Ross Atkins was hired as Toronto’s Executive VP of Baseball Operations and General Manager in December 2015, shortly after Mark Shapiro was officially named the team’s President and CEO. Both came to the Blue Jays from Cleveland, where they’d worked together with the Indians for the past 15 years. A formidable pairing atop Toronto’s front office hierarchy, they are — as Atkins is quick to point out — nonetheless just two pieces of a much larger puzzle.

The Blue Jays have undergone organizational change in recent seasons, but the past six months stand out. John Gibbons was formally dismissed as manager in late September, and several members of his coaching staff followed him out the door. The roster has also undergone change. Troy Tulowitzki has departed, as have Russell Martin, Josh Donaldson, Curtis Granderson, Marco Estrada, and JA Happ. Notably, all of these player are 33 years old or older.

Fifty-three-year-old Charlie Montoyo is the biggest incoming name. The bench coach in Tampa Bay last year, Montoyo has replaced Gibbons in the manager’s chair. Four of his coaches are imports from other organizations, while two others were promoted from Toronto’s minor league system. Pete Walker and Luis Rivera are the only holdovers.

As is common within the industry, there have also been hirings, promotions, and the shifting of responsibilities throughout Toronto’s various departments. How do Atkins and Shapiro go about making such moves — not just in the front office, but across the board? Atkins addressed that question in a wide-ranging interview late last week. Read the rest of this entry »

Payton Henry grew up in a wrestling family in a wrestling town. That’s not the sport he settled on. The 21-year-old native of Pleasant Grove, Utah cast his lot with baseball, and went on to be selected in the sixth round of the 2016 draft by the Milwaukee Brewers. He’s seen by many as the NL Central club’s catcher of the future.

His backstory is one of Greco-Roman lineage. Henry’s paternal grandfather, Darold, won 10 state championships as a coach, and is a member of Utah’s Wrestling Hall of Fame. The patriarch coached 65 individual champions, including his son Darrin — Payton’s father — who captured a pair of titles. And while it eventually rolled away, the greenest of the apples tumbled from the same tree.

“I was kind of born to grow up a wrestler,” said Henry. “But then I fell in love with baseball. Once I realized I had a future in it, and started traveling a lot for baseball tournaments, I stopped wrestling. I didn’t have the time for it anymore.”

Being physically strong — weight training has long been part of his workout routine — and well-schooled in the sport’s technical aspects, he probably could have followed in his father’s footsteps. The coaches at Pleasant Grove High School certainly thought so. At the start of each year they would approach him and say,“Are you sure you don’t want to come out and wrestle?” Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday afternoon, Freddy Galvis, 29, signed a one-year contract to play baseball for the Toronto Blue Jays. The deal guarantees Galvis $5 million next year and either $1 or $5.5 million in 2020, depending on whether or not the Blue Jays exercise their team option on the contract. Even though contract expectations for Galvis were maybe a little bit higher than that coming into the offseason (you guessed he’d get two years and about $15 million), the deal he ended up accepting still seems like a pretty good get for a guy who posted a .294 wOBA last year and hasn’t ever posted a wRC+ above 85 (last year’s mark).

In Toronto, Galvis will join, at least to begin with, 25-year-old Lourdes Gurriel Jr. as a candidate for the Blue Jays’ starting shortstop job out of spring training, but he will likely thereafter end up spelling the younger man as a defensive replacement late in games and perhaps also against tough righties. Gurriel, the younger brother of Houston’s Yuli and son of Cuban baseball legend Lourdes Sr., had a reasonably strong debut season at the plate in 2018 (his .446 slugging percentage was particularly promising, paired as it was with a modest-for-today 22% strikeout rate) but injured his knee in August and his hamstring in September and worried observers with occasionally puzzling footwork at short.

In Galvis, the Blue Jays have an insurance policy against a scenario in which the bottom falls out of Gurriel’s offense (because he doesn’t walk very much, almost all of his value at the plate comes from his power stroke) and his defensive lapses therefore become intolerable. Galvis isn’t better as a hitter — in 2018, in fact, he was about 20% worse, at least as measured by wRC+ — but he’s always had a solid defensive reputation and, as a seven-year veteran, his approach at the plate is enough of a known quantity that it is unlikely to fall entirely off a cliff. If Gurriel’s offensive performance ever gets to the point that it begins to look like Galvis’, the deciding factor will be the defense, and Galvis is likely to win that battle. Read the rest of this entry »

In a trade that sent Russell Martin back to Los Angeles, the Blue Jays acquired two interesting, but drastically different, prospects in teenage second baseman Ronny Brito and Double-A righty Andrew Sopko.

