Weekend Up!: How sweep it isn't...
On managerial moves, Anthony Bass, Teoscar's return, messy Manoah, Gausman's greatness, Bassitt, Heineman, Capra, Mitch White, Orelvis Martinez, Matt Chapman, Yankee woes, Jays-Red Sox, and more!
Welp. What looked almost certain to be a rather upbeat edition of this feature has become slightly more downcast after the Jays pissed away a game on Sunday that had looked like a certain win — after, in the early going, looking like a certain loss — while ending a nice little run of bullpen performance in the process.
I suppose it’s for the best that all of the bad bullpenning happed in the same game, and that Trevor Richards and Anthony Bass once again doing Trevor Richards and Anthony Bass things will perhaps accelerate Nate Pearson’s move up the pecking order, but that didn’t make it any easier to watch.
According to FanGraphs, as a unit Jays relievers were worth -0.4 WAR over the course of their five innings pitched on the day. Almost half a win in the negative! And, you know what? That felt about right.
Which isn't to say that the bullpen has gone back to being a major problem, or that there's reason to be overly critical about the coaching staff's use of them either.
No, really!
Critical? Sure. Fine. If you must. In a vacuum, Tim Mayza probably makes more sense to have entered in the eighth inning than Anthony Bass did, given there were two tough lefties — Jared Kelenic and Cal Raleigh — due up. But Bass hadn’t pitched for five days, had only taken the ball once in the previous twelve, and had been faring just about as well against left-handed hitters this season as Mayza. The samples are practically microscopic, but heading into Sunday's game 15 lefties had slashed .231/.333/.308 (.267 wOBA) against him, whereas Mayza had faced 17 and held them to .294/.294/.294 (.262 wOBA). Bass has actually been pretty good against lefties since 2019, when he really upped his splitter usage against them. (Last year he was a little homer-prone but held them to a reasonably passable .268/.308/.423 (.314 wOBA), and in 2019 and 2020 their wOBA marks were .219 and .176.)
The only year when he wasn't effective against them, 2021, he threw them the splitter just 2% of the time. This year so far it's at 25%.
I don't think it's necessarily the move the Jays make in a playoff game, when usage isn't a factor, but I do think it's a defensible one there — maybe even the correct one.
Add in that the damage done with Bass on the hill would have been limited to just one run had the usually steady Santiago Espinal not managed to biff a routine ball at second base and I tend to chalk that whole unfortunate episode up dumb luck more than anything else.
John Schneider himself, on the other hand, when speaking to reporters after the game, wasn’t willing to be quite so kind to his players.
REPORTER: Hey John, what about Cal Raleigh makes him so tough to pitch to?
SCHNEIDER: He's not very tough to pitch to when you execute your pitches. You know, he's hitting .200. I know he's done damage against us, and I think if you execute — he's obviously got big damage potential, and he's got a lot of strikeout potential, too. And when you execute your pitches you usually get the job done.
Bit of a weird one there, John!
I mean, he’s not wrong that Bass has struggled to execute so far this year, but I don’t think it’s a great look when fans are obviously going to be questioning your bullpen choices in a game your team fumbled away to be passing the buck like that. Or to be weirdly dismissive of a guy who was a four-win catcher last season, appears well on his way to that kind of mark again in this one, and kinda keeps on killing you.
Clearly Schneider is sick of games like that happening against the stupid Mariners, which… yeah man. Welcome to the club.
But if we can put that aside for a moment — or, you know, forever! — there was a whole lot of great stuff that had to happen to bring the Jays to the brink of perfection in this series and on this homestand, and I think that’s probably where our focus should lie. Here's three up...
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Up: Friday: Blue Jays 3 - Mariners 2
Jays fans gave Teoscar Hernández a great reception as he made his return to the place he called home for five-plus seasons, especially after he acknowledged the crowd prior to his first plate appearance on Friday night. That was awesome to see — and, as Dan Shulman noted on Sportsnet’s broadcast, it was great that home plate umpire Tripp Gibson was keen enough to let the moment breathe instead of worrying about the pitch clock. The cheering for Teo’s home run on Sunday, I probably could have done without. But the vibes were good. It was nice.
