Just a few weeks ago, Julian Merryweather was fighting for a spot on the Blue Jays Opening Day roster. A back injury suffered early in spring training pushed his Grapefruit League debut back to mid-March and he struggled to get up to speed in such a compressed timeframe. But then Kirby Yates went down with an elbow injury that would require Tommy John, a couple of other pitchers were sidelined to start the season, and Merryweather just barely snuck onto Toronto’s 26-man roster on March 31.

The very next day, he was pitching in the 10th inning in Yankee Stadium, trying to hold a one-run lead on Opening Day. He came one pitch away from throwing an immaculate inning and ended up striking out the side to secure the win. Three days later, he was thrown into the fire again, this time being asked to protect a two-run lead in the bottom of the ninth. He recorded two more strikeouts in that outing and earned the second save of his career.

When I wrote about what the Blue Jays bullpen might look like without Yates a few weeks ago, Merryweather wasn’t even on my radar. Jordan Romano and Rafael Dolis have definitely been in the mix for high-leverage work — they threw in the eighth and ninth of that Opening Day victory paving the way for Merryweather’s appearance in the 10th. The quality of Merryweather’s stuff has been a revelation and has helped him emphatically declare his spot in the bullpen pecking order.

Merryweather was acquired by the Blue Jays in August of 2018 when Toronto traded Josh Donaldson to Cleveland right before the waiver trade deadline. It was viewed as a light return at the time since Merryweather had blown out his arm during the previous season and was in the middle of rehabbing from Tommy John surgery. He got back on the mound in 2019 but another arm injury limited him to just six minor league innings. Last season, he made his major league debut in September, showing impressive velocity and a starter’s repertoire out of the bullpen, but another elbow issue cut his season short after just 13 innings. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Carmen’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. Carmen is an engineer living in the Bay Area. Born and raised in Connecticut, his inherited Yankees fandom (yes, he can hear all of your grumbles) and curiosity about math and science combined to foster a fascination with how players contribute to run scoring and prevention, as did growing up reading the venerable pages of sabermetric havens such as FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, and Beyond the Boxscore. The accessibility of pitch-by-pitch Statcast data has allowed him to dig deeper into player and team tendencies and examine how each approaches the opposition, which he has written about at his own website, Sabermetric Musings. He hopes to use his skills and interests to contribute to the baseball discourse at large, as well as the website that played such a big part in making him the baseball observer he is today.

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is a supremely talented hitter. In this season’s early going, he has already hit a ball 114.1 mph, swatted a home run, and has a couple of RBI to his name. Prior to his call-up in 2019, Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel rated him as the best prospect in baseball with a 70 Future Value. If you go to The Board, only five other players since 2017 have received such a grade: Wander Franco (now an 80), MacKenzie Gore, Gavin Lux, Yoán Moncada, and Shohei Ohtani. His specific combination of future tool grades, consisting of a 70 hit tool, 70 game power, and 80 raw power, is unrivaled in the dataset, a unique blend of elite bat-to-ball skills and game-changing power. At 19, he posted a 203 wRC+ in Double-A and a 175 wRC+ in Triple-A. The latter is especially impressive given that the average age of a Triple-A player is 28.

With those things in mind, you might say that what we have seen from the young phenom thus far is a bit disappointing. In 757 plate appearances through his age-21 season, Guerrero has posted a 107 wRC+. That places him 112th amongst all hitters since 2019 (for players with at least 500 plate appearances), sandwiched between the aging Robinson Canó and Omar Narváez. But I would note that context is key. Guerrero is one of only 10 players to receive 500 plate appearances through age 21. On that list, he ranks seventh in wRC+ behind Juan Soto, Fernando Tatis Jr., Cody Bellinger, Ronald Acuña Jr., and Carlos Correa. One could argue that four of those guys are on a Hall of Fame trajectory while the fifth (Correa) has been one of the top talents in the sport when he is not struggling with injury.

Guerrero is in rare company given the amount of big-league time he has logged at such a young age; that is an accomplishment in and of itself. But we are still left wanting more. How can he unlock his generational tools and become the hitter we hope he can be? I would argue the most glaring potential adjustment is to his swing plane. In 2019 and ’20, Guerrero posted groundball rates of 50.4% and 54.6%, respectively. The following represents his rolling average groundball rate in 25 groundball samples:

A whopping 68.5% of these samples yielded groundball rates above the major league average. Over the past two seasons, major league hitters have produced a .218 wOBA and .244 BABIP on groundballs compared to a .500 wOBA and .344 BABIP on batted balls in the air. Among the group of players with 500 plate appearances the past two seasons, Guerrero ranks 15th out of 226 players in the cohort. The frustrating part of this phenomenon is that he hits the ball exceptionally hard, to the point where if he put the ball in the air at closer to league average rates he would be a candidate to place amongst the league leaders in home runs and overall production.

