Don't make this any harder
Everybody's waiting
Road trip! And then the All-Star Break.
I was thinking about the Blue Jays offense, and you'll be impressed to know that this did not make me rush out and consume a number of very strong drinks. As has been said many times, I have the strength of ten men (I then like to quip that those ten men are the Seven Dwarfs and the Three Stooges, but never mind.)
Surely we saw this coming, to some extent. The idea behind the offseason changes was to improve the defense, recognizing that in the process the team would lose a bit of offense along the way. No one expected Kiermaier and Varsho to match the production of Hernandez and Gurriel.
This still isn't quite what we expected. Last year, Toronto had the second best offense in the AL, behind the Yankees. This year, they're eighth (just ahead of the Yankees.) AL offense is up this year, from 4.22 runs per game to 4.52 - but the Jays have fallen from 4.78 runs per game to 4.46, and it's not all Kiermaier and Varsho replacing Gurriel and Hernandez.
Vladimir Guerrero gets much of the attention around here, and takes most of the heat when things don't go as everyone hopes. Guerrero hasn't been bad this season. People shouldn't say things like that, because it's flat out wrong. (I might even point out that once upon a time the Blue Jays won a World Series with about this level of production from their first baseman.) But no one expects Guerrero to be merely okay, to be a solid complementary bat in a lineup of his betters. I trust we've all come to realize that a significant amount of his 2021 production owed a lot to his unique affinity for couple of ballparks that the team hasn't played in since. (I did make a point of telling all of you!) But even so - Guerrero's work this year is still not what this team needs from him, expects from him, and it's not what Guerrero expects from himself either. He's obviously been frustrated, and his frustration has at moments spilled over into other parts of his game. And what has to be really, really frustrating - for Guerrero and the team - is that it shouldn't be happening. It simply shouldn't He's hitting more balls hard than he's ever hit before. He's hitting more line drives than ever before. He's hitting fewer ground balls than ever before. He's striking out less often than ever before. This shouldn't be happening. But it is. This game will make you crazy.
The other big issue with this year's offense is behind the plate. In 2022, Alejandro Kirk turned in the best offensive season by a Blue Jays catcher in franchise history. And as wonderful as that was - Danny Jansen actually hit better than Kirk last year. This year - not so much. In fact, Kirk and Jansen have fallen off much more than Guerrero has. Now no one really expected the two catchers to be the heart of the offense, and maybe it was a bad idea to be counting on them to do it again. But still - Blue Jays catchers have made 336 Plate Appearances so far this season - not quite as many as the first basemen (368), but enough to make the wrong kind of difference.
In the process of preparing those paragraphs, I took the trouble - what else was I going to do on an off-day - to copy and paste all the Jays hitting records since 1977 into a spreadsheet, so I could compare Guerrero to all the other first basemen in franchise history, Kirk to the catchers. I'm a lazy sod, I started out just using OPS+. This, after all, is precisely what catch-all great statistics were made for - silly comparisons of large groups of seasons. Certainly not any kind of serious analysis. So in historical terms, Vlad's 2023 is middle of the pack for Jays first basemen. Somewhere in between a typical John Olerud season and a typical Lyle Overbay season.
I had lots of fun playing with the spreadsheet. I'm sure no one needs me to tell them that Josh Donaldson had the best offensive season by any Jays third baseman (2016, even ahead of his MVP year) and Jose Bautista the best by any right fielder (2011, edging out his 2010 season.) George Bell (1987) in left field is another no-brainer (Bell's own 1986 is next, though Gurriel's 57 games in 2020 ranks almost as high, albeit with some kind of asterisk.) Edwin Encarnacion has the best (2012) and third best (2015) seasons by a DH, with Molitor's 1993 in between. And Roberto Alomar's 1993 season comes out quite decisively ahead of Marcus Semien's 2021 - that 70 point advantage in OnBase more than makes up for a 40 point deficit in Slugging.