Sopko is the more likely of the two to wear a major league uniform, as his skills are constantly desired among teams seeking to build starting pitching depth at Double and Triple-A in the event of big league injuries. He’s an efficient strike-thrower with spot starter’s stuff; a fastball that resides in the 88-92 range, an average changeup that flashes above, and a slurvy breaking ball with enough depth that it will be an issue for hitters who struggle to square up break.

Pitchers with this kind of stuff are typically found at the very back of the rotation or waiting to pick up a start due to injury. The frequency with which pitchers get hurt makes teams’ 6th-8th starters very important, as they may have to make meaningful starts at some point during the year. Sopko projects to be a very competent version of this.

Brito is more boom or bust. After dealing with injury and struggling badly throughout his first full pro season, Brito had a monster year in the offense-friendly Pioneer League, slashing .288/.352/.489 with 11 homers in 53 games at age 19.

While the dizzying elevations of the Pioneer League drastically inflate offensive performance, Brito does have legitimate, above-average raw power, and he’s capable of hitting balls out to all fields, even as a teenager, something not typical of middle infield prospects.

What eyeball scouts are skeptical of, though, is Brito’s bat. He’s free-swinging and prone to the strike out. His swing has gone through several iterations — a leg kick was implemented and then uninstalled for a while last fall, for one — and all of this mechanical variability makes it harder to evaluate Brito as a hitter. But a lack of plate discipline makes Brito’s contact profile high risk, even if there’s natural feel for contact here once his swing gets dialed in.

He has a chance to stay at second base, but he hasn’t really improved there since signing, and some scouts think his defense has actively gone backwards as his frame has thickened. His body is also pretty much maxed out, so he’s not likely to grow into much more power as he ages, though he already has enough to profile at any infield spot provided he becomes a competent defender and takes better at-bats. If that stuff comes, Brito will be an everyday player, but scout-to-scout optimism for improvement is highly variable.

Because the Dodgers have two of the best young catching prospects in baseball, we knew they didn’t necessarily need a long-term solution behind the plate. But because the Dodgers lost Yasmani Grandal to free agency — and, ultimately, the Brewers — we knew they needed at least short-term help, to pair with Austin Barnes. One name that was frequently connected to Los Angeles was Francisco Cervelli, who the Pirates have considered moving. The Dodgers have gone in another direction, bringing back a familiar face, albeit a face that’s displaying more wrinkles.

Dodgers get:

• Russell Martin
• like a whole lot of money

Blue Jays get:

• Andrew Sopko
• Ronny Brito

Martin was available. Martin was obviously available. He’s almost 36 years old, and the Blue Jays like Danny Jansen. They also have Luke Maile, Reese McGuire, and, if he still deserves to be included, Max Pentecost. Martin was out of room to play in Toronto, so the team looked to shed some of his $20-million final-year salary. I don’t think that much of the salary is being shed here at all, but then, any savings count. The Jays are out from underneath at least a little bit of money. And the Dodgers have their veteran stopgap.

Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for more than half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Toronto Blue Jays.

Batters

This is a bit awkward, as the most interesting Blue Jays batters essentially sit in the Bench and Prospects section. Probably the starkest difference between ZiPS and Steamer comes in the form of Lourdes Gurriel, Jr., who has such an unhappy projection from ZiPS that I went back and ran it a second time to make sure I hadn’t goofed anything. From his minor league hit data, ZiPS doesn’t think Gurriel will be able to maintain his minor-league BABIP. And the poor defensive projection isn’t just ZiPS overreacting to Gurriel’s fairly poor BIS and UZR defensive numbers; as rudimentary as even play-by-play minor league defensive measures are, Gurriel’s estimates come in below-average there as well.

The larger problem with the Blue Jay offense is that ZiPS essentially sees little upside remaining among the established players. Tulowitzki and Donaldson were both gone, and while they weren’t stars in 2018 by any stretch of the imagination (and Tulo didn’t even get in a game), they at least represented the possibility of star-level performance going into 2018. Smoak’s 2017 was probably his high-water mark and he’s now a designated hitter on the wrong side of 30, while Devon Travis is another year further away from when he looked like he could be a borderline star. Toronto was 10th in the AL in runs scored in 2018, but outside of the admittedly super-exciting addition of Vladimir Guerrero Jr., I just don’t see much of a hope for this unit doing much more than last year. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

At last, we’ve reached the final installment of my round-up of the 14 players on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot who are certain to fall below the 5% threshold, with most of them being shut out entirely. It’s no tragedy that they’ll miss out on plaques in Cooperstown, but their triumphs and travails are worth remembering just the same.