To get a better idea of how Guerrero compares to sluggers with his prodigious power, I pulled the batted ball data from Baseball Savant (via Bill Petti’s baseballR package) for a select few right-handed hitters who posted comparable maximum exit velocities to Guerrero in ’19 and 2020. This list includes the following:

Max exit velocity is our best indication of a player’s raw power. We do not have to worry about a sufficient sample of plate appearances to see how that power plays in the game; all we care about is how hard the player can put the ball in play if he makes optimal contact. You, the reader, might gripe that it is difficult to use max exit velocity to gauge a player’s power. How do we know this is truly the hardest he can hit the ball? To that I say, yes, smart reader we definitely do not know if a player’s maximum exit velocity is actually the hardest he will hit the ball. But, I will say, we can reasonably confident that we are in range fairly quickly, based on research from Alex Chamberlain.

The main comparison I am interested in is the differences in approximate attack angle between these players. The concept was outlined in great detail by Jason Ochart at Driveline in this 2018 post, but the TLDR is it is the vertical angle (which is associated with the launch angle of a batted ball) of the bat as it goes to impact the baseball. Hitters can measure it with bat sensors or by parsing video.

Unfortunately, we do not have this information for major league hitters in games because they do not walk up to the plate with sensors on their bats. Instead of throwing our collective hands up, however, we can approximate attack angle with the data we do have access to. And fortunately, that has already been done. Back in 2017, David Marshall wrote an amazing piece on the Community Research blog here at FanGraphs reverse engineering attack angle from Statcast data. He concluded his post with an elegant linear equation approximating attack angle based on the launch angle of the top 20% of a player’s hardest hit batted balls. Anthony Shattell has also posted about data of this nature in the past, and I would highly-recommend scrolling through his feed for some batted ball related visuals; he uses the top 10% of hardest hit balls for his attack angle approximations. For this analysis, I arbitrarily took the top 5%. One might quibble with such a choice, but I think it gets the same point across.

Here are the estimated attack angles for the hitters in the table above based on my filtering criteria:

Stanton has the flattest swing in this group with an estimated attack angle of 8.74 degrees. Guerrero is even lower at 8.71 degrees. Stanton and Judge stick out in that they hit a ton of home runs but have noticeably flatter swings then the rest of the group. They make up for those flat swings by hitting the ball harder than anybody else in baseball. In the Statcast era (since 2015), Stanton has hit 28 balls over 118 mph, the most in the majors. Judge sits second with 10 (he was not a full-time regular until 2017). Third, despite his lack of experience in the big leagues, is Guerrero. If you just look at 2019 and ’20, Vlad is tied for the most with Stanton. Guerrero and his power are in rare company. What’s more, Stanton and Judge have career strikeout rates of 28.1% and 31.4%. Guerrero’s sits at just 17.0%. Even though he doesn’t have quite the same amount of juice on contact as the Yankees outfielders, he makes up for it by putting the ball in play much more often, albeit on the ground. Stanton and Judge have career groundball rates of 42.2% and 38.5%, respectively, with the former about league average and the latter about a standard deviation below it.

Guerrero is still a step behind Stanton and Judge with regards to power, so any large increase in extra base hits (where he has been slightly above league average in terms of the percentage of his total plate appearances) will have to come from either hitting the ball harder or putting more balls in the air. In my own research, I found that maximum exit velocity peaks around age 26 and average exit velocity on balls in the air peaks around 30. So maybe there is some power Guerrero can still squeeze out of his bat. Given that he is already inside the top 1% in raw power, however, I am dubious of how much room for growth there is in that department. What about swing plane? There is precedence for young hitters changing their distribution of batted balls.

More often than not, these young talented hitters saw performance boosts when putting the ball in the air more. That is not to say Guerrero will definitely see a bump in production if he focuses on hitting the ball in the air. It could mess with his swing for all I know. But I do believe that there is room for him to add some loft in his swing, even at the expense of more whiffs. His strikeout rate is close to six percentage points below the league average. There is a trade-off to be had there that can make him the fearsome hitter we all believe he can be.

