Weekend Up!: Good weekend, bad ending
On Romano's rare off day, Cimber vs. Bass, swinging for the fences, average ol' José Berríos, playoff races, the days ahead, scoreboard watching, George Springer, Sem Robberse, David Price, and more!
I don't think we have to use that GIF of the Undertaker opening his coffin from below and sitting up bolt straight for this one. The Baltimore Orioles are not back from the dead. They're just not quite as buried as we maybe felt they were when, in the bottom of the seventh inning on Sunday afternoon, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. reached out and put a somewhat awkward, one-handed swing on a Dillon Tate slider — the third straight one Tate had thrown him, and a second in a row in literally exactly the same spot...
...— and muscled the ball over the fence, providing the Jays with what felt at the time like a massive insurance run as the score moved to 3-1.
Unfortunately, with Tim Mayza unavailable after having pitched on both Friday and Saturday, John Schneider and Pete Walker chose Adam Cimber as their next best option to face red-hot rookie lefty Gunnar Henderson and fellow left-handed hitter Terrin Vavra, who were due up first and third in the top of the eighth, with the right-handed Jesús Aguilar hitting between them.
There's an argument to be made that Anthony Bass should have been given the assignment instead, seeing as he and Cimber have been just about even over the last few months when it comes to handling left-handers, depending on how you want to slice it, whereas Bass has been clearly more effective against right-handers. Whether you want to nitpick that or not, what happened was that Aguilar homered off of Cimber, drawing the Orioles one run nearer at 3-2.
Normally even that small lead would be enough for Jays closer Jordan Romano, who came on in the ninth, but this was one of those exceedingly rare situations where he couldn't lock it down. Pinch hitter Kyle Stowers ambushed Romano's first offering of the ninth — a slider, which is a pitch that Sportsnet’s Chris Black points out Romano has possibly been using too much recently, especially early in counts, as his 0-0 slider usage has crept up to nearly 80% here in September…
… — singling into left field. Ramón Urías battled to a full count before singling as well. Cedric Mullins then walked, helped significantly by a ball three call at 2-0 on a pitch (highlighted in yellow below) that may have just been outside but was in a spot that had pretty consistently called a strike all night for Orioles pitchers by home plate umpire Mark Wegner.
Catcher Adley Rutschman, who is annoyingly talented despite being older than all three of Alejandro Kirk, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and Bo Bichette, singled off of Romano to put his Orioles ahead. A couple batters later, Aguilar would single in another, making the score 5-3.
The Jays would rally in their half of the ninth. George Springer would come up with a huge run-scoring two-out double to follow an excellently worked walk from Cavan Biggio, but the ball — like the Jays themselves — fell just short of tying it. Final score: Orioles 5 - Blue Jays 4.
It was a tough loss, made tougher by the fact that the Yankees — whose score against the Brewers you can see in the image above — held on to win their game.
And yet, because Romano has been so good as this year has progressed — this was the first time the Jays had lost a game in which he’d blown a save since June 21st! — and the team has done so much good work of late, both over the weekend and in the weeks preceding, it somehow didn’t even feel quite as completely devastating as it might have at virtually any other point in the season. Even if though it completely undid another great Alek Manoah performance!
Weird!
Here’s Weekend Up!…
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Up: Friday: Blue Jays 6 - Orioles 3
I know that many Jays fans have loved for years to grumble that the team spends too much time swinging for the fences — as much a response to the game’s long slide toward the three true outcomes (walks, strikeouts, home runs) as a comment on the Jays' particular identity — but it's a dimension of their offence that has occasionally disappeared this year.
Yes, offence is down across the board, and partially that's to do with Rob Manfred's limp balls — something I wrote about last week — but I don’t think that’s the only reason these Jays have suffered in terms of their power output.
Lourdes Gurriel Jr., when healthy, has turned into some kind of a slap hitter. George Springer's elbow has suppressed his power numbers. Vlad and Teo haven't been the same as 2021.
As a team, the Blue Jays are quite close to where they were in 2021 with respect to average and on-base, just not power. They're slashing .261/.326/.426 here in 2022. Last year they slashed .266/.330/.466.
On Friday the Jays hit three home runs: one off the bat of a rejuvenated-looking Springer, and two from Matt Chapman. It was just the fourth time in 49 games, dating back to July 26th, that they'd hit three or more as a team — a feat they had accomplished 17 times in the 96 games prior, and 36 times in 2021.
Multi-home run games last year? 74. This year? 51.
Runs per game last year? 5.22. This year? 4.67.
Home runs are good. Swinging for the fences is good.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say that it’s not better to want more “complete” hitters, or that there isn’t something of a boom-or-bust nature to being overly reliant on home runs. There is nuance to this stuff, of course.
But, particularly coming out of a series against the Rays, we tend to hear a lot of the gospel of small ball and "productive outs," and it's all just a bit silly. The Rays typically find offence in other ways not because they possess some kind of belief in a purer form of the sport, it's because players who hit prodigious numbers of home runs cost more! And the Rays aren't always "the Rays" of narrative lore anyway. In 2021, for example, they were third in the American League with 222 home runs — a tally only one team in the majors has reached so far here in 2022, with fewer than three weeks remaining in the season.