Teo’s not a Level of Excellence guy, nor a guy who led the Jays to glory, but his emergence as an All-Star and Silver Slugger helped the club rebuild turn around a whole lot more quickly than those kinds of projects have for other organization. His time here really meant something, and it was great to see it acknowledged.
Another guy who helped that process — and maybe the only other positive thing that the front office has to show for all their intentional losing in 2018 and 2019 — was Friday’s starter, and 11th overall draft pick from back in 2019, Alek Manoah.
Once again it was a bit of a weird one for him. On the plus side he only allowed two runs on six hits with seven strikeouts, but on the minus side he walked four, dealt with traffic on the bases all night (four of five leadoff batters reached), and needed 100 pitches just to get through five innings.
Sure, we could add this one to the pile of "managed to grind out a good outing without necessarily having his best stuff" starts that have helped to build the most common narrative about who Manoah is as a pitcher — because he absolutely did do that — but the free passes are mostly new, and a concern.
In 31 starts last year, Manoah walked four batters or more in a game just five times. This year in six starts he's already done it four times. And if you combine hit batters and walks, this year he's already allowed five runners to reach base without swinging the bat four times. Last year he did that only once.
If we accept that, in the name of efficiency and soft contact, Manoah may not be fishing as much for swing-and-miss as he did in 2021, this... uh... ain't it.
Obviously the story of Manoah’s 2023 season is still far from written, but if this was a pitcher who didn’t have the reputation of being able to do more with less we might find the trajectory of those percentile rankings more alarming.
Now, partly any numbers we look at are going to be skewed by the clunker Manoah had on opening day, but even without it the picture at the moment isn't great. Looking at just the five starts since then his walk rate is 14.5% (league average for starters so far is 8.3%), and his 20.2% strikeout rate of 20.2% is also worse than average (22.4%).
He's averaging just under 5 2/3 innings per start when last year it was over 6 1/3. Without including opening day, his 5.24 FIP ranks 38th highest out of 125 pitchers who've thrown at least 20 innings so far. With it he's 15th worst.
In other words, it's been bad, his strong outing against the Yankees didn’t quite right the ship, and the ugly numbers are not just a hangover of whatever happened in St. Louis. Yet Manoah does seem to have it in him better than most to avoid the wheels completely coming off. And in this one, with some help from the bullpen, Alejandro Kirk, the red hot Matt Chapman, and the oddly snake-bitten George Springer — whose .270 wOBA is 60 points below his .330 expected wOBA (a bigger negative difference than all but 13 of 261 qualified batters) — the Jays pulled this one off too. They’re now 4-2 in games he’s started.
Up: Saturday: Blue Jays 1 - Mariners 0
Trevor Gott got got. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. hit a middle-middle sinker from the M's reliever so hard in the top of the 10th inning that Bo Bichette wasn't even able to score from second base on it. An intentional walk to Matt Chapman then put the game in the hands of the struggling Daulton Varsho, who made absolutely no mistake, smashing the first pitch he saw from Gott — another ugly middle-middle job — into right field for the first run of the game and a walk-off Blue Jays victory.
Before all that, though, Kevin Gausman was the story of the afternoon — at least on the Blue Jays’ side of things. A pitching matchup featuring the Cy Young candidate and Easton McGee, a 90-mph-throwing veteran of exactly three MLB innings, shouldn’t have the word “duel” come anywhere near it. But that’s exactly what this one was, as the Jays’ failure at the plate forced Gausman to go toe-to-toe with the former Rays prospect. Fortunately, he was up to the task.
Gausman masterfully worked both sides of the plate with his fastball, kept most away from the heart of it, and mixed in several that were low in the zone so as to avoid "fastball up/splitter down" predictability and freeze Mariners batters looking for the splitter.
Naturally, the splitter was as brilliant as ever, generating swing-and-miss on 48% of the hacks Mariners hitters took at it, leading to a career high 13 strikeouts for Gausman.
Pitcher List has an outstanding primer on CSW% (i.e. called strikes plus whiff percentage) in which they tell us that just about the best a starting pitcher can do is get a called strike or whiff on 35-40% of pitches thrown. Gausman’s rate on Saturday was 41%. He leads MLB in strikeouts heading into play on Monday night.
And yet, as excellent as he was, and as pretty a picture as he painted around the edges of the zone, his most pivotal throw may have been to second base.
