Well that sucked!
The Blue Jays are unlucky to be out of the playoffs and looking toward next season after Saturday's loss to the Mariners. Unfortunately, much of it was bad luck they made themselves.
A recurring theme in my head as I’ve watched the Blue Jays all season is the idea that sometimes you make your own luck. I don’t that’s anywhere close to a universal truth — or even true at all, really — but it nevertheless struck me whenever a guy like Yusei Kikuchi would get burned by bloopers, seeing-eye singles, and shift-beaters, in addition to whatever else he was getting beaten by. In those times my instinct, as I groped around for some kind of a positive to take away from what was inevitably another ugly performance, told me to factor the fluky hits into any assessment.
If a reliever comes with a runner on second and one out and gets a pair of a strikeouts on either side of an impossibly soft single that scores the run, that guy’s done his job, right? And the outcome? Well, that’s just baseball.
But, especially as the season was winding down, it became noticeable to me that we never had to do this kind of excuse-making for someone like Alek Manoah. The Jays’ ace, whose rough first inning on Friday is thankfully now massively overshadowed by Saturday’s collapse, doesn’t walk guys, keeps the ball in the ballpark, and has the stuff to get strikeouts when he needs them. Kevin Gausman, who was brilliant on Saturday, had a great season despite a whole lot of hard contact because he strikes guys out and doesn’t walk them. Ross Stripling was outstanding this year, which sadly may be his final one with the Blue Jays, because he’s extraordinarily well prepared, has tremendous command, keeps batters on their toes to suppress contact, and doesn’t walk guys.
When bad luck strikes, as it always will eventually, these guys generally don’t have the bases already clogged. For Kikuchi, who dealt all year with too many walks, HBPs, and hard contact, and the low K%/hard contact 2022 version of José Berríos, those “unlucky” hits that fell in when they probably shouldn’t have tended to have a much greater impact — anecdotally, at least. The other guys did a much better job of making their own luck.
I bring this up because, while the Blue Jays on Saturday were beaten by the Mariners, and beaten by themselves, they were also hilariously, catastrophically, historically unlucky. You could watch that game play out from 8-1 onward a thousand times and maybe never once see a Mariners win. In that sense, there’s probably no use trying to take much from it. And certainly no use in making it any bigger than any of the other 163 games the team played this season — though, for obvious reasons, the reaction among many fans will be to do exactly that. “They lost a crazy game. That’s baseball.”
That would be preferable, if only to get rid of all the ass-brained takes about firing everybody, trading everybody, mentality, humility, curses, Luis Castillo, “the will to win,” or whatever other obscenely dumb hyperventilations are spinning around out there right now.
Preferable, but not right.
The Jays made their own bad luck in this one. And it’s worth considering how.
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The point at which I think we can all agree that the game began to change was when Kevin Gausman was lifted for Tim Mayza with two outs, the bases loaded in the top of the sixth, and the Jays up by seven runs. Mayza, of course, uncorked a wild pitch to allow a run, then gave up a three-run shot to Carlos Santana.
“Timmy Mayza is a tough guy to get underneath and hit the ball out of the ballpark,” manager John Schneider said afterwards. “We liked that with Santana right-handed as opposed to left-handed.”
There's some logic to that, unfortunately I don’t think it’s especially good logic.
Only three of Santana's 19 home runs this season have against left-handers, his ISO from the right side is not as high as it is from the left, and none of his homers versus LHP since 2020 have been on pitches anywhere near as low as the one Mayza threw him.
This aspect of it, to me, smells like something pointed to by the kind of swing plane/pitcher arsenal data that's likely been behind some of the Jays’ oddest-seeming lineup choices this season. It's the kind of stuff you want your team to be incorporating into their decision-making — more data, better decisions — but I wonder if they may have missed the forest for the trees with this one. Santana has been a significantly better hitter from the right side this season, posting a 134 wRC+ as a RHB compared to a 89 wRC+ from the left side. Relying on Mayza executing and Santana being unable to get under a low-zone pitch from a lefty — as opposed to it just not having happened in a while — is a risky proposition at the best of times, and I think pretty clearly the wrong one when you look at what Santana has done to lefties this year, and the fact that more than just a home run could be damaging. And, in hindsight, what happened.
Especially considering the fact that Mayza simply hasn't been good in the second half.
Mayza's second half ERA was 3.98. He posted an even worse 4.83 FIP, and if home run prevention was the idea there, a guy with 2.21 HR/9 and a 27.8% HR/FB rate since the All-Star break is probably not your guy.
Uh, also:
Weird move, in other words.
I understand that the three-batter rule was a factor, because waiting to turn to Mayza for the lefties that followed Santana would have risked him having to face Julio Rodríguez, which could have led to a really big inning. But if you don’t trust Mayza to get one of Kellenic/a pinch hitter or Crawford out, why are you trusting him to get Santana?
