Projection systems tend to look at reality a whole lot more soberly than us humans, who can fall madly in love with a player on the basis of aesthetic appeal alone. That’s why most offseason columns here at FanGraphs reviewing free-agent acquisitions tend to damper down instead of ramp up excitement.

So it is a meaningful testament to Russell Martin’s skills that, upon being signed by the Toronto Blue Jays to a five-year, $82M contract as a 31-year-old catcher — i.e. after Martin has already sustained several lifetimes of knee-shredding, cup-checking abuse in baseball’s most brutal position — the deal was graded positively in these pages by Mr. Sullivan.

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Let’s reflect on the FanGraphs staff predictions, shall we? Seems like a great idea for the 28th of April. Every single voter selected the Nationals to win the National League East. Okay, great start. Taijuan Walker got the most votes for the American League Rookie of the Year, and his ERA’s almost 7. Daniel Norris also got some meaningful support. Devon Travis got half as many votes as Norris did. So the best you could say is that Travis at least got his name picked by a few people. I bring this up because, as silly as it is to be thinking about awards in the season’s first month, right now Travis ranks third in baseball in wRC+. Perhaps more shocking, Travis ranks fourth in baseball in isolated power. The Blue Jays decided to start Travis out of the gate even though he never spent a day at the highest level of the minors. All he’s done is out-hit the scorching-hot Nelson Cruz.

And this is a Toronto second baseman we’re talking about. Certainly, it’s not like the position is cursed. There’ve been good second basemen in Toronto before, and there’ll be good second basemen in Toronto again, after the Travis days are over. But the Blue Jays are the reason you even recognize the name Ryan Goins. Devon Travis isn’t Ryan Goins. It’s not quite clear what Devon Travis is, but one answer seems to be “surprisingly powerful.”

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Making wholesale role changes two weeks into the season is not likely a sound strategy, as the decisions leading up to Opening Day take in much more reliable information with considerably more history than a few appearances in April. Likewise, taking promising starters who have yet to prove they cannot start and sending them to the bullpen where they will pitch considerably fewer innings is not ideal either. Yet that is where the Toronto Blue Jays sit heading into the third week of the season. The Blue Jays were dealt a blow in Spring Training when Marcus Stroman was lost for the year after a knee injury that required surgery, and they are still reeling from that loss.

A battle for the fifth spot in the rotation between Daniel Norris, Aaron Sanchez, and Marco Estrada shifted as the Blue Jays anointed two of their top three prospects as starters to begin the season. With Aaron Sanchez struggling, Daniel Norris beginning the season with a dead arm, and a young bullpen that has already switched closers, the Blue Jays pitching staff has provided more questions than answers.

In five starts this season, Norris and Sanchez have combined for 22 innings and 15 strikeouts while giving up 12 walks and five home runs. The poor performance and low innings totals thus far have put a strain on an inexperienced bullpen. The Blue Jays 47 2/3 innings pitched out of the bullpen are tied for fourth Major League Baseball, but they’re not getting worked so much because they’re dominating when called upon; those innings have come with a 4.16 FIP, ranking 26th in MLB. The Blue Jays bullpen is both performing poorly and getting overworked, never a good combination for mid-April.
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You’ve probably seen what Kevin Pillar did on Wednesday. On the off chance you haven’t, we’ll get to that later, at the right time. Let this much be said now: it was absolutely extraordinary. But it also wasn’t the first Pillar highlight of the season. The guy who was supposed to lose time to Michael Saunders has so far played in place of Michael Saunders, and, it’s been a busy several days.

One play alone can’t explain this: in the early going — the very-stupid-early going — Pillar leads baseball in Defensive Runs Saved, with seven. As a matter of fact, if you set a low threshold of 500 innings, then, since 2010, Pillar ranks third among major-league outfielders in DRS per inning, or per 1,000 innings, or per whatever denominator you choose. He hasn’t played enough for that to be super meaningful, but he’s done enough for that to be interesting, and it isn’t lost on me that a pillar is a stationary building support. Grant Balfour has been a pretty good pitcher. Kevin Pillar has been a pretty good defender.

So let’s review Pillar’s week that was. Everything you see below was contained within Pillar’s most recent seven games, through Wednesday, with the first game chosen because that’s when Pillar recorded his first assist. I noted that Pillar has been busy. Ever wondered what 7 DRS looks like? Wednesday’s catch was just the latest feat. And there have been close calls. And there have been misplays. The antonym of “pillar” is “Kevin Pillar”, apparently, because he hasn’t been able to stop moving around. The man’s made himself noticed.

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In Monday’s “Opening Day Staff Survey,” Dave said the storyline he was most looking forward to this season was, “Breaking in young pitching prospects as relievers.” This was a little bit vague, but he elucidated on it further later that day when he recorded his weekly podcast with Carson. If you skip to the 30-minute mark, we get to the heart of the issue:

“Earl Weaver used to do this all the time with his relievers back in the 70s, but he broke them in as long relievers; we didn’t really have these one-inning specialists that they have today. So you’d break in these young pitchers, but they’d go two, three, four innings. They’d have to face hitters multiple times, they’d have to work on multiple pitches, they’d have to pace themselves a little bit. To me, that’s a little bit different than breaking in a guy as a ninth-inning guy or as an eighth-inning guy and telling him to throw as hard as possible for 15 pitches.”