Guerrero is still very young and has a lot of room to grow as a hitter. The projection systems seem to agree. The FanGraphs Depth Charts projections see him putting up a .360 wOBA in 2021, 23rd in baseball. THE BAT X, which to my knowledge most explicitly leverages existing Statcast data, is even more optimistic. It sees a .376 wOBA in Vlad’s future, placing him 11th in the league and sandwiching him in between Yordan Alvarez and Judge.

When you consider his pedigree coming into the majors, his high-end bat control (as evidenced by his strikeout rate), and his nearly unmatched power, I still think these projection systems are a little light on what to expect from Vlad Jr. going forward. His combination of skills should put him in the conversation to be among the best hitters in baseball, the type who is in the MVP conversation throughout his 20s. Let’s hope he can make the necessary adjustments and grow into that kind of player starting this season.

This is Ashley’s first post as a FanGraphs contributor. Ashley has spent the last several years writing for various SB Nation sites, including Bless You Boys, DRaysBay, and Bleed Cubbie Blue. Her bylines have appeared here at FanGraphs, The Hardball Times, Baseball Prospectus and more. She hosts a baseball YouTube channel called 90 Feet From Home and co-hosts the baseball podcast Who’s On Worst.

There is no magic quite like that of Opening Day. It’s hard to explain the sensation of being part of a crowd of like-minded baseball fans, brimming with enthusiasm over the return of the game after a long, cold winter. It will make otherwise rational people gather en masse in 20-degree weather in the hopes of seeing their beloved team get the first win of the long 162-game season.

It’s a unique level of fervor, one that draws us like moths to the porch light that is the ballpark.

For fans of the Toronto Blue Jays, though, it has been two years of Opening Days without baseball close to home, and the absence of their team north of the border has at times made it difficult to feel connected to the sport they love. To make it worse, blackout restrictions and the elimination of a dedicated Blue Jays radio broadcast (the audio from the television broadcast will be simulcast to radio listeners) have further limited access to the only Canadian major league team. Read the rest of this entry »

Simeon Woods Richardson has big-time potential. Blessed with an impressive combination of power, finesse, and command, the 6-foot-3, 222-pound right-hander is No. 3 on our Toronto Blue Jays Top Prospects list, and No. 72 on our 2021 Top 100 Prospects list. Just 20 years old, Woods Richardson fashions himself — stylistically speaking — as a modern-day Satchel Paige.

More on that later.

Born and raised in Sugar Land, Texas, Woods Richardson was taken 48th-overall in the 2018 draft by the New York Mets, only to be traded a year later, along with Anthony Kay, to the Blue Jays in exchange for Marcus Stroman. The approach he brought to Toronto was one of a burgeoning craftsman. I learned as much when I asked — in a twist on a question I often ask hitters — if he views pitching as more of an art or a science.

“Both,” responded Woods Richardson. “With pitching you need some feel, and then you have the analytics of it. It’s, ‘Okay, you’re doing this and you’re doing that, you have this break and you have that break.’ So I think it’s a mesh of both worlds. But I like the art side of pitching, where you’re hitting a spot three, four times in a row. You’re keeping them off balance. That’s what I like.”

A self-described visual learner, Woods Richardson prefers video over number-crunching, although he does pay heed to the spin efficiency of his four-seamer — an impressive 98% that he aspires to improve. Delivered at 92-94 mph, it’s one of five pitches in his arsenal. He also throws a two-seamer, a curveball, a slider, and a circle changeup, the last of which he’s diligently honed. ”Shaky” when he broke into pro ball, it’s now considered by many to be his best weapon. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, the Blue Jays announced that Kirby Yates had been diagnosed with a strained flexor in his throwing elbow. A day later, that injury turned into something far more serious, as the righty will need Tommy John surgery (the second of his career) to repair a torn ulnar collateral ligament. Signed to a one-year, $5.5 million deal earlier this offseason, it’s likely he’ll never pitch an inning in a Blue Jays jersey.

Elbow issues have derailed a promising late-career upswing for Yates. Between 2018 and ’19, he was arguably the best reliever in baseball, worth a league-leading 5.2 WAR and with 53 saves to his name as the Padres’ closer. But bone chips in his elbow limited him to just 4 1/3 innings in 2020, and his age — he turns 34 in just a few days — combined with the uncertainty surrounding his health likely led to the below-market deal he signed with Toronto. That elbow reportedly sunk a potential deal with the Braves earlier in the offseason, and his physical with the Jays showed more damage than expected, costing him more money.

