Well that sucked; Is Roark Roarked?; Injury updates; Bisons displaced; Atkins' tenure so far; Links and more!
The Blue Jays played their “home” opener in Dunedin on Thursday night, and it was a reasonably entertaining game of baseball for a while. Then it degenerated into frustrating madness that I don’t even really want to talk about. So let’s sort of talk about it, but then also talk about a whole bunch of things that are very definitely not it. Alright? Ugh!
Oh, yes, but first, please briefly indulge me while I attempt to make a living. Because the thing is, if you appreciate what I’m doing here in this little corner of the internet, I would love it if you’d tell a friend.
And if you’ve been sent here by a friend, or are an existing subscriber who would like to upgrade to a paid membership so you can comment, ask questions the next time I open up the ol’ mail bag, or just plain old support what I do, click below to become a subscriber.
Woof
I don’t think the Blue Jays lost a winnable game on Thursday night. It feels to me more like the Blue Jays didn’t win a winnable game. Victory was there for the taking several times, and like one of those dreams where you want to run but just can’t make yourself do it, the Jays’ hitters seemed helpless to take what was in front of them. The team burned through some mostly quite good relief performances until finally, in the top of the 11th, less through good work than good fortune, the Angels scored a pair of runs on a bullshit bloop hit on Rafael Dolis’s first pitch to David Fletcher.
It’s baseball. It happens. They’ll be better. It was a balk. The summer of Vlad is a-comin’. But that doesn’t mean tonight didn’t absolutely suck to watch. Some reward for four-plus hours of TV viewing, eh?
Now let’s never talk about it again.
Is Tanner going to be Roarked from the rotation?
Jays manager Charlie Montoyo provided updates on several players in his pre-game Zoom session with reporters here on Thursday, and while several of them are pretty significant (George Springer! Nate Pearson!), I’m going to start here with the one that interests me the most.
The Blue Jays are paying Tanner Roark $12 million this year. Despite his struggles last year, he has been a presumptive member of the rotation all the way until basically this point. And while I understand that the Jays like to weirdly play really basic things close to the vest far too frequently, this really seems like a situation where they could have easily said they’re sticking by him and not considering a change.
That is, if they’re sticking by him and not considering a change.
Of course, as I wrote earlier in the week, they absolutely should be considering a change. It sucks that they have to at this point, but that doesn’t make it any less apparent that they really do.
Are they hedging here? If they can keep Trent Thornton and Tommy Milone off of the mound until Sunday, they’d be an interesting righty-lefty tandem. Better still would be Thornton and Anthony Kay. The fact that Thornton pitched just 1 1/3 innings here on Thursday doesn’t exactly help this scheme, but I’m intrigued nonetheless.
Maybe Roark is only now hanging around as an emergency option in case they need to burn a bunch more relievers over the weekend. Then again, maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
At the very least, we learned here on Thursday night that whoever does take the ball for the Jays on Sunday won’t have to square off with Shohei Ohtani.
Scuttlebutt
• According to Montoyo, the quad injury suffered by George Springer this week is a “low-grade strain” that will likely see him miss the entirety of the current homestand. This, of course, sucks. But there ain’t a whole lot we can do about it, is there? The Jays should continue to get on fine without him, then be all that much better when he does finally debut.
• After hosting the Angels for four this weekend, then the Yankees for three early next week, the Jays will hit the road. They'll play four in Kansas City, have a much-needed off day, play two in Boston, then get a somewhat less-needed off day, then go to Tampa for three "road" games at the Trop. Another off day follows that series, before they host the Nationals for two at TD Ballpark and the Braves for three more (with yet another off day in between the two series). So cross your fingers then circle your calendars for April 27 as Springer's "home" debut.
• Montoyo’s pre-game Zoom session also brought us word that Nate Pearson has finally thrown a bullpen. That’s great news until you hear the next part: Montoyo added that Pearson is now at the point where he can basically start spring training all over again, slowly being built up until he’s ready to rejoin the rotation. It’s completely understandable why they’re taking they’re time with such a prized prospect, given that he was going to have workload limitations this season anyway, but if memory serves — I’d have to check my calendar to be completely sure — spring training last about a jillion goddamn weeks. So we’re not going to be seeing him for quite some time, I’m afraid. Let’s just hope that when we do he’s fully healthy, can stay that way, and that the reins will at least be off at that point.
• Robbie Ray has reportedly recovered well from the simulated game he pitched this week, which Montoyo says puts him in line to return to the rotation sometime next week. Because the sim game took place on Wednesday, the earliest he could throw again on regular rest would be Monday. Speculation is that he may just do that, in order to allow Hyun Jin Ryu to get an extra day off.
