Wins! Kikuchi! Stripling! Berríos!
On Stripling and the past, Berríos and the present, and Kikuchi and the future. Plus George Springer, Frankie Montas, Michael Conforto, Matt Chapman, John Schneider, Bradley Zimmer, Apple TV and more!
The Jays aren’t very much fun to write or read about when they’re in the kind of rut they have been in for much of this month. As you’ve probably noticed, I find these spells are good for taking my foot off the gas a little bit and avoiding the kind of burnout that tends to hit after the trade deadline passes, and again following the sprint to the finish and whatever October may bring. Frankly, the team has been a little too generous in regard to providing these kinds of stretches this season so far, but alas. Readership remains mostly steady when they’re lost, subscriptions do come in, but not in the same way as when the team is riding high. That’s where we all want this thing to be, and hopefully — behind a masterful performance from Ross Stripling on Wednesday night, a Berríos gem on Thursday, and a better-looking, Springer-led offence — that’s where it is once again headed.
There are only so many ways to write “This is bad and it sucks and I don’t know why it keeps happening,” you know?
I suppose there aren’t many more ways to write “Oh my god, Ross Stripling is still somehow incredible!” but the sense I get is that nobody minds reading those so much.
Anyway, it appears I’ve got some catching up to do, so here’s some news, notes, and links…
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Kikuchi the reliever (but what happens next year?)
The big news heading into Wednesday’s game was the fact that Yusei Kikuchi was not among the group of starting pitchers who walked in from the bullpen with Stripling — something the Jays have done all season long as a show of unity and strength (or something). This was conspicuous, as Kikuchi — who had laid yet another egg in Monday’s 7-3 loss to the Orioles — was part of a group of five starters to accompany Alek Manoah in on Tuesday. The reason for his conspicuous absence became clear early on in the game, when it was noticed that he was sitting out in the bullpen with the rest of the relievers, and the team confirmed afterwards that he has indeed lost his rotation spot.
And not a moment too soon, I might add.
Call me crazy, but I still think there’s a chance that Kikuchi’s contract doesn’t turn into an all-time disaster for the Jays. There are aspects of his stuff that should be better at getting big leaguer hitters out than he’s shown so far in his North American career, and he’s never struggled with issuing walks like this before. It’s just, how many times can you say that sort of thing while hoping for a different result?
The answer, apparently, is 20 starts. At least this season!
John Schneider spoke about urgency when asked about his rotation plans earlier in the week, and with their once fairly comfortable lead in the AL wild card race now turned to dust, and an incredible opportunity to have really gained ground on a backsliding Yankees team having gone to waste, it’s definitely season-salvaging time. I feel for Kikuchi, but it had to be done.
Should have been done sooner, in fact. I wrote last month, when he first “suffered” a “neck strain” about how there was a chance then to keep him on a rehab assignment almost until September, at which point they could have simply buried him if no progress was made. The team has basically ended up in the same place I suggested at the time, with the same modest deadline acquisitions, though they took a different path to get here — one that involved subjecting us to more of Kikuchi than any of us needed, I think.
Fans are fickle. Fans tend to lack object permanence. But I don’t think anybody was wrong for being done with having to watch Kikuchi start games for this team a number of weeks ago. Nor should anyone be surprised with how this latest attempt to kickstart his season turned out, least of all the Blue Jays — though at this stage, nearly seven years into the Shapiro-Atkins experience, it’s clear haven’t exactly been world-beaters when it comes to pitching acquisition.
Will Kikuchi be able to contribute anything from the bullpen? The idea is certainly out there that maybe he’ll be able to trust his fastball better if he’s throwing it harder — which he should be able to do in short bullpen stints — which might just a way to help him get sorted. And in his relief debut on Thursday we certainly saw that in practice, albeit in completely low leverage and with a shaky start.
Frustrated as fans have been with him all year, they’re pulling for him to make something of this new role — though we’re maybe not quite ready for scenes like this one just yet.