With two outs in the top of the third, Seattle catcher Tom Murphy singled, after which first baseman Sean Haggerty walked to bring up the top of the M's order. Specifically, the very dangerous Julio Rodríguez. Gausman was being a little bit too fine with Rodríguez, missing with his first three pitches, at which point catcher Danny Jansen, rather shrewdly, called for a pickoff at second base.
Gausman got the signal, nodded at it, did a fine bit of acting as he went through his usual pre-pitch routine until Jansen dropped his glove to indicate that second baseman Cavan Biggio was breaking to the bag — as explained by Joe Siddall on Sportsnet’s telecast. Gausman then spun and fired a perfect strike to nab Murphy and end the threat with the score still 0-0. It would remain that way — thanks to Gausman and some brilliant bullpenning — until the bottom of the tenth.
Up: Sunday: Chris Bassitt (mostly)
We’ve probably talked about Sunday enough already, but I do think I’d be remiss if I didn’t give at least a bit of a shout out to Chris Bassitt. Yeah, people are probably going to look at him funny because he broke an iPad after seeing how badly he got jobbed by home plate umpire Mark Carlson on two would-be inning-ending strike three calls in the four-run first or whatever…
…but he actually pitched fairly well in this one. The middle innings were, in fact, pretty fun — as the win probability graph can attest.
Matt Chapman doubled in some runs, as he always seems to do lately. Bo smashed a home run a ridiculous 460 feet at 113 mph off the bat. Espinal and Danny Bats came through with RBIs. There was a strike-em-out, throw-em-out to end the fourth. And Bassitt rebounded from his “ugly” first — in which he really only made two mistakes: hitting Teoscar Hernández to load the bases and serving up a meatball of a changeup to Taylor Trammell for the grand slam. He allowed no runs on just one hit and two walks the rest of the way, striking out five in the process. That brought his total for the day to seven Ks over five innings, and if he pitches like that most times it would an incredible outcome for the Jays. Minus the blip, of course.
A transaction!
The Jays announced on Sunday that they’d made a trade! Buffalo INF/OF Vinny Capra has been sent to Pittsburgh in exchange for catcher Tyler Heineman. Buffalo outfielder Jordan Luplow was designated for assignment to create room on the 40-man for Heineman, who was then immediately optioned down. Heineman, you may recall, got into 10 games for the Jays in 2022 before being claimed on waivers by the Pirates in May (then re-signing with them on a minor league deal over the winter).
The logic here would appear to be twofold. First, as Dan Shulman noted on Sunday’s broadcast, Buffalo’s second catcher, Steve Berman, recently broke a finger, which left the Jays with a need for another Triple-A backstop. Secondly, and probably more importantly, the deal had to do with those minor league options Heineman still possesses.
Heineman can be moved to the minors and back up to five times this season — and next year as well, provided he’s able to hang on to his 40-man spot for that long. Previously, veteran Rob Brantly would have been the Jays’ first choice catcher in the event of an injury to Danny Jansen or Alejandro Kirk. But as Brantly is out of options, he’d have had to be exposed to waivers in order to be sent back down, which could have left the team scrambling. Instead, they bring back a guy who they’re obviously familiar and comfortable with, stash him in Buffalo, and then can have their pick if a move becomes necessary.
Capra got into eight games for the Jays during a brief call-up last season, making seven plate appearances. He’d been scuffling to start his year in Buffalo, but hit well in his second crack at Double-A as a 24-year-old in 2021, then was above average in 52 games for the Bisons last year.
If such facts lead you to believe that the Jays have given up too much here for a guy they ideally won't ever have to use, good lord don't! You know, unless you were really broken up about it when Capra was non-tendered last November. I wish him well, but everything here says he's an org. guy. And with Otto López, Addison Barger and Leo Jimenez all on the 40-man ahead of him, it seems unlikely he was going to get a shot this year and would have wound up a minor league free agent next winter anyway.
Quickly…
• There’s one more name that I could have mentioned among Jays infield types on the 40-man, but I get the feeling that Orelvis Martinez and his 12 wRC+ so far this year (.089/.159/.250 in 64 PA) is not likely getting a call-up. Woof! (The strikeouts are down, though. Hopefully he's, uh, working on something?)