And while I'd say it's easy to second-guess this stuff after the fact, a whole lot of Jays fans were rather easily first-guessing this in the moment — a thought made much easier by the fact that Kevin Gausman had been so good all day and was “only” at 95 pitches.
Yes, that’s a high number of pitches for the modern MLB, but it’s not that high. Gausman had thrown more pitches in 13 of his 31 starts this year, getting as high as 110 back on June 27th.
He also was potentially looking at an extended amount of rest between starts, should the Jays have made the ALDS. Game one of that series will be Tuesday in Houston, which would have forced the Jays to decide between going to Alek Manoah on short rest, or giving the ball to José Berríos. And because for some reason there's an off-day between the first and second game of that series, Gausman would have either been going on regular rest for game two, or on six days of rest for game three. He absolutely could have kept going and, not only that, deserved to keep going!
That last bit's not the kind of sentiment I normally get behind, but in what was, at the time, a blowout, after such a brilliant playoff start, to give someone else the chance to put those runs on Gausman's record is a really tough choice. Kudos to Schneider for having the courage of his convictions, unfortunately his convictions were just entirely wrong here.
Gausman, at least publicly, blamed himself afterwards for letting his pitch count get too high to let him finish the inning, forcing his manager's hand. That's downright noble of him. However, putting it on himself elides an incredibly crucial decision that contributed significantly to the way the Jays made their own bad luck in this one — both at this juncture and later on.
When the bullshit Mariners plunked Whit Merrifield after the Jays had broken the game open and taken an 8-1 lead in the bottom of the fifth, Schneider made the extremely curious choice to send Raimel Tapia into left field as his replacement, rather than sending out Jackie Bradley Jr. for some extra help with run-prevention.
The third of the three singles Gausman gave up before he roared back for the first two outs of the sixth was a blooper to left that Tapia valiantly dove for, but ultimately missed. Gausman had to throw more pitches because that play wasn’t made.
We can't say that Bradley Jr. would have definitely made the catch had he been out there, but he sure as hell is a better defender and would have been much more likely to. Of course, we also can't say that Bradley Jr. would have been in left field in the first place, even if he'd been brought into the game instead of Tapia. Had he entered the correct move would have been George Springer to right, Bradley Jr. to centre, and Teoscar Hernández to left. However, Springer has rarely played in right field over the last two months, presumably to keep him from having to air out max-effort throws with his injured elbow — reasoning that makes much more sense while trying to keep him healthy for the postseason than it does in the actual postseason itself.
Whatever configuration — the correct one or otherwise — the Jays would have ended up in with Bradley Jr. there instead of Tapia may not have led to a catch on that third single, or Suárez's bloop double to lead-off the four-run Mariners eighth that a heavily shifted Tapia couldn't get to, or even the killer eighth-inning pop-up double/collision play. But it absolutely might have! And only one of those plays needed to get made for the Jays season to still be going.
Plus, there were plenty of reasons to have George Springer out of the game before the sixth. He hadn’t looked right at the plate all day, seemed from where I was sitting to be doubled over in pain after a swing on more than one occasion, had collided with the fence a couple times, and you were up seven runs! This may sound like Monday morning quarterbacking, but there were people calling for it at the time. A tough conversation to be had, to be sure. But right field was right there! Just don’t throw so hard! José Bautista did this for years!
And while I’m certainly not blaming Springer for the play on which he was injured, having a better outfielder behind him may have made Bo Bichette less inclined to go as hard there as he did.
Either way, turning away from basic run-prevention strategies used all year simply because was too early in a playoff game, or because you wanted to keep running up the score after Merrifield was plunked, or whatever the hell happened there, was a choice. And a bad one.
Sometimes you make your own luck.
Other examples of the Blue Jays' making their own luck:
• I’m not blaming Bo for that play either, and certainly not the multidimensional clusterfuck that was this loss, but sometimes when you choose to live by the defensively-below-average, plays-with-his-hair-on-fire shortstop, you die by the defensively-below-average, plays-with-his-hair-on-fire shortstop. I’ve often defended Bichette’s defence, because he generally makes the whole package work and I think, even if Outs Above Average and the vast majority of fans may not say it about this year, he’s shown improvement and tightened up the number of mistakes he makes over the last couple of seasons. As someone said to me on Twitter, what gives Bo the potential to be a great player is exactly the fact that he’s the kind of guy who’d go after that ball. Still, sticking with him at short these past to years as the team has progressed into a very real championship window is a choice. And I’d be lying if I said that I think that was the shortstop’s ball, or that I don’t think Springer might have made the catch had Bo not been there. Unfair? Perhaps.