We’ll see how it goes. A more realistic assessment at this point is that he’s simply not an asset, he’s a liability. The Jays needed to limit the damage he continually has inflicted on their chances to win. If they can get anything from him in a relief role that’s great. But if his being hidden away there means they’re ultimately playing a man short for the rest of the season, in the aggregate that’s still going to be better than giving him more starts.
If the kernel of hope that he can be useful in the bullpen is one silver lining in all this, another is the structure of his contract. You never want to be thinking about how best to cut bait on a player when you’re not even through year one of a multi-year deal, but that’s where this is at. “Fortunately” for the Jays they frontloaded Kikuchi’s deal in order to better keep their financial house in order down the road. He’ll be on the books for “just” $10 million in each of the two seasons after this one.
That’s a still-significant hit, especially for a team that will be paying Hyun Jin Ryu to rehab post-Tommy John for most, if not all, of the year, and that has a José Berríos-sized question mark hanging over its rotation. But they really have no choice in that matter either.
Unless this relief experiment goes spectacularly, and unless they really believe Yosver Zulueta — who many see as a reliever eventually — is an answer in the rotation for next year, or that incredibly young guys at Double-A like Ricky Tiedemann or Sem Robberse will be ready to make the jump next season, they’ll need to plan for Kikuchi to be the number five in 2023. In that scenario Mitch White to be the six, and the Jays will need to be ready to switch them up as soon as possible. Then cut bait on Kikuchi as soon as it’s deemed necessary.
In an ideal world the younger guys are reinforcements and they find a number four to stick between Kikuchi/White and the Manoah/Gausman/Berríos trio at the top. Easier said than done, though. Cot’s has the Jays committed to $123 million in opening day payroll for next season already, with several substantial arbitration salaries yet to be added to that figure. Plug in what arb-eligible guys like Teoscar Hernández, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette, Cavan Biggio, Danny Jansen, Santiago Espinal, Tim Mayza, and Adam Cimber are making this season and the figure jumps to about $150 million.
Factor in raises and they’re already just about committed to this year’s opening day number as it stands. Rogers could take the payroll higher, of course. It looks like, without some subtraction, they’ll have to.
Can the Jays get to where they need to by dealing the final two years of Danny Jansen’s deal? Will a team offer much in return for three years of Biggio? Does the front office actually contemplate selling low on Bo?
It’s going to be a fascinating winter, and a crucial one for Shapiro and Atkins.
Strip of beef
Part of what is going to make the upcoming winter so fascinating for the Jays is the decision they’ll have to make on Ross Stripling, who came off the injured list on Wednesday and produced the best start of his career by Game Score. With a Game Score of 82, the effort would be the best of a lot of guys’ careers, though it “only” ranks about 40th among the 3,550 starts made in the big leagues this year, and second among Jays starts to Kevin Gausman’s beauty on August 2nd in Tampa.
Thing is, it obviously hasn’t been about just one start for Stripling.
Among the Jays' four top starters, Stripling's 2.11 ERA since June 1 is tops by nearly a full run. His 2.60 FIP just beats Kevin Gausman's 2.61 mark for the lead among that group. His 1.7 fWAR is tied with Gausman's. His 2.1 RA9-WAR beats Manoah's 1.9.
Move our arbitrary endpoint to July 1st and his lead by ERA and fWAR grows. Hell, move it to May 1st and he's still the team leader in ERA.
Everything but the name, the velocity, the innings per start, the strikeout rate, and the track record says that this has been the team's best starter. If this was Hyun Jin Ryu we wouldn't think twice about giving him the ball in game one of a playoff series.
This run he's on might not even be as fluky as some would tend to think. Just this week the Athletic's Eno Sarris looked at the 25 pitchers who have most improved their Stuff+ — a metric that accounts for velocity, location, release point, the shape of a pitch, pitch mix, etc., to put a catch-all number on the quality of a pitcher's arsenal — over the course of this season, and found that Stripling ranks ninth. Though his overall Stuff+ isn't in elite territory, it's an impressive gain in a metric that Sarris has found to be quite "sticky" (i.e. it correlates well to itself year over year).