Yates’ potential ability to anchor the bullpen was enticing enough for Toronto to take the risk that his elbow could hold up for the whole season. Instead, he didn’t last through spring training, and now the Blue Jays have to figure out how to organize the back end of their bullpen. They already had a number of strong options for high-leverage work; the trick will be determining the best way to cover up the gaping hole in the ninth inning.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2020 season couldn’t have been much fun for the Nationals or Stephen Strasburg. In the wake of their World Series victory over the Astros, the team sputtered out of the gate, while Strasburg, the MVP of that World Series and a newly-minted $245 million man via his opt-out and re-signing in December 2019, was limited to two starts before undergoing late August surgery to alleviate carpal tunnel neuritis.

On Tuesday, Strasburg took the mound for his first Grapefruit League appearance — against the Astros, coincidentally, albeit a much different team from the one he faced in the World Series, with Jose Altuve, Michael Brantley, Carlos Correa, and Yuli Gurriel the only starters in both games. The 32-year-old righty threw 38 pitches, had good command of a fastball that reportedly sat at 93 mph and ranged from 91 to 93 (he averaged 93.9 mph in 2019, via Statcast), and retired five out of the six batters he faced. He struck out four, including Correa looking at a high fastball to end the first, Kyle Tucker looking at a fastball in the second, and Gurriel check-swinging at a low curveball.

These descriptions come from the Washington Post’s Jesse Dougherty and will have to do, as there was no television or Trackman for the game. The Nationals’ Twitter account did celebrate Strasmas by posting a press box-level video of the four strikeouts:

Time to open up your #Strasmas presents…

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? ?????????#SpringTraining // #NATITUDE pic.twitter.com/suA2LhCKSa

— Washington Nationals (@Nationals) March 10, 2021

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This season, for the first time since the Toronto Blue Jays played their inaugural games in 1977, there will not be a dedicated radio broadcast of their games. Instead of a radio team broadcasting the game, the audio from television broadcasts will be simulcast to radio listeners. Rogers, the Canadian telecom giant that owns both the Blue Jays and the networks they are broadcast on, has made assurances that this is merely a safety measure in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But it is unclear what the plans are for the future of the Blue Jays on the radio. Longtime broadcaster Mike Wilner was laid off this winter, and there has been no replacement announced; even apart from the loss of a Jays radio broadcast, the AM sports radio landscape in Canada has taken significant blows recently, with Bell Media, another telecom giant, unceremoniously taking a number of local stations off the air last month. Should this season prove to Rogers that having a dedicated radio broadcast is an expense not worth carrying into the future, Blue Jays baseball on the radio could prove to be another one of the casualties of the pandemic.

It’s been almost a century since the first major league baseball game was broadcast over the radio: an early-August game between the Pirates and the Phillies in 1921. Despite resistance from both traditional print media and team ownership, the popularity of such broadcasts took off, sparking a conflict that would fundamentally change the revenue structure of major league baseball. In his book Crack of the Bat: A History of Baseball on the Radio, James R. Walker writes about the forces that changed the attitudes of baseball higher-ups towards the broadcasting of baseball on the radio. Declining attendance was at first, and stubbornly, blamed on radio broadcasting, leading team ownership to call for bans on such broadcasts. But with the growing influence and financial power of advertising in broadcasting and the realization that radio was a boon to developing geographically-displaced fandom (especially in the western United States, where many people lived far from a major-league team), fewer and fewer teams held out against the practice.

There was, at the same time, a fundamental shift in what the purpose of such broadcasts was. As Walker writes, the World Series, from 1921 until 1933, was broadcast on the radio — not because it was lucrative to do so, but as a service to the country’s interested public. In 1934, though, commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis sold the rights to the World Series broadcast to the Ford Motor Company. Within a few years, a federal judge would hand down a decision naming baseball broadcasts on the radio as the property of the teams involved, and New York, the last holdout of broadcast bans, embraced this new revenue stream. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about MLB.TV repetition, Yadier Molina throwing out Jose Siri, teams opting to end innings early, the effect of Jarred Kelenic’s injury on the Mariners service-time controversy, the Astros signing Jake Odorizzi, and teams being more brazen about lowering their competitive balance tax assessments, then preview the 2021 Blue Jays (21:50) with Kaitlyn McGrath of The Athletic and the 2021 Giants (1:06:14) with Grant Brisbee of The Athletic.