• What is Yusei Kikuchi doing on the roster if you want a lefty in the game to get one out with a seven-run lead and instead of going to him you turn to Mayza for the second game in a row, effectively ruling him out of game three? I know we already discussed the swing path stuff, and maybe there wasn’t the fit they wanted there. I also know that bringing him in at that point would have induced several heart attacks across the nation. But I mentioned in Friday’s piece that I thought it was more likely that we’d end up at some point thinking “would have been nice to have Zimmer out there!” than any similar kind of sentiment about Kikuchi, and… well… here we are.
• Yimi Garcia threw eight pitches. I understand the way these things get mapped out in the regular season, when you can’t play every game like it’s a game seven. You go to Bass and then Romano, and then if something goes sideways you make due. I also understand that at the start of the eighth with a four-run lead you have game three to think about… which… uh… you didn’t when it was a seven-run lead in the fifth and Mayza came in… but you do now that it’s a three-run lead. Nevertheless, uh, I don’t know, man. Maybe let your third-best reliever go a little bit longer than eight pitches if there’s even a remote possibility that Romano might have to go two full frames if trouble hits? That was a huge piece of insurance peeled off way too quickly given the dearth of trustworthy options left back there.
• This, naturally, brings us to bullpen construction overall. And the thing about that is, the bullpen was… fine? Like, it wasn’t good, obviously. The score line makes that quite plain! But, like, for all the hue and cry about it, what actually happened here? Mayza had a pretty good pitch lit up by a guy who never hits those kinds of pitches out. Garcia was great. The team’s second-best reliever and one of the better guys in baseball all year, Bass, got burned by the shift/his defence, then gave up a couple not-particularly-hard-hit singles (89.0 and 94.6 mph). Romano gave up a single, struck two guys out, then the brutal pop-up double, then a couple real doubles in the ninth when he’d been pitching for longer than he should have. It’s not as ugly as it looks, nor as damning of the front office as it looks. But it’s thin. A couple more big arms — maybe even just one — and you could have kept Romano out of the eighth or yanked him after the first sign of trouble in the ninth. It was correct not to use Kikuchi, Adam Cimber, Trevor Richards, Zach Pop, or David Phelps in either of those spots.
So what do we make of all this? I must say I’m not entirely sure just yet. The easy part is pointing to a litany of poor decisions that cascaded their way, one after the other, into one of the most miserable experiences Blue Jays fans have ever had. Figuring out why is the hard part, though that’s not really for us to do anyway.
I’ll certainly say that it’s not because John Schneider is bad or clueless, or that Ross Atkins is telling him to be bad from on high. Drew’s sarcasm here about the “why didn’t they just trade for Castillo?” sentiment out there could be healthily lobbed at any number of the multitude of overreactions to this loss…
…yet I do sometimes get the sense that these Atkins-era Jays have a tendency to get a bit too cute, a bit too clever by half. A bit too enamored sometimes with being unorthodox for its own sake maybe. But that’s easy to say that when we don’t as clearly see the weird decisions that go right, and maybe I’m thinking too much about how interesting it is that the team that used outfield shifts more than anybody this year appeared to be burned by it on the Suárez double at the worst possible time. It’s a chaotic game and sometimes there’s just not a lot of order there to be pulled, no matter how desperate our brains are for it.
Still, you might need to recalibrate some of the algorithms there, boys.
Anyway, there’s a lot more about this game and the reaction to it that I could tackle, but I think I’m going to leave it there for now. It is what it is. And fans are fans, and are understandably going to react powerfully to something like this.
Ross Atkins will meet with the media on Tuesday for his annual too-soon post-mortem, and I’m sure there will be plenty to talk about then. And on into the offseason, as well. There are some big decisions that will need to be made this winter, which could see the Jays be incredibly bold — or surprisingly quiet.
The team is closer than this disaster made it feel, but the clock is ticking.
Thank you to everyone who read all year, everyone who subscribes, and especially everyone with the means and the generosity to be a paid subscriber. You support is literally the only way I make my living and I don’t know what on earth I’d be doing without it. I’m sorry this year’s run has ended so much sooner than any of us would have wanted, but… well… this is where a different kind of fun begins.
To the offseason we go…
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I think the part about the Mayza decision that baffled me most at the time was the implication it carried for Game 3. Because, when you’re up 8 to goddamn 1 you need to be managing for Game 3. Mayza is one of your most important pen arms, and Schneider was effectively burning him there with a 7 run lead. ( It was only after the fact that I looked up Santana’s splits and saw that they were effectively doing the Mariners a favour by turning him around.) We we’re in the driver’s seat. Trust your $100 million co-ace to get the #7 hitter out. Let him eat another inning and set us up to go into Game 3 with a fully rested pen. We didn’t have our backs against the wall. We were up seven runs… so frustrating — in the moment, and in hindsight. Looking forward to the next podcast. Let us know when it’ll be happening. Thanks for all your work this season.
Glad you mentioned the outfield shift. That first double in the eighth was, in a better world, a routine fly to left. I wonder if the shifts come from the dugout or, ultimately, from the front office.