Archive for Blue Jays

One of the coolest stories taking place right now is the emergence of George Springer in Houston. Springer is among the more interesting prospects in recent years, and after a bit of a rough introduction to the majors, Springer’s caught fire. He homered again Wednesday, and over the course of the last month, Springer’s gone deep nine times, ahead of Yasiel Puig, Giancarlo Stanton, and Troy Tulowitzki. Springer’s been one of the best power hitters in the world, and over that month, he’s also hit 40% fewer home runs than Edwin Encarnacion.

Encarnacion stands at 15 dingers in 30 days, and over those 30 days, that’s more home runs than have been hit by both the Cardinals and the Royals as whole teams. Previous to the hot streak, Encarnacion had gone deep just once, prompting people to worry that something was wrong. If something was wrong, it was resolved in a damned hurry, and now Encarnacion is among the Blue Jays who have led the team into a playoff position. It’s interesting to examine some of Encarnacion’s recent trends. It’s interesting, too, to compare those against larger ones.

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Dave observed the other day on Twitter that, over the past calendar year, Mark Buehrle has been one of the better and more valuable starting pitchers in baseball. A lot of that has had to do with home-run suppression, and if you read FanGraphs often, you know how we generally feel about home-run suppression, but the larger point is that, after getting off to a rough start in Toronto, Buehrle turned things around and continues to get batters out to this day. His strikeouts right now are basically the same as ever, and every game batters against Buehrle return to their dugouts shaking their heads. He is what he has been, allowing him to feel ageless.

Consider everything about Buehrle and you might assume that he’s pitching like he always has. Why mess with what’s been working? Buehrle’s always been a little bit deceptive and a little bit finesse, and it’s not like you very often see a pitcher in his mid-30s make an approach adjustment. But if you dig beneath the 2014 Mark Buehrle surface, you notice something you can’t un-notice. Of his 31 strikeouts, 20 have been called. This is unusual, and this has an explanation.

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The first batter Masahiro Tanaka ever faced in a regular-season game in the majors hit a home run. On Tanaka’s third-ever pitch, Melky Cabrera blasted Tanaka’s signature splitter, and just that quickly was the fairy tale smashed. There would be no season-opening whiff or shutout, and Tanaka might’ve figured the home run would stick with him for the length of his career. And that much is true, in that the game was documented, and Cabrera’s homer is something people will always be able to look up. But no one thinks of Yu Darvish and remembers that his career began with a four-pitch walk of Chone Figgins. No one thinks of Daisuke Matsuzaka and remembers that his career began with a single by David DeJesus. No one thinks of Stephen Strasburg and remembers that his career began with a 2-and-0 line drive by Andrew McCutchen. People will remember Tanaka for however Tanaka performs overall, and, one start in, it seems there’s an awful lot to like.

Which should surprise absolutely no one. Tanaka isn’t just a rookie — he’s a rookie recently given a nine-figure contract. Against the Jays, he threw two-thirds of his pitches for strikes. He kept the ball on the ground, outside of the dinger, and he didn’t issue a single walk while he struck the hitter out eight times. It was, granted, a Jays lineup without Jose Reyes, but it was a Jays lineup with everybody else, and Tanaka needed very little time to settle in and find a dominant groove. And along the way, he happened to pitch a lot like another front-of-the-rotation American League arm.

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As we start the second week of April, it’s that fun time of year where individual stats really and truly don’t mean anything yet — unless you think that Charlie Blackmon is a true-talent .542/.560/.792 player, in which case, seek help immediately — and yet we are baseball writers on a baseball site, so we still need to digest what’s happening and try to put some meaning to it. As Jeff said the other day, the games still matter, even if the slash lines don’t, really.

So in looking at some of the absurd early season hitting lines, it’s less about what is “best” and more about what is interesting. It’s great that Mike Trout and Chase Utley and Freddie Freeman have killer early lines, because they’re great players. It’s fun to see that Emilio Bonifacio and Dee Gordon and Yangervis Solarte have great early lines, because it’s fun to see BABIP above .500 and to see how skewed tiny samples can make all of this. None of this fundamentally changes our understanding of what those players are.

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The fastest pitch Mark Buehrle threw Wednesday was just shy of 84 miles per hour. For Buehrle, in early April, that’s not out of the ordinary, and he’s long been a guy who’s managed to make it work in the low- to mid-80s. What was a little more out of the ordinary was everything else. Armed with his usual stuff, Buehrle struck out 11 of 30 Tampa Bay batters. He was a fastball away from completing a shutout, and Buehrle himself was taken by surprise by what he was able to do.

Only one other time in his extraordinary career has Buehrle’s strikeout total reached double digits. He whiffed a dozen Mariners all the way back in April 2005, in a game that lasted all of 99 minutes. So, this was Buehrle’s second-highest strikeout total ever. Yet he generated just a dozen swings and misses. That’s a high number, but not as high as the strikeouts would suggest. In 28 career starts, Buehrle has missed more than 12 bats. In another 14, he’s missed exactly 12 bats. Buehrle was unusually unhittable without being unusually unhittable, and the reason for that is the very reason for Buehrle’s continued success in the bigs.