• Good catch by the great Brendon Kuhn, as he tweets a picture from Chavez Young’s Instagram showing the young prospect’s vaccination card. It appears as though the club has started getting their players jabbed.
The Bisons are getting displaced to… New Jersey?
Interesting report from Shi Davidi of Sportsnet on Thursday, as he revealed that the Buffalo Bisons “are closing in on a plan to play their home games out of Trenton, N.J., to accommodate ongoing renovations at Sahlen Field and the possible arrival of the Toronto Blue Jays later this summer.”
I especially thought this was odd because the Jays had used nearby Rochester as their alternate site when they played at Sahlen Field in 2020, and because Bluebird Banter’s Minor Leaguer noticed back in February that the Bisons and Rochester Red Wings are never scheduled to play home games at the same time in 2021.
That setup seemed simple enough. Red Wings go on the road, Bisons come in. Bisons go on the road, Red Wings come back in. But apparently that wasn’t going to be an acceptable solution.
“There was some early thought of putting the Herd in Rochester's Frontier Field, but Covid concerns of multiple teams sharing a facility and overuse of the field squelched that,” wrote Mike Harrington of the Buffalo News, who also reported the shift on Thursday. “Trenton was chosen because it had just lost its affiliated team and it was only scheduled to host a team in the new MLB Draft League for college players. In addition, it was within the footprint of the Bisons' schedule, which features games this year only against Rochester, Syracuse, Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, Lehigh Valley and Worcester.”
Links!
• Great stuff from Nick Ashbourne over at Sportsnet, as he goes through each of the pitchers the Jays have used so far and dives into some very early-season numbers to see what there is to learn so far. One of the more interesting capsules, I thought, was the one on T.J. Zeuch, which runs counter to some of the narrative coming out of Sunday’s successful (albeit short) start against the Yankees. “Although Zeuch had a strong first outing, his stuff didn’t look much better than what we’ve seen before, despite glowing reports out of spring training. His sinker came in a touch harder (+0.5 mph) than last year’s average, but not significantly, and he still allowed tons of contact — much of the hard variety considering he finished his day with a xERA of 9.15,” he writes. “If there was one reason for optimism, it would be that his signature sinker showed more horizontal movement (17 per cent above league average) than in 2019 (6 per cent), and the run on the pitch appeared to give the Yankees issues at times.”
• Elsewhere at Sportsnet, Shi Davidi talks to Perry Minasian, the Anthopoulos Era Blue Jays executive who is just now beginning his first year running the Angels.
• For very understandable reasons, it’s a much nicer time these days to be over at my friend and former colleague Drew Fairservice’s Vlad-centric site, Vlad Religion. In his most recent piece he takes a look at — and issue with — Vlad’s decision to swing at a 3-0 pitch from Matt Bush on Wednesday.
• Speaking of Vlad, Carmen Ciardiello debuts at FanGraphs with a piece on the Jays’ young slugger and a new twist on how to look at his ground ball problem. Comparing Vlad to players with similarly elite raw power, Ciardiello finds that Vlad’s swing is particularly flat. Only Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton have swings nearly as flat as Vlad’s, which they make up for by hitting the baseball harder than anybody else. Vlad’s power is close to theirs, his swing isn’t much flatter, and he’s been better at controlling the bat and avoiding strikeouts than they have. The raw ingredients are all there, is the conclusion. He probably just needs a small (and hardly unprecedented) tweak that gets the ball in the air just a little bit more in order to unlock his best self.
• The thing is, at this point one clearly has to wonder if that tweak has already been made. Or if Vlad's increased agility and mobility following his off-season weight loss has sort of made it for him. The Jays have only played six games so far, but at that point last season we had already started noticing the ground balls accumulate. Vlad had a 66.7% ground ball rate through six games last season, and an average launch angle of 7.2°. He finished with a 54.6% ground ball rate and lauch angle of 4.6°. Sure, it's too soon for these numbers to mean anything, but here they are anyway! Heading into Thursday’s game, Vlad's ground ball rate here in 2021 was just 33.3%, and his average launch angle was 21.3°. 👀
• Speaking of Vlad, he’s really the only Blue Jays player worth talking about after that loss to the Angels. Everything else may be bad right now, but our large adult son? Our large adult son is very good.
• OK, OK, Grichuk made two outstanding catches — one of which wasn’t even due to the fact that he initially broke the wrong way on the ball — and David Phelps and Julian Merryweather were pretty good.