The two calendar months of this season in which the Jays have hit the fewest home runs, May and August, are also their two lowest-scoring months by runs-per-game. August is their only month of the last two years with a losing record.
Anyway! Thanks to the aforementioned blasts from Chapman, and an absolutely crucial three-run, go-ahead shot from Springer — just his fourth since the All-Star break — the Blue Jays were able to weather a bullpen day featuring Trevor Richards fresh off giving up five runs on 29 pitches the night before, and two more adventurous innings from Yusei "pretty good save for the goddamn triple and homer he gave up to the first two batters he faced" Kikuchi, nabbing a big win to kick off the series with.
Yeah, home runs are good.
Hey, and it was also nice that the Apple TV+ broadcast wasn’t in the middle of some pointless interview and talking over any of the Jays’ blasts as they happened! Neato!
Up: Saturday: Jays 6 - Orioles 3
José Berríos did his team a big favour on Saturday, and I sure as hell don’t mean electing to wear the team’s atrocious red jerseys. Two runs on seven hits and two walks over six bullpen-saving innings, with three strikeouts.
If he was Alek Manoah, or was having a season like Alek Manoah's, we might be lauding him for battling through an important start and giving the Jays a whole lot of innings despite not having his best stuff. Even being José Berríos in this cursed 2022 season, it's a credit to him that he only allowed six balls in play that were hit at 95 mph or above, producing his second lowest Hard Hit rate (by Statcast's measure) of the season. Still, he needed some big help from his defence — a nice catch from the day’s hero, Raimel Tapia, on a Mullins screamer to start the game; a great dive from Springer to start the fourth; some nifty defending to nab Mullins trying to steal home on a throw to second later in that frame — and didn't manage a three up, three down inning until his final frame, the sixth. After some promising late-August starts in terms of generating swing-and-miss, his whiff rate was below his season average for the third straight start.
Six innings of two-run ball is great, obviously. But seven hits and two walks over that span, with just three strikeouts to show for it? Less so. Even as he gets better, Berríos continues to frustrate.
The why of Berríos’s difficult 2022 season has been somewhat elusive, but the how seems fairly simple, I think. It’s in the two metrics I just mentioned.
Never a big strikeout guy to begin with, his whiff rate has dipped to its lowest point since his rookie year, while batters’ ability to produce hard contact against him has continued to rise.
It’s not what you want!
But there has been some good of late, too. The massive blow-ups have become further and farther between. Since July 1st, Berríos has a 4.15 ERA and a 4.03 FIP — similar to his career 4.04 and 3.96 marks heading into this season — while averaging over 5 2/3 innings per start, which is also right in line with the rest of his career. His strikeouts per nine, and overall strikeout rate, have ticked up a little bit too, albeit not quite to where you would expect them to be. His home run rate has been better.
Still, it hasn't been ace-level performance. Or even that of the strong number two that Berríos was billed as — and had been prior to this season.
Earlier in the year I plotted his starts this year by Game Score, which assigns a numerical value to every start a pitcher makes. (You can read about the formula here). I've now updated it to include his latest starts, and clearly the troughs haven't flattened out a little bit. This is good!
Unfortunately, to give some context for what you’re seeing, FanGraphs rates a start as "poor" if it has a Game Score between 30 and 40, "below average" between 40 and 50, "above average" between 50 and 60, and "good" between 60 and 70.
Even in his stronger second half (which in the chart above begins at start number 16), Berríos has averaged a Game Score of 49.
The rebound, in other words, has merely been to average. And while average pitchers with incredible durability are certainly valuable, that’s not what the fans expect of Berríos, or what the Blue Jays are paying for. It’s also a skillset that is more valuable over a 162 game season than in a short series.
Berríos was more than a half a run better by both ERA and FIP in 2021 than he has been over the last three months. In his time with the Jays last year he struck out 26.8% of the batters he faced, and walked just 4.5% — better than what he's managed in the good portion of this season (20.7% and 5.5% since July 1st). So we do know that there’s more in there. But starts like Saturday’s, even with the positives that can be taken from them, are hard to get terribly excited about. And are certainly not going to help wrest playoff starts away from Ross Stripling.
Big team win, though! For all that he occasionally lacks, Raimel Tapia has repeatedly managed to come up big for this team, and did so here with a two-out, three-run double in the bottom of the fifth to widen the Jays’ one-run lead to four. Winning the series with a game still to go is always a good thing, and set the Jays up brilliantly to finish out the weekend. Ugh!
Up: The Blue Jays in the standings
I know, I know, Sunday’s late loss undid a sizeable chunk of the progress the Jays could have made in the standings over the weekend, especially with the Rays and the Yankees both winning. But as of Monday morning they're sitting in the top AL wild card spot. They are also just 5.5 games back of a Yankees team that, apart from Aaron Judge, clearly isn't nearly as good as it looked in the first half of the season, with three games still to come against them, beginning next week.