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Watching the Braves rotation grab appendages has been tough this spring. Kris Medlen has ligament damage in his elbow, Brandon Beachy has biceps soreness, and Mike Minor survived a scarred urethra only to encounter shoulder soreness. None of the three is a lock to make the opening day rotation. And this is a team that brought two veteran free agents in for depth and had extra youth at the back end of their rotation. They might be fine without Ervin Santana, but yet that team does inspire a question. How many major-league ready starting pitchers should a competitive team field in a given year?

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Look at our depth charts, please. Go ahead, look! If you sort by position, ascending from worst to best, you’ll see a few spots that are projected to be just awful, by which I mean, “1 WAR or less.” That’s close enough to zero WAR that we can safely describe them as “replacement-level,” and that’s not a situation any contender wants to be in. Of course, many of those spots — Marlins shortstop, Brewers first base, etc. — don’t belong to likely contenders, which I will completely arbitrarily define as having playoff odds of at least 30 percent on our Cool Standings page.

That still leaves a few potential contenders with a big problem, but none more so than second base in Toronto, where the Blue Jays are apparently actually planning to give Ryan Goins a crack at second base, if for no other reason than that Maicer Izturis was atrocious last year. Between Goins, Izturis, Munenori Kawasaki, Chris Getz, and Steve Tolleson, the Jays keystone crew ranks dead last in our second base projections, and no, newcomer Brett Morel’s attempt to move from third isn’t changing that needle.

If anything, that combined projection of 0.4 WAR seems possibly high, because it partially depends on Izturis being somewhat less miserable than he was last season. If Goins can even manage to be replacement-level, that will be something, because he’s coming off a Triple-A debut in which he hit just .257/.311/.369, followed by a .252/.264/.345 line (and a 1.7% walk rate!) in 121 plate appearances after the Jays after Izturis injured his ankle and Emilio Bonifacio was traded. The Fans, Steamer, and Oliver all think he’ll put up a wRC+ in the 60-69 range, which is of course terrible, no matter how good the glove is, and for a team that still has a chance to contend, that’s just not going to work. Read the rest of this entry »

Jason Heyward was supposed to be going to court in a few weeks. His agents had filed a salary number for arbitration, and his team was a file-to-trial team — once a player has filed an arbitration number with a file-to-trial team, it’s supposed to mean that they are headed to court to debate their respective cases in front of an arbitrator. We thought about this situation when they filed, and it seemed that were reasons on both sides for the public fight over $300 thousand — the team wanted to discuss more reasonable numbers quicker and needed the threat of trial, while the agents in this case were aggressive and didn’t mind the consequences, apparently.

But today, look in the news, and there’s an announcement — the Braves and Heyward have agreed to a two-year $13.3 million deal. This seems to go against the file-to-trial policy, at first. Until you look around the game and realize that two other file-to-trial teams, the Rays and the Blue Jays, have also made deals like this after filing numbers. Now it looks like there was one last benefit to the file-to-trial policy that we didn’t get to: leverage in negotiations for a multi-year deal.

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After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Toronto Blue Jays. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Kansas City / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / Seattle / St. Louis / Tampa Bay.

Batters
From their top-five position players (Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion, Brett Lawrie, Colby Rasmus, and Jose Reyes) the Blue Jays are projected to extract 16.4 wins, according to ZiPS. A convenient number, that, for the sake of constructing an Intriguing Narrative, on account of it’s precisely the number of wins produced by all Toronto field players in 2013. If the club can manage to surround their five best hitters with not-worse-than-replacement-level players, the reasoning goes, then they’ll be at least as valuable as last year.

General manager Alex Anthopoulos et al. do appear to have taken steps towards this end. J.P. Arencibia and Emilio Bonifacio, for example, were among the club’s most grievous offenders last year, combining for a negative win. And while, owing to regression, neither would likely be expected to perform so badly in 2014, neither will have the chance, it appears, as they’re now employed by Texas and Kansas City, respectively. Second base remains an issue, however: ZiPS projects Ryan Goins* and Maicer Izturis for a collective 0.5 WAR in over 900 plate appearances.

*Note: the author accidentally credited Goins with a 2 WAR in the depth chart he tweeted yesterday (Wednesday) afternoon. Apologies.

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The Braves are going to arbitration with Jason Heyward over $300 thousand dollars. It’s a wonderful sentence, full of so many words that could set you off in a million different directions. And so I followed those strings, talking to as many people involved in arbitration as I could. Many of those directions did lead me to denigrations of arbitration, and of the file-to-trial arbitration policy that the Braves employ. There’s another side to that sort of analysis though. Arbitration is not horrid. File-to-trial policies have their use. This is not all the Braves’ fault.

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