• Moving on: The early returns on Rob Manfred’s de-juiced balls are, apparently, not so great. “HR/FB% creeping up now as April warms up,” tweets Rob Arthur. “It's now higher even than in 2019 through the same date. Decent chance we'll see another record-breaking HR season.” (Rob and Ben Lindberg wrote a piece for the Ringer late last month titled “The New Baseball Still Seems Juiced.” He adds that “It continues to boggle my mind that MLB did not, apparently, do field testing of the new ball to see whether or not it actually depresses HR. They did not test drag, the single most important variable determining HR rate for the last decade.”
• It gives me no pleasure to have good feelings about anything to do with the Baltimore Orioles, especially when it’s a guy who has particularly been a thorn in the side of the Blue Jays, but how do you not love Trey Mancini? (Mancini, for those who don’t know, was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer last spring and missed the entirety of the 2020 season. Thankfully, he is now cancer free and back in the big leagues. He had a hit and scored a run on Thursday in his return.)
LOL
In recent months, Major League Baseball has begun trying to crack down on pitchers who apply foreign substances to the ball in order to get better grip. According to the latest from Ken Rosenthal of the Athletic, one of the more outspoken critics of foreign substance use, Los Angeles Dodgers wanker Trevor Bauer, may be caught in the investigation's web.
"The umpires in Bauer’s start against the Oakland Athletics on Thursday collected multiple balls he threw during the game, according to major-league sources. The balls had visible markings and were sticky, and were sent to the league offices for further inspection, the sources said," Rosenthal reports. "Yet, even if the balls Bauer threw are found to have contained foreign substances, it remains to be seen whether the league can prove he was responsible for their application, or whether any punishment imposed by commissioner Rob Manfred would stand."
I'd have some reservations about the league office appearing to target a specific pitcher in this fashion if it weren't for the fact that Bauer has been such a chode when it comes to this issue (as deliciously documented by Chris Thompson of Defector last September).
Anyway, let's see if Bauer is wetting his pants about all this.
Reflections on Atkins’ tenure so far
In the wake of the announcement that the Jays have signed Ross Atkins to a five-year contract extension, Gregor Chisholm of the Toronto Star went through the GM’s history of moves, picking out and giving his take on five hits (Teoscar, Lourdes, Giles, Benoit, Merryweather), five misses (Kendrys, Drury/McKinney, Roark, Urshela, Grichuk), and five where the jury is still out (Springer, Stroman, Ryu, Ray, Matz).
Because I like the conceit, and because there are plenty other moves to dissect, here are three more in each of his categories.
The good ones
July 30, 2019: Traded RHP David Phelps to the Chicago Cubs for Thomas Hatch: The Cubs liked Hatch enough in the spring of 2018, when he was a 23-year-old ticketed for Double-A, to have given him an invite to big league camp and a locker placed deliberately between those of Yu Darvish and Kyle Hendricks. He fared well that year, but went back to Double-A in 2019, struggled while battling shoulder inflammation, and was flipped to the Jays when Chicago needed a reliever for their doomed playoff run. Hatch was healthy and looked good in three short outings before the trade, and has continued on an upward trajectory ever since. He’s not made a huge impact in the majors just yet, but he looks like he can, and that’s an incredible win for dealing away two months of Phelps (who is, of course, back with the Jays again).
February 8, 2020: Signed RHP Rafael Dolis: He may not be easy to watch pitch. He may, in fact, be excruciating to watch pitch. He may pitch in such a way as to make it difficult to watch. Pitching, for him, may be a painfully slow and difficult-to-watch exercise. Watching him pitch may be, at times, excruciating. But Dolis, who hadn’t pitched in the big leagues since 2013 when the Jays signed him just a little over a year ago, was integral to keeping the bullpen from imploding in the wake of Ken Giles’ injury. The Jays picked up a $1.5 million club option on him for this season, and only after that will he become arbitration eligible — meaning that if he continues to perform he won’t reach free agency until after 2024.
February 28, 2017: Signed RHP Matt Buschmann: This one’s a bit sneaky of me, because Buschmann didn’t end up pitching for the Jays, or at all in the 2017 season. His brief time in the organization, however, made an impression on front office types like Gil Kim (who, like Buschmann, had played college ball at Vanderbilt) and Ben Cherington. Buschmann, whose passions for technology and pitching make him a perfect fit for today's game, spent 2018 with the Giants as their "Assistant Director of Player Development- Run Prevention." When the Jays' were making big changes to their coaching staff after the 2018 season, they remembered him. So, too, did new manager Charlie Montoyo, who Buschmann had played for with the Durham Bulls in 2012 and 2013. He's now a key member of the team's on-field staff as the major league bullpen coach, while also holding the title Director of Pitching Development.
