jays 1 - Tigers 3
Welp. You can't win 'em all, but this one was through little fault of Jays starter and, um, geography understander, Kevin Gausman, who took a step in the right direction back to his whiffing ways in this one, picking up 15 swings-and-misses. How did he do it? Presumably not by figuring out how to no longer tip his pitches — an idea that was much-discussed coming out of his previous start, including around here.
Instead, he seemed to do something that was so obvious last time even I eventually noticed it! He made the difference between the locations of his four-seamer and his splitter a little less predictable. When I wrote about Gausman's previous outing for the second time last week, I concluded with this: "Want to bet we'll see some four-seamers to the lower third the next time Gausman pitches?"
In his rough go against the Twins, Gausman had barely touched the lower third with his four-seamer, and barely threw his splitter anywhere but, exacerbating trends that had been gaining steam all season.
Here’s how his heat maps on each pitch looked on Saturday, with the four-seamer again on the right, and the splitter on the left.
The difference is a bit subtle, but you’re definitely seeing those red areas for the four-seamer extend lower into the zone that he’s generally been all year — right into areas where there is at least some overlap with the splitter, particularly low and inside to right-handed hitters. Plus, we see a lot more splitters that were elevated enough to catch the zone.
It was maybe not a perfect outing, especially considering how the Tigers’ offence has been historically bad this season. But it was much better stuff from him than we’d seen the week earlier, when the areas each pitch was routinely thrown to were much more distinct.
Sadly for the Jays, despite a ton of hard contact — including 10 of the 11 hardest hit balls all night, each of which topped 103 mph off the bat, Gausman’s teammates couldn’t get it done in this one. The Jays failed to score until the top of the ninth, when a two-out single from the debuting Moreno was lashed to centre field at over 105 mph, then followed by a Cavan Biggio walk and a George Springer RBI single.
Bo Bichette’s line out to end the game certainly looked like it had the juice to get out of the ballpark from my vantage, alas, I’d been drinking in the sun all day, wasn’t able see the right field corner (where the ball was caught short of the warning track), and definitely thought it was gone until I saw the “Tigers win!” signs on all the videoboards pop up. Lol.
Going back to Gausman, I kid about the geography thing, of course. But this is pretty funny.
Credit to him for the self deprecation. And he's not wrong! There was a great contingent of Blue Jays fans at the park on Saturday — all the more reason games between these two teams need to happen more often. Who says a team's "natural rival" has to be an interleague team? The schedule makers? Rob Manfred? Pfft. Enough Phillies games every year — I'm sure they don't care either — and more with the Tigers! It's not like the distinction between leagues matters any more, right? WHO'S WITH ME???
Up: Sunday: Jays 6 - Tigers 0
You love to see Vladimir Guerrero Jr. hitting bombs like he did in this one, though he still hasn't been quite as Vladdy-eqsue as anyone would care for this season. His 181 wRC+ since the start of June is a number you'd take any day of the week, but the fact that it's based almost entirely power — and certainly was before Monday’s three-hit night, which bumped his on-base from .314 to .339 — is not my favourite factoid in the world at the moment! Vlad's 54.8% ground ball rate in the month is not where you'd like it to be — his rate was just 44.8% last season — and his ridiculous 54.5% HR/FB rate seems unsustainable, even for Vlad with livelier ball. We’ll take it, but it’s odd!
We'll also take an RBI double a couple batters later, plus an eighth inning insurance RBI, from Lourdes Gurriel Jr., who seems to finally be doing one of those things where he hits everything in sight, as we can see from this post-series visual from Props.cash — player prop research made easy!
Gurriel added three more hits in Monday’s win against the Orioles, too. Lol!
We’ll also definitely take an RBI double from Cavan Biggio, too. Biggio has somewhat quietly (i.e. with hardly any power to speak of) has put up a .371 on-base this season, which puts him ahead of every Blue Jays regular save for Kirk.
Biggio’s .288 slugging percentage heading into Monday’s game was bumped up to .323 thanks mostly to an RBI double, moving him from a 99 wRC+ to a 108 mark — an indication of just how small the sample (78 PA) we’re talking about here is, but still pretty impressive for a guy a lot of folks were ready to be done with earlier in the season. *COUGH*. I’m not sure he can continue to walk at nearly an 18% clip (third in baseball behind Max Muncy and Juan Soto among those with at least 70 PA this season so far), so more of that kind of power will need to come for him to stay productive, but not a ton more. Especially as he’s now looking like the kind of position-switching Swiss army knife kind of player we’ve long expected him to evolve into. It might not last, but it’s a good sign — and the emergence of Santiago Espinal really gives the Jays the chance to match Biggio up with pitchers where he has the best chance to be successful. (You know, like against ones that play for the Tigers and Orioles. HEYO!)
Despite the offence, the story of this 6-0 ballgame has to be Ross Stripling. The fill-in for the injured Hyun Jin Ryu allowed just a single hit over six innings of work, making his kitchen sink arsenal work despite topping out at just 93.3 mph on his fastball, and averaging 91.8 mph on it for the day. His changeup was his most used pitch, as he worked it to both left- and right-handed batters, including with two strikes to the latter group. Four of the six two-strike pitches that right-handers saw from Stripling were changes. Lefties saw more of a mix with two strikes — though, interestingly, Stripling didn't got to his knuckle curve to put left-handed hitters away, but instead tried to drop it in for strike one to them with some regularity.
We’ve seen his pitch mix evolve over the course of the season, as he’s moved away from his fastball — a smart move considering batters have a hard hit rate of 62.5% against it this season, a career worst for Stripling.