Jon Garland

Known mainly for his durability, Garland was the perfect embodiment of a League Average Innings Muncher (LAIM), a term coined by blogger Travis Nelson in late 2003, generally describing dogged but unspectacular sorts such as Dave Burba, Jeff Suppan, and Steve Trachsel who rarely deviated from average run prevention by more than 10%. Over a nine-year span from 2002-2010, the heavy sinker-reliant Garland never made fewer than 32 starts or threw fewer than 191.2 innings, only once finishing with an ERA+ outside of the 91-to-111 range. In 2005, he put it all together, making his lone All-Star team and helping the White Sox to their first championship in 88 years.

Born September 27, 1979 in Valencia, California, Garland grew to 6-foot-5 1/2 and 200 pounds by the time he was a senior in high school (1997), able to throw 90 mph when that was a big deal. That year, he made a variety of pre- and postseason All-America teams, and planned to go to the University of Southern California, but when he was chosen with the 10th pick of the amateur draft by the Cubs, he signed for a $1.325 million bonus and was on his way. Less than 14 months later, he was traded to the White Sox straight up for reliever Matt Karchner in a rare crosstown deal; the Cubs got all of 60.2 innings of 0.1 WAR relief work in exchange for their top pick from the previous season.

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

We continue our quick look at the 14 players on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot who are certain to fall below the 5% threshold — with most of them being shut out entirely — but are worth remembering just the same.

Placido Polanco

A valuable player who started for five playoff teams, Polanco didn’t pack much punch with his contact-oriented approach at the plate, but he was quite a glove whiz, rangy and sure-handed, at home at both second base and third. In fact, he was just the second player to win Gold Gloves at multiple positions (after Darin Erstad), and his 136 career fielding runs ranks 31st among all infielders.

Born on October 10, 1975 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Polanco came to the U.S. on a student visa, attending Miami Dade Community College. Drafted by the Cardinals in the 19th round in 1994, he began his minor league career as a shortstop, and though he spent all of 1996 and ’97 as a second baseman, played more short than second during his 45-game callup in 1998. He spent most of his five-season tenure in St. Louis as a utilityman, earning an increasing amount of playing time as his offense improved. In 2000, he hit .316/.347/.418 in 350 PA, while in 2001 he upped his playing time to 610 PA while batting .307/.342/.383; he was a combined 23 runs above average at third base (his primary position), second and short, boosting his WAR to 4.5. The Cardinals made the playoffs in both of those seasons.

Read the rest of this entry »

In 2018, I once again had the pleasure of interviewing hundreds of people within baseball. Many of their words were shared in my Sunday Notes column, while others came courtesy of the FanGraphs Q&A series, the Learning and Developing a Pitch series, the Manager’s Perspective series, and a smattering of feature stories. Here is a selection of the best quotes from this year’s conversations.

———

“My slider will come out and it will be spinning, spinning, spinning, and then as soon as it catches, it picks up speed and shoots the other way. Whoosh! It’s like when you bowl. You throw the ball, and then as soon as it catches, it shoots with more speed and power. Right? “ — Sergio Romo, Tampa Bay Rays pitcher, January 2018

“One of the biggest lessons we learn is that iron sharpens iron. That is 100% how we try to do things with the Rockies — hiring people that are smarter than we are, and more skilled, and have different skills that can complement, and train people to be better at their jobs than I am at my job. That’s how you advance an organization.” — Jeff Bridich, Colorado Rockies GM, January 2018

“We could split hairs and say, ‘Hey, you’re playing in front of a thousand drunk Australians instead of 40,000 drunk Bostonians, and you’re living with a host family instead of at a five-star hotel.’ But The Show is The Show, and in Australia the ABL is The Show.” — Lars Anderson, baseball nomad, January 2018

“Baseball is heaven. Until our closer blows the game.” — Michael Hill, Miami Marlins president of baseball operations, January 2018 Read the rest of this entry »

When Thomas Pannone was featured here in April 2017, I wrote that he was “quietly emerging as a legitimate pitching prospect.” Playing for Cleveland’s High-A affiliate at the time, the Rhode Island-born southpaw hadn’t allowed an earned run in his last 38 innings. Amid negligible fanfare, Pannone was on a roll.

His address and level of notoriety have since changed. Sent to Toronto in the 2017 trade-deadline deal that delivered Joe Smith to Northeast Ohio, Pannone proceeded to test positive for a performance-enhancing substance, prompting a suspension that kept him out of action until this past June. He flew through the minors upon his return. Called up in August, Pannone appeared in 12 games for the Blue Jays— six as a starter — and logged a 4.19 ERA over 43 innings. He picked up four wins, to boot.

As for punch outs, while they aren’t particularly prominent in Pannone’s resume, he did manage to send 29 batters back to the dugout as an official scorer entered a K into a scoresheet. Kevin Kiermaier — the first player to step into the box against him — went down looking on a hook. Read the rest of this entry »