The bad ones
December 28, 2019: Signed RHP Shun Yamaguchi: It was a nice idea to sign a guy who had been a very successful starter in Japan, and a great signal that the Jays were finally starting to really explore the overseas market in their search for the best talent available. But in order to reel in Yamaguchi the club not only had to give him a guaranteed two year deal, but also include a provision that prevented them from sending him to the minors. Unfortunately for all involved, Yamaguchi made it clear early on that he very much could have benefitted from time in the minors, and his Blue Jays career never took off. Though he showed flashes in 2020 of the player the Jays must have thought they were getting, he spent most of last year being hidden away in the bullpen. This winter the team faced reality and simply cut him loose, rather than trying it again.
January 6, 2018: Traded RHP Jared Carkuff and OF Edward Olivares to the San Diego Padres for INF Yangervis Solarte: This one feels a little better today than it did a year ago, when Olivares jumped straight from Double-A into his big league debut with the Padres. He struggled, and since then Jonathan Davis and Josh Palacios have emerged as the sort of homegrown outfield depth options for the Jays that they had been lacking for several years (as they cycled through the likes of Brandon Drury, Billy McKinney, Scorates Brito, Derek Fisher, et al.). Olivares was moved to the Royals last summer, along with a PTBNL, for reliever Trevor Rosenthal, showing that he still had some value. That's more than Solarte could say, whose time with the Jays was — after a hot start — especially poor.
July 26, 2016: Traded Hansel Rodriguez to the San Diego Padres for Melvin Upton Jr. and cash: I was able to see some of the logic in this deal at the time, and ended up looking quite foolish for it. A league average hitter at the time of the deal, the Jays seemed to see Upton (who went back to going by "B.J." in 2019, whose contract was mostly covered by the Padres) as cheap outfield help for both the rest of 2016 and 2017. Instead he slashed a pitiful .196/.261/.318 over 165 plate appearances in 2016, was let go the following spring, and didn't appear in the big leagues ever again.
Still up in the air
January 20, 2021: Signed RHP Kirby Yates: How can the jury still be out on a guy who was injured before he ever threw a pitch for the Blue Jays, you ask? Obviously this was a bad one, but we’ll have to wait for the 2021 season to play out a little more to understand just how bad. The Jays need pitching, and one wonders how much better that money may have been spent elsewhere. Hey, and here’s something you will perhaps find relevant.
On the other hand, it was not a good day for a couple of the pitchers who the Jays might have otherwise spent that money on, as Trevor Rosenthal underwent thoracic outlet surgery today, and it was announced that James Paxton — Big Maple! — will sadly have to miss the entire season due to Tommy John surgery. Ugh.
June 28, 2018: Traded INF/OF Steve Pearce to the Boston Red Sox for INF Santiago Espinal: Yes, I realize the Jays weren’t going to get anything out of Pearce over the rest of the 2018 season, and that Espinal seems like he might turn into a useful bench piece for the Jays in the coming years. That sounds like a win. But then when you factor in that the effing Red Sox won the fucking World Series and Pearce was the effing MVP, I think you sort of need Espinal to at least be a big leaguer. No, I will not be taking questions at this time.
November 17, 2018: Traded SS Aledmys Díaz for RHP Trent Thornton: Here’s another one that maybe doesn’t deserve to be here. Díaz was found money for the Jays, who had a huge win when they traded J.B. (or was it J.D.?) Woodman to the Cardinals for him in December 2017. Woodman was out of baseball 68 games later, and Díaz remains a useful big leaguer, now in Houston. Getting a bunch of years of control of Trent Thornton was a good move for the Jays in the asset management sense, but what Thornton ultimately becomes — and how healthy he can be — will move this one to either a big win or, “couldn’t they have found someone else?”
Top image: Screengrab via the Toronto Blue Jays/Sportsnet
The Steve Pearce trade will always be a nightmare...... absolute, rock bottom, worst-case scenario. I can't imagine anything working out worse, honestly.
I get your take on Thornton. But he did give us a pretty solid full year in the rotation in 2019, so that value has to be factored in (1.9 fWAR). It looks like he's been worth a tad more than Diaz since 2019 (2.1 fWAR in 2019/20 vs 1.4 fWAR for Diaz). And the main thing for me is that I'd take Thornton over Diaz today 10 times out of 10 (notwithstanding Diaz's legit continued value in a part time role for Houston.) He could still end up being a decent 4th/5th starter. And it looks like he may have a chance to show what he's got pretty soon.