Even after their big offseason moves, the Blue Jays were not the consensus pick to win the 2013 American League East, as three or even four teams seemed to have a good shot. Very few, however, probably thought the Jays would be the one team left out of the race almost from the start. Yet here we are in the middle of August, and Toronto is the only team in the division under .500, a distant seven and a half games behind the fourth-place Yankees. The litany of problems is well-known: the starting pitching has been terrible, Jose Reyes got hurt, and more. Not every player has been disappointing, however. Colby Rasmus, who came to the Jays in a 2011 trade with the Cardinals, is having his best season since 2010. Indeed, his performance this year resembles that 2010 season in multiple ways.

Read the rest of this entry »

The author attended a Double-A Eastern League game on Tuesday between the Bowie Baysox (a Baltimore affiliate) and New Hampshire Fisher Cats (Toronto) in Manchester, NH. What follows is a brief examination of three Blue Jays prospects from same.

Marcus Stroman, RHP

After returning in May from a 50-game suspension for a banned stimulant, the right-handed Duke product Stroman has been excellent for New Hampshire, having recorded strikeout and walk rates of 29.9% and 6.8%, respectively, entering Tuesday’s contest. Those figures situate him third among Eastern League starters behind only Cleveland prospect Danny Salazar (since promoted) and the Mets’ Noah Syndergaard by SCOUT, itself essentially a regressed (and probably poorly calculated) form of kwERA.

Read the rest of this entry »

So much of what we do is try to separate the signal from the noise. That is, a lot of what we do is investigate whether what we’re looking at, statistically, is real. We’re always chasing evaluations of a player’s true talent because we want to know what that player’s going to do. We want to know how his team is going to do because we think we want to know the future. As a group, we’re not horrible, but we’re not very good. There are biases that we have, there are things we don’t know and there’s the matter of players being humans and humans being all change-y. So often, we end up having to throw up our hands and say, “Welp.” Firm conclusions are hard to come by because firm conclusions are almost impossible to reach.

The greatest problem and the greatest solution is sample size. The rule of thumb is the smaller the sample of data, the greater the error bars around the actual signal. It follows, then, that the greater the sample of data, the smaller the error, assuming the players aren’t changing too much. If you observe one characteristic in one year, then that’s meaningful. If you observe it in three or four or five years, then that’s a lot more meaningful.  You’ve got signal that drowns out the noise. Which  brings us to Mark Buehrle and the Blue Jays.

Read the rest of this entry »

At most, the trade deadline completely consumed you. Like a gas, it expanded to fill the entire volume of your being, and you lost everything but your unwavering anticipation. Family, friends, loved ones, employment — sacrificed, all of them, cast aside, so you could commit yourself to figuring out whether your team would trade for Bud Norris. At least, the trade deadline was a partial distraction, something besides the games to take your attention away from the games somewhat. We have only so much attention to give, and the deadline caused that attention to be divided. Only now can we get back to something approximating normal.

Because of the deadline, you might’ve missed what happened. Already this week, baseball has seen at least three highly unusual things take place on the field. I thought I’d take this opportunity to note all of them, just to make sure they didn’t slip by un- or under-noticed. I say “at least three” because it’s entirely possible I’m missing more rare events. If there is something I missed, you can blame the deadline. It divided my attention, too, and I couldn’t really help it. Now let’s get to appreciating the incredible.

Read the rest of this entry »

Carlos Delgado’s official retirement in 2011 sort of slipped under the radar. It was understandable, since it came in April right after the beginning of the season. It was a bit unfortunate, though, because Delgado had an wonderful career. Yesterday at the Rogers Centre, the former Met and Marlin slugger was recognized by the team he was most closely associated with, the Blue Jays, during a ceremony in which he was inducted into the Jays’ “Level of Excellence.”

[It’s a tremendous name, isn’t it? I can imagine the brainstorming that went into it. Team President: “You need to come up with a name for our version of a Ring of Honor that is a bit different. Something like, ‘Level of Excellence,’ but, you know, better.” {President leaves rooms.} Marketing Person to others: “‘Level of Excellence’ okay with everyone?” {Others shrug in assent.}]

Delgado was outstanding, but he was no Hall of Famer. He move from catcher to first base early on, and even that position was a stretch, no matter how hard he tried. He was bad on the bases. But the guy could hit. From 1997 to 2004, he was one of the best hitters in the American League. His 148 wRC+ over that span was the equal of Alex Rodriguez and better than Edgar Martinez and Frank Thomas.

Read the rest of this entry »

The last time I wrote about Edge% it was in the context of the Tampa Bay Rays using it to get their pitchers into more favorable counts on 1-1. But now I want to take that topic and drill a little deeper to understand how often edge pitches are taken for called strikes.

Overall, pitches taken on the edge are called strikes 69% of the time. But that aggregate measure hides some pretty substantial differences. Going further on that idea, I wanted to see how the count impacts the likelihood of a pitch on the edge being called a strike.

Here are the results:

Read the rest of this entry »

R.A. Dickey’s first half hasn’t gone that well, as both he and the team struggled early. Lately, though, the Blue Jays are baseball’s most interesting turnaround, with the other players on the roster carrying the team while the Blue Jays knuckleballer tries to get things straightened out. As Eno Sarris noted back in May, Dickey’s velocity has been noticeably down this year, and while that might not seem like a big deal for a knuckleball pitcher, Dickey’s velocity with the floater is what has set him apart from previous hurlers who threw the pitch.

In an interview with Sarris a few weeks back, Dickey noted that health issues have contributed to the problem, but he was hopeful that he’d be able to bounce back soon. Last week, Drew Sheppard created a series of images showing the movement on Dickey’s various knuckleballers, including these two showing the difference in arm speeds from 2012 to 2013.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sort relievers backwards by velocity, and only four closers are in the bottom 30. Sergio Romo and Huston Street live on their sliders, Koji Uehara has his splitter, and then there’s Casey Janssen, humming along with his cutter and a 90 mph fastball. I asked him how he does it, and he graciously answered without resorting to fisticuffs.

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know what the top story in baseball actually is, because we don’t have a measurement for that. I guess it could be anything. What it should be, though, is the fact that the Toronto Blue Jays have won 11 consecutive games. If this were a simple 11-game winning streak, it’d be newsworthy, just because of the odds. But adding to the richness here is the identity of the team, and everything it’s been through. A team that was supposed to be good then was not good, then suddenly became impossibly good, climbing all the way back into the race. Just when people were ready to start officially writing the Blue Jays off as a bust, they picked themselves up in the fastest way possible.

The standings, now, are incredibly tight. In the American League East, five games separate first from fifth, which is also fourth. The Jays are three back in the wild card, and while there’s a point at which the gap is too large to fancy yourself a contender, the point’s a hell of a lot bigger than three. This is a team that’s been banged up, and this is a team that’s about to have the return of Jose Reyes. Unless things quickly reverse course, the Jays won’t soon be selling any pieces. They’ve erased much of their disadvantage.

Read the rest of this entry »

You all know the R.A. Dickey story by now. Journeyman major leaguer reinvents himself as a knuckleball thrower in his 30s, then refines the pitch to become one of the better starting pitchers in baseball, culminating with his selection as the National League Cy Young Award winner last year. The knuckleball is always a fascinating pitch, and Dickey is a fascinating guy, so there has been no shortage of media attention focused his direction.

While I was not working here at FanGraphs last year, I could not resist taking a belated look at some of Dickey’s dominating knuckleballs from that 2012 season. I’ve selected three particularly impressive pitches from that campaign and used an effect known as StroMotion to help track their movement.

Read the rest of this entry »