And whatever else he and Moreno were doing here, it worked. By the time he gave way to the bullpen the Jays had a 4-0 lead, and Stripling had yet to even cross the 75 pitch mark. He's not really a guy you're going to let go through the order more than just a couple times, so this is probably as good as it gets! Nice little start!
Up: Monday: Jays 10 - Orioles 1
The Jays’ bats kept on rolling on Monday night, scratching out a pair of runs early before loathsome Bautista-puncher Rougned Odor helped them open the floodgates in the fifth when he couldn’t squeeze a poor shovel from shortstop Jorge Mateo on Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s infield RBI single that began what would turn into an epic, seven-run inning.
The story of this one, however, I think has to be starter Alek Manoah — particularly, the way that he was able to neutralize Baltimore’s left-handed hitters.
Manoah has been dominant against right-handed batters so far this season, leading all qualified starters in baseball with a .164 wOBA against him in the split. Left-handers have been another story, however, as they were slashing .295/.355/.411 against him heading into Monday's tilt. He didn't exactly face the best group of them in this one, but his success was notable. Against Manoah, Cedric Mullins was 0-for-2 (reaching in one plate appearance via catcher's interference). Rougned Odor was 0-for-2 with a walk. Adley Rutschman was 0-for-2. And Kevin Stowers was 0-for-2 with a strikeout. That's two baserunners in 10 PA, one through no fault of his own, the other a mere walk. The Orioles' lefties slashed .000/.111/.000 against him for the game, making this the first time a left-hander had failed to get a hit against him in a game since last October.
We can see how he did it, too. First up we have heat maps of all of Manoah’s pitches to left-handers so far this season, as seen from the catcher’s perspective (i.e. the hitter is on the right side of the plate). He’s thrown some good sliders, as indicated by the red area low and inside on that particular heat map, but a lot of them — and a lot of his other pitches — have certainly leaked out over the plate.
Now we can see where his pitches were on Monday night. Below is a composite heat map, showing all of his offerings to lefties, and while he’s still a little bit in the danger area, he was much more frequently getting in on their hands than he has been this year, and avoiding parts of the zone where they can really extend and get into one.
As a result, Manoah gave the Jays another six innings of one-hit shutout ball, striking out seven and walking just the one batter. He's as good as anybody going right now. Fun!!
Also fun? Dingers! And Vlad left us with a mammoth one in this contest, tacking on a run in the bottom of the eighth that felt like it took about four days to land.
What a beauty. What a win. The Jays have gone 8-4 since June 1st, when they found themselves 5.5 games back of the division-leading New York Yankees — who will be visiting the Rogers Centre this weekend, once the Orioles are dispatched. Now to take a look at what the standings look like today, but first, a big sip of coffee…
Other notes
• Another tough break for Julian Merryweather, who left Monday’s game with what the club called “left side discomfort,” which will require an MRI here on Tuesday. He was a decent bet to be the odd man out when the limits on the number of pitchers a team can carry come into effect in a week or so, and this may just seal it.
Merryweather was optioned for fewer than 20 days earlier this season, meaning he hasn’t yet burned his final minor league option year, but that seems like where his year may ultimately be headed. Hopefully not! Hopefully it’s not a long one! But man, what a frustrating… um… career.
• I don’t really want to go back into this after getting into a real froth about it on Twitter back on Friday, but that letter from Jays president and CEO Mark Shapiro urging the mayor and the city of Toronto to cancel the ActiveTO program on Lake Shore Boulevard West? Man alive.
Like, I can’t blame Shapiro for trying to protect the revenue of the business he’s in charge of, and we can debate whether this particular area is right for the ActiveTO program, but to base his argument on the lie that “public transit is not an option” for those coming from the western parts of the GTA? To advocate for Lake Shore being opened up for the whole summer when the team will only be there on half of the weekends in question? To urge the city to ignore the needs of its own residents and privilege out-of-towners driving through? To choose this as the transit-related point of entry for the club when it comes to using their political capital, when they’ve got fans legitimately underserved and families feeling priced out of transit options from points west, east, and north — an important matter that lobbying from the Jays could legitimately make a real difference on? When you’re the Toronto Blue Jays, a sports team, discouraging exercise so that people can drive to the stadium the team was gifted precisely because it is at the nexus of several transit options?
It’s not that I expect the billion dollar baseball arm of the giant telecommunications company to lead the way on trying to get people out of their damn cars — an objectively good thing in the abstract, but an especially good thing in as densely populated a place as downtown Toronto — but come on. Ridiculous.
• Lastly, in case you missed it last night, Nick and I talked all about the weekend that was, as well as Monday’s blowout victory on a fresh Blue Jays Happy Hour! To have a listen, just get yourself the Callin app and head over to our show page, or find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your podcast app of choice!!
We’ll be back again after Wednesday’s game, talking live, taking questions from the chat, and your calls!
Next up: Tuesday, 7:07 PM ET: Jays vs. Orioles (Yusei Kikuchi vs. Jordan Lyles), TV: Sportsnet, Radio: Sportsnet 590
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If Shapiro was really committed to easy access to the stadium then they should have backed the plan to build a new stadium at Ontario Place. Smug fucker can learn to STFU when he's got no place to be speaking about a public issue. He joins the ridiculousness of cross-Canada blackouts for the Jays on MLB so Rogers can have their "TV" rights. As if whether or not we can see the game live would get someone on a plane from Saskatoon to go see the Jays in Toronto. It just means people give them all the finger and pirate the game. These morons are driving fans and revenue away with their shortsighted bs. Supporting active transportation would actually increase the number of fans that came to games, the idea that reducing car corridors causes traffic or a reduction in the number of people visiting stores or venues has been soundly thumped by extremely thorough research dozens of times and people still believe this myth.