• Also related to our transaction talk is the status of Mitch White. There wouldn’t have been a need to DFA Luplow to create a roster spot for Heineman if the team could have simply transferred White to the 60-day IL, and the fact that they didn’t was a strong indication that he’s getting closer to returning. Lo and behold, Sportsnet’s Arden Zwelling tweeted on Monday that White is in Boston to check in with staff, and because his rehab assignment with Buffalo will take him to nearby Worcester on Tuesday, where he hopes to get up to 50 pitches.
• Very curious to see how things go, roster wise, when he's ready to come back. White and Trevor Richards are both out of options, Adam Cimber will likely need a spot again relatively soon, Anthony Bass looked like one of the better relievers in baseball last year but sure as hell doesn't right now, and Zach Pop can be optioned but has turned himself into a pretty important guy back there. Nate Pearson has a real chance to do that as well. But something's going to have to give and I have no idea what. Off the top of my head I'll guess White's rehab gets extended as long as it possibly can and if Bass hasn't righted the ship by then they'll find a phantom injury for him.
• The Yankees have their heads above water, but only just barely at 15-14. And the bad news for them keeps coming. On Monday, manager Aaron Boone announced that reliever Jonathan Loaisga needs surgery to have a bone spur in his right elbow removed and will be out until August. Later on Monday the club also announced that they've placed Aaron Judge on the IL with a hip strain. Terrible news if you're a fan of the Yankees, which I am not.
• Unsurprisingly, Matt Chapman has been named to MLB’s team of the month for April. Can a player of the month award be far behind? Do they still do those? Could I possibly care less?
• I’m being dismissive of the award, yes, but Chapman has obviously been unbelievable for the Jays so far this season. Sportsnet’s Ben Nicholson-Smith tweets some crooked numbers: “Matt Chapman so far this season: more 2B (15), XBH (20), total bases (68) & WAR (2.0) than anyone in baseball. As for quality of contact, he also leads MLB in barrel rate (21.1%) & xwOBA (.499).” Yowza.
• Fred Lewis out here reminding us to not get too excited by one month’s worth of data though…
• I mentioned the difference between Springer’s wOBA and xwOBA above, but I saved something maybe even more remarkable for here: Not far up from him on that leaderboard, checking in at number 235 of 261, is Vladimir Guerrero Jr.! Vladdy's .387 wOBA is actually quite a bit lower than his .425 xwOBA suggests it should be. Wild.
• Sticking with Springer, the Jays announced prior to the game Monday that he has been removed from the lineup for game one against Boston due to a viral illness.
• Aaaand, sticking with the the four-game set about to begin in Boston, the Jays will get a heavy dose of right-handed pitching this week. They will miss Sunday's Red Sox starter, Chris Sale — which is not necessarily good news the way it used to be, though he did have a fine outing in that one — so the matchups for the series look like this: on Monday we'll get José Berríos against Corey Kluber. Tuesday sees Yusei Kikuchi take on Tanner Houck. Wednesday it will be Alek Manoah and Nick Pivetta. And on Thursday (at 6:10 PM ET!) it's Kevin Gausman and Brayan Bello.
• Obviously it will be the Manoah start the gets the most juice, given the mild war of words between him and the Red Sox’ Alex Verdugo early last month. If Verdugo knows how to work a calendar, he’s probably had this one circled for a while. And as for Manoah, he’ll probably want to pitch better than he did over the weekend if he hopes to shut up any members of the Fenway crowd who are still frothing over any of this.
• Lastly, speaking of pitching better, I’m not sure it’s possible for Yusei Kikuchi or José Berríos to do that compared to their last outings, so… uh… let’s see where this goes. What time does the Bruins game start? Go Jays!
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Our schedule this month is going to be extremely tough. Our great April was largely driven by pretty decent starting pitching so let's hope that doesn't waver too much because despite some great individual numbers our offence just doesn't feel quite right to me. There's some underlying stats that paint a rosier picture, but it would be good to see some better numbers coming from Springer, Varsho, Jansen, Biggio, Belt and Espinal...let's see what May brings!
I've been thinking a lot about Brandon Belt's untucked shirt. I was as bullish as anyone on that signing, but that is a major red flag for me. Dude is clearly checked out.