For Stripling the formula for success seems relatively simple on the surface: his changeup has always produced good swing-and-miss, in 2021 it was by his best pitch for suppressing slugging percentage, so he's started throwing it more and his fastball less — particularly to right-handed hitters.
It’s also a bit of a unicorn, with the highest release point on a changeup in the league — though that’s not entirely new for 2022.
Interestingly, Stripling went against these trends in his spectacular turn on Wednesday against Baltimore, throwing one of his two fastballs (a four-seamer and a sinker) 64% of the time to right-handed hitters. It's a bit of a Ryu-ish thing to do, actually. But it illustrates, I think, that there's maybe more art than science to what he's been able to do this year. (Though it's worth also considering that Stripling admitted earlier this season to paying attention to the spin and break metrics that are flashed on the video boards at Rogers Centre after every pitch, just to see if the data lines up with how well he's executing a particular pitch. And when we check the data for that particular game at Baseball Savant, we do indeed see that he was throwing those pitches harder and getting more spin on them than usual on Wednesday, which was not the case for his other offerings.)
What do we make of all this and how does Stripling’s Jays career play out going forward? Well, it certainly seemed as though the Jays tipped their hands at the deadline by acquiring a ready-made Stripling replacement in White — who gets a mention himself in Eno’s piece as one of seven candidates to improve by Stuff+ with the right couple of tweaks.
We need to be careful about reading too much into one truly spectacular start, I think. I still genuinely wonder whether he gets a qualifying offer this winter, let alone a multi-year extension from the Jays — though he’d obviously be a great fit for that number four role I mentioned above. A team giving big money to a soft-tossing former Dodger heading into his age-33 season? Sounds crazy!
On the other hand, as Nick mentioned on last night’s podcast, Stripling’s body of work is growing. This run has been much more durable than the brief bit of success he had in 2021. A 2.80 ERA since May 1st!
No need to decide just yet, I suppose. The Jays have got all of September to see where this goes. And perhaps October, too.
Good Berríos shows up
One guy who would certainly be a candidate to lose a playoff start to Stripling is José Berríos — though not if he keeps pitching the way he did on Thursday night in the Bronx.
It has been a confounding season for Berríos, who has been good much more often than he’s been bad, but has been so bad when it goes wrong that you can’t step back and look at his year as anything but a disaster.
To take it back to Game Score, I went to the trouble of producing this simple line score to indicate the mark each of his starts has produced.
As noted above, a score above 80 is obviously very good — Stripling’s 82 on Wednesday lands in the 98th percentile among all starts thrown this season. Berríos hasn’t quite hit that number yet, but he’s been at least somewhat close on a few occasions. It’s important to consider scale here, though. A Game Score above 80 is excellent, a Game Score of 50 is considered average, so Berríos has actually given the Jays a whole lot of above average starts. That’s basically who he’s always been as a pitcher, at least in the aggregate.
Unfortunately for him — and for those of us who’ve had to watch him this year, and especially those cutting him massive cheques — a Game Score of 40 is considered “replacement level.”
Berríos hasn’t just been a replacement level pitcher on far too many occasions this year, he’s been sub-sub-sub-sub-replacement a whole lot. Catastrophically so! Too much!
As he does to great effect so often, Sportsnet’s Chris Black has a terrific Twitter breakdown of some of the minor changes Berríos has made — and may have made — between starts that helped him find the best version of himself on Thursday. The two biggest ones for me are that Berríos was coming set with his hands high, and keeping them there before beginning his delivery…
…and that he was clearly making a concerted effort to shield the ball better in his glove.
I had a tougher time with some of the other observations in the thread, which might entirely be accurate but were about very subtle body positioning changes that relied on comparing images from slightly different angles that may be deceptive, but nonetheless, it was different, and it was better, and that’s at least can give us hope that he’s genuinely fixed something.
Or, at least, fixed what was wrong in his disastrous game against Cleveland.
I think it’s much too simple to think that he has been tipping pitches all along and that’s been the problem all along, but there was certainly some talk about it being a problem during that Guardians game. For example:
Interestingly, the Guardians had five of 11 batters reach base with the bases empty in that one, but two of those were batters hit by Berríos and another was a walk. Two singles in 11 PA isn't disastrous. But once runners got on it was a different story: 12 batters faced, one walk, six hits, two home runs. And, as Drew pointed out, that ball that José Ramírez golfed out sure looked like it came on a pretty good pitch.