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Episode 548
Nick Gordon is the Minnesota shortstop prospect selected fifth overall in the most recent draft. Jeff Hoffman is a right-hander, also among the top-10 selections of the 2014 draft, who’s currently at the end of his recovery from a Tommy John procedure. This edition of FanGraphs Audio features both of them, in conversation with lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel. (Note: Gordon’s interview begins at about the 9:45 mark; Hoffman’s, around the 17:40 mark.)

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 33 min play time.)

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And now the final division preview, just in time for Opening Day. If you missed them, here are the first five:

NL West
AL West
NL Central
AL Central
NL East

Now, wrapping things up with the AL East.

The Projected Standings

The only division in baseball where all five teams have a legitimate shot at winning; the projected spread between first and last place in the AL East is smaller than the gap between first and second place in the NL East. The forecasts have a favorite, but this division is wide open, and nearly any order of finish could be reasonable. On to the teams themselves.

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For the second year in a row, the Blue Jays headed into spring training with no clear second baseman. Last year, their second base competition featured Ryan Goins, Maicer Izturis, Munenori Kawasaki, Chris Getz and Steve Tolleson. Unsurprisingly, this quintet ranked last in our preseason, second base positional power rankings with a collective projection of 0.1 WAR. Nonetheless, the Jays rolled with this group all season, and things got ugly. Real ugly. Blue Jays second basemen combined for 0.3 WAR last year, and 0.7 of that WAR came from Brett Lawrie, who was supposed to be the team’s third baseman, but filled at second for 32 games.

A year later, not much has changed. Goins, Izturis, Kawasaki and Tolleson are all still on the team’s depth chart, and once again, the Blue Jays checked in at number 30 in our second base power rankings. For the second consecutive year, Toronto’s outlook at at the keystone looks pretty dismal. But unlike last year, there’s reason for hope for Blue Jays fans. While last year’s cast of characters is still around, the team’s opening day second baseman will be someone new: 24-year-old rookie Devon Travis, who secured the job by hitting .352/.397/.463 this spring. Read the rest of this entry »

R.A. Dickey’s entire career has, essentially, been one giant experiment. You know the story by now. Dickey was drafted by the Texas Rangers back in 1996, and took a signing bonus for nearly $800,000 less than what was originally offered after team doctors discovered he just didn’t even have an ulnar collateral ligament in his throwing elbow. Dickey scuffled through the minor and major leagues for more than a decade before reinventing himself as a knuckleballer and promptly becoming one of baseball’s best pitchers, winning a Cy Young Award in the process.

Dickey’s experiment, obviously, was the knuckleball. But around Dickey, other experiments followed. Like the Mets giving light-hitting catcher Josh Thole regular playing time due in large part to his ability to catch Dickey’s knuckleball. Catching a knuckleball is quite hard, you see. But Thole could do it, and the two built a strong rapport together.

Then, the Blue Jays took over the experiment by trading top prospects Travis d’Arnaud and Noah Syndergaard for Dickey, and, of course, his personal catcher, Thole. In Toronto, Thole’s position was reduced to exclusively serving as Dickey’s catcher. He couldn’t hit worth a lick, but he could catch Dickey’s dancing knuckler, and that was enough to keep him on the roster.

In the offseason, the Blue Jays signed Russell Martin to a contract worth $82 million, which, alongside incumbent Dioner Navarro, gave the Blue Jays something of a logjam at catcher if they wanted to continue carrying Dickey’s personal backstop on the roster.

Then, on Tuesday, some news:

Thole was sent to Buffalo today, so Russ Martin will catch the knuckleball. #bluejays

— Brendan Kennedy (@BKennedyStar) March 31, 2015

In 2015, a new R.A. Dickey experiment begins. Maybe you’d prefer to call it a Russell Martin experiment, because Dickey’s largely going to continue throwing his knuckler the same as he ever has. Martin is the one learning something new.
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This time, at least, it’s a little different. Yu Darvish sustained an injury while pitching. Cliff Lee sustained an injury while pitching. Gavin Floyd, Masahiro Tanaka, Jose Fernandez, Matt Harvey, so many of the others — they sustained their injuries while pitching. Marcus Stroman sustained an injury while fielding. His throwing arm is completely fine. His throwing arm, also, is completely useless to him at the moment, because you can’t pitch through a torn ACL. The freak injury will knock Stroman out for the duration of 2015, and though he should be good to go after that, the calendar says “2015” right now, and we’ll be without something we all thought we’d have. Stroman, like the others, has been taken from his team, and he’s been taken from the game.

There’s also that other twist. Darvish is a devastating loss, but then, the Rangers didn’t seem particularly poised to challenge for the playoffs. Lee would be another devastating loss, but even with him healthy, the Phillies looked like a mess. Floyd was just re-injured, and the Indians could win the AL Central, but the Indians also have a ton of pitching depth, and they knew Floyd was a risk. The Blue Jays had dreams of winning the World Series. Stroman figured to be the No. 1, and the team didn’t look deep with him. This is a massive blow, and it’s a massive blow to a team right on that win-curve position where a massive blow can be the most massive. People are mourning this. It’s not that much of an overreaction.

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