Could things be better? Of course. But it's still pretty good overall, and much better than where they were on the morning of September 1st, when they were eight games back of New York and clinging to the third wild card spot.
Here’s a current look at the standings:
• The Jays are off here on Monday, with a two-game set in Philadelphia next up for them, before four huge games at the stupid Trop coming up starting on Thursday. The probable pitchers against the Phillies, who currently occupy the third wild card spot in the NL and are trying to hold off the Milwaukee Brewers for it, will be Ross Stripling versus Kyle Gibson, then Kevin Gausman versus Zach Wheeler. Big stuff!
• The Rays will play three home games against the Astros before the Blue Jays come visit them later in the week, beginning with Drew Rasmussen taking on Luis Garcia. After the Jays series they will finish with a three-city road trip that will take them to Cleveland, Boston, and then Houston.
• Out-of-town scoreboard watchers will get a chance to catch both the Rays and Mariners in action today, as Seattle sends Logan Gilbert to the hill in Anaheim to face the Angels' José Suarez. Gilbert has been excellent this season, posting a 3.19 ERA on the year, and has very much gotten back on track after a wobble in a couple early-August starts against the Yankees, as we can see in his recent game-by-game earned runs chart from Props.cash — player prop research made easy!
• Seattle will head to Oakland for a set starting tomorrow, followed by a trip to Kansas City on the weekend. They’ll finish at home with Texas, Oakland, and the four in three days with the Tigers.
• Meanwhile, the Yankees, like the Blue Jays, are off here on Monday, before they get the Pirates for two and the Red Sox for four at home. Next week they visit Rogers Centre, before returning home for a set with the Orioles, then finishing up with four in three days in Texas.
Other notes…
• Jays manager John Schneider noted after Sunday’s game that George Springer is “good to go” despite what was announced as a contusion to his “good” elbow suffered on a hit-by-pitch during the game, which had everybody holding their breath a little bit — especially after he was spotted walking down the tunnel with a trainer mid-game.
This is, of course, great news, because how do you not love George Springer?
• I’ve had this clown blocked for ages, but I had to see this so now you have to as well. Just imagine being this much of a loser! I guess all the negative attention he got after he accused a bunch of teams and players of cheating and had to immediately cry and retract his unfounded allegations wasn’t enough for him. Strange person. Do not recommend taking him seriously.
• Oh, Bob. It was reported by Bob Nightengale of USA Today that David Price, the ace of the Blue Jays’ pitching staff for a glorious few week, intends to retire after the season. Price then told several reporters, as relayed by MLB Trade Rumors, that he has yet to make that decision. I’m happy to not be needing to write that column just yet. But this has got me thinking… isn’t it about time for a definitive documentary about the 2015 Blue Jays season??? And if so, how can I help??
• Great stuff from MLB Pipeline’s Sam Dykstra, who took in the final start of Jays prospect Sem Robberse’s season over the weekend in New Hampshire, and saw the best version of the young Dutchman yet. Next stop? Potentially pitching for the Netherlands in the World Baseball Classic.
• Lastly, Nick and I had to cut short an episode of Blue Jays Happy Hour last week because of some technical issues, but we’ll have everything back in business again today — Monday! — at 5:15 PM live on Callin.
We’ll be back on after the final out of Wednesday’s game between the Jays and Phillies as well!
Get yourself the Callin app and follow us on there so you can tune in live, drop us a question in the chat, or give us a call!
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It's difficult to blame Romano as it's been so long since he blew a save, but man, at this stage in the season, that hurt! Seattle's remaining schedule is a problem.
The 2015 season, or at least from the trade deadline on, was like no other. Even in Australia, watching the games was unreal. The fans were insane - hungry and rabid. Good call on the doco....there's something there right down to the 2nd and 3rd and no out and bad calls and Josh Donaldson to end the year.
Can I make a comment (and I don't expect an answer because it involves your former employer), but maybe other subscribers can resonate with this. I signed up to The Athletic to follow you and John Lott and was so happy I did. Fantastic journalism everywhere - it was like reading Sports Illustrated from the 70s and 80s. But over time it feels like it's become pedestrian, mostly game updates. Kaitlyn does a great job for the Jays and Ken Rosenthal is great, but overall there's not much to keep me there when I can read your stuff, NIck's and the rest of the Sportsnet crew (who are all excellent). Any other readers feel the same?
I was at Sunday's game, and watching the weird infield-in shift behind Romano with the bases loaded, I said "this is not the time to shift, a roller to the left side plates two, instead of netting a double play", and sure enough - that's exactly what happened. Easy double play turned into runs scored. With a standard alignment in that scenario, we win the game. I must be some kind of baseball genius, right? ;)
But really - I think Schneider lost that game with that bad shift as much as Romano's pitching. That was a bad shift at the wrong time. Wasn't the time to play the odds. It was the time to - almost literally - cover all your bases, and try for the best-case outcome and avoid the worst-case outcome.