His previous start, a rough one against the Twins, doesn't make as compelling a case for runners being able to pick up a tell and flash it to the man at the plate, but it's not impossible it was going on here either. With the bases empty he faced 12 batters and gave up two singles, a double, and a home run. He faced six with runners on, walking two and giving up a home run and a single.
Not great either way! Yet, is it possible that he turned some kind of a corner several starts back only to start tipping his pitches? In this season of calamities for him I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. Frankly, right now I think that’s probably the scenario we ought to hope for.
But with the regularity that shockingly awful starts from him have occurred this year, we’re going to have to see a lot more like this most recent one this one before we can be convinced he’s on the right track.
Quickly…
• Baseball is much more enjoyable when the Blue Jays score runs, imho. And George Springer looking more like George Springer definitely makes that seem like much more of a possibility, doesn’t it?
• Sure, some of Springer’s over the last couple games haven’t been with a ton of authority, but some have been!
• Jon Heyman noted in his latest for the New York Post that free agent Michael Conforto “has a good chance to be ready to hit for a contender in September,” and that teams are checking out his medicals. Conforto’s vaccination status is obviously something that’s been speculated on, and whether he’ll actually be able to offer much is debatable, but it could work, and there’d at least be some opportunity for him to play here, I think. Would be OK with this!
• I noted ahead of Thursday’s game that Yankees starter Frankie Montas had really been limited in terms of the number of pitches he’s thrown since returning from a shoulder injury suffered with the A’s in early July. You can see that quite clearly in the following chart from Props.cash — player prop research made easy!
Part of the problem, of course, has been purely performance-related. Montas is still doing well in terms of whiffs and called strikes, but after getting shelled by the Jays on Thursday, he’s up to a 6.55 ERA over five starts since coming off the injured list. Too soon to say that the Jays dodged a bullet here, but I’ve definitely enjoyed the beginning of his Yankees career so far!
• Is Matt Chapman a fun guy to watch play baseball on a regular basis, or what? As my Blue Jays Happy Hour cohost Nick pointed out, the Jays probably come away with nothing in the second inning against the Yankees on Thursday if not for Chappy’s outstanding swim move to avoid being tagged out at second base in that frame. You love to see it.
• I didn’t mention this in my bit on Kikuchi above, but huge kudos to him for the way he’s handled what has been an absolutely miserable season. Manager John Schneider told reporters that Kikuchi offered to go to Buffalo instead of the bullpen after being told he had lost his rotation spot this week. Not a lot of guys would do that — certainly not ones on multi-year deals. Clearly there are reasons his teammates are still pulling for him — something Mike Wilner wrote about for the Toronto Star on Thursday. I have no doubts that it’s part of why his appearance out of the bullpen was so well received by fans, too. (Or at least the fans I think are worth listening to!)
• Part of Schneider’s message to Kikuchi was that he could do more for the team out of the bullpen than in Buffalo. I think that took some people aback, because the bullpen usually isn’t a great hiding spot for guys who simply cannot find the strike zone. But obviously the Jays see something here. Or… uh… they just didn’t want to give him the false impression that he’d be the next guy up if a starter was needed.
• A two-year, $20 million deal for a lefty reliever with excellent velocity who can generate swing-and-miss? Not the worst thing in the world, I guess!
• Bradley Zimmer was claimed by the Phillies on waivers on Thursday, which was nice to see. We really need to recalibrate what we think of bench players in this new era of roster limits for pitchers. You don’t want developing players to be sitting on the bench missing opportunities to play, so there are simply going to be guys taking up spots that have other skills. Zimmer’s got utility in that world.
• Lastly, in case you missed it on last night’s broadcast, game two of the Jays and Yankees series here on Friday will be available exclusively on Apple TV. These have been free to watch on the app so far, but you do have to give Apple a bunch of your information to do so. Thanks, Manfred!
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