Audio intro: Zeus, "At the Risk of Repeating"
Audio interstitial 1: Neil Young, "Far From Home"
Audio interstitial 2: Old & In the Way, "Old and in the Way"
Audio outro: Sloan, "Everything You’ve Done Wrong"

Link to sentient-baseballs email episode
Link to MLB Film Room
Link to Molina/Siri play
Link to Evans/Phillips face-off
Link to Ichiro/Cameron simulated game
Link to story about Kelenic’s knee injury
Link to rule about “rolling” innings
Link to Dan Szymborski on the Odorizzi signing
Link to Odorizzi contract terms
Link to drafts and competitions spreadsheet
Link to story on Kovalchuk’s 17-year deal
Link to story about Kovalchuk penalty reduction
Link to story about Blue Jays’ radio feed
Link to story about Blue Jays’ free agency premium
Link to Kaitlyn on where the Jays will play
Link to Kaitlyn on Vlad
Link to Dan on Vlad as a breakout candidate
Link to Kaitlyn on the Jays’ pitching depth chart
Link to Kaitlyn on the Jays’ new complex
Link to story on the Jays’ high performance department
Link to story on Biggio and the less lively ball
Link to Spin Rate podcast
Link to Ben Carsley on the Giants
Link to Matt Trueblood on Yastrzemski
Link to Grant on Yastrzemski
Link to the Giants’ giant coaching staff
Link to Andrew Baggarly on Alyssa Nakken
Link to Grant on the Giants’ old lineup
Link to Grant on the Giants’ rotation depth
Link to Grant in 2017 on AT&T Park offense
Link to Grant on Oracle Park offense in 2020
Link to Baggs & Brisbee podcast

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For the Toronto Blue Jays of 40 years ago —  a young team, an expansion team, a Major League Baseball team in a non-American country — finding an identity, something for fans to cling to beyond regional affinity and a desire for entertainment, was an uphill battle. They played in Exhibition Stadium, a field not made for baseball, pummeled by wind and snow off the lake. They lost, and lost, and lost again, their roster an endlessly rotating door.

After the buzz of novelty wore off, their attendance dwindled, from fourth in the American League to 11th just four years later. The tainted atmosphere of MLB at the time, with collusion and the constant threat of labor stoppages looming large, didn’t help either. The strike-shortened 1981 season ended in a fifth consecutive last-place finish. The most press the Jays got in the stretch run that year was about struggling third baseman and NBA draftee Danny Ainge’s dreams of switching sports. He finished the season, his last as a major leaguer, batting .187; from the stands of the Ex, a fan threw a basketball at him.

The following year, for the first time in history, the Jays climbed out of last place in the division. (They were sixth out of seven.) And then, in 1983, a breakthrough: They put together a winning record. Dave Stieb was great again; Lloyd Moseby and Jesse Barfield broke out. Though they didn’t, in the end, come close to a playoff spot, they were a very competitive 89-73. More fans attended than ever before; suddenly, there was life here. 

It was in September of that year that Tony Fernandez made his debut. He had been signed in 1979, a teenager out of San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic; he was, still, just 21. He came in as a pinch-runner, and he scored on a wild pitch. That was the beginning.

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Just two years ago, the Blue Jays used an MLB-record 21 different starters over the course of a season, most of whom were either years past their prime or pitching in the majors for the very first time. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t go so well. Toronto tried to fix that last winter by adding nearly enough pitchers to build a whole new rotation, then acquired three more starters at the August trade deadline. Even after all that movement, though, the Jays still finished 24th in the majors in pitching WAR.

The Blue Jays don’t have an arm quantity problem; they have an arm quality problem. But between a free-agent market lacking in top-end starting pitching and an apparent unwillingness to compete with the Padres and White Sox in making trades for aces, Toronto has been unable to address that need. Instead, it has directed its financial resources elsewhere, adding two of the best free-agent hitters of this winter’s class and the best reliever of the 2019 season. The Blue Jays have improved their offense and their bullpen. As for their starting pitchers, well, there sure are a lot of them.

You can add one more arm to that growing pile, as Toronto acquired left-hander Steven Matz from the Mets on Wednesday in exchange for three young right-handed pitchers: Sean Reid-Foley, Yennsy Diaz and Josh Winckowski. Matz, 29, is entering his final year of team control and is set to make just over $5 million in 2021. He became expendable in New York after the team acquired Joey Lucchesi — a younger, cheaper, and more controllable left-handed starter — from the Padres in the three-team deal that sent Joe Musgrove from Pittsburgh to San Diego. On the Mets, Matz was either the fifth or sixth starter in an elite rotation. In Toronto, he’ll be the fifth or sixth starter in a rotation that is merely okay.

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