But centre field gave me pause. Lloyd Moseby (1983) and George Springer (2022) lead the way with an OPS+ of 134 - but in 2003, Vernon Wells a) had an OPS+ of 132, which is awfully close, and b) had 130 more Plate Appearances than either Moseby or Springer. And if I start making some kind of appropriate adjustment for Plate Appearances, things get muddied elsewhere on the diamond. Carlos Delgado's 2000 season just barely inches ahead of Olerud's 1993 season at first base. I'm not sold on that at all. Delgado's raw numbers that year were obviously much more impressive than Olerud's in 1993, but the offensive context was very, very different. But hey - Delgado has lots of other seasons in the team's top 15 at the position, and Olerud doesn't have any. Maybe it should be Carlos.
Catcher - Danny Jansen, 2019 (.207/.279.360 OPS+ 70). You may also want to hoot at Rod Barajas for 2009 (he was about as bad as Jansen, and batted 80 times more often.)
First Base - Lyle Overbay, 2007 (.240/.315/.391 OPS+ 85). You may prefer Willie Upshaw's final Toronto season - his numbers are almost frighteningly identical to Overbay's, over 100 more Plate Appearances.
Second Base - Aaron Hill, 2011 (.225/.270/.313 OPS+ 58) No one else is really close, and just two years earlier Hill had what was at the time the best ever season by a Jays second baseman not named Alomar.
Third Base - Danny Ainge, 1981 (.187/.258/.228 OPS+ 38) Kelly Gruber's 1992 was the worst by an actual baseball player.
Shortstop - Alfredo Griffin, 1984 (.241/.248/.298 OPS+ 48) Like Bichette at the top of the list for the position, Alfredo is mostly competing with himself down here.
Left Field - Alvis Woods, 1981 (.247/.291/.309) Distinctly worse than Reed Johnson's work during the Season From Hell.
Centre Field - Otis Nixon, 1997 (.252/.343/.304 OPS+ 72). We'll definitely take votes for Rick Bosetti in 1979, who was almost as bad as Nixon and came to the plate almost 200 more times.
Right Field - Bob Bailor, 1979 (.229/.297/.287 OPS+ 59) The other contenders are Lloyd Moseby in his rookie year, and Jose Bautista in his final year. But Bailor has them beat, easily.
Designated Hitter - Joe Carter, 1997 (.234/.284/.399 OPS+ 77) He even drove in 102 runs! Man, Carter's final year here was so awful that I think it's left a permanent scar on the psyches of everyone who lived through it, causing everyone who witnessed it to forget that Joe was a pretty good player when he got here. But then he got old. And bad.
Well, enough of this foolery. On with the business....
The White Sox came to Toronto, back in May, in the midst of a losing streak that would eventually reach ten.
Mon 24 Apr: Chicago 2 Toronto 5 - Andrew Vaughn's third inning double staked the White Sox to a 2-0 lead. They would not score another run until they were back on American soil. Their lead didn't last very long, either. The Jays came up to bat and immediately jumped on Lance Lynn for four runs, the big blast being Cavan Biggios' three run homer. Chris Bassitt worked into the seventh, allowing just three hits; Pop, Mayza, and Romano finished up.
Tue 25 Apr: Chicago 0 Toronto 7 - Jose Berrios held the White Sox to four singles over seven innings. Nate Pearson, making his season debut, and Bass finished the shutout. Danny Jansen hit a pair of homers to account for much of the scoring.
Wed 26 Apr: Chicago 0 at Toronto 8 - It was Yusei Kikuchi's turn to blank the White Sox, which he did for 5.2 innings while fanning eight. Bo Bichette had three hits, one of them a homer, drove in three and scored two.
Curiously, the Jays have the same three starters in the same sequence lined up for this series
Matchups
Tue 4 July - Bassitt (8-5, 4.06) vs Giolito (6-5, 3.53)
Wed 5 July - Berrios (8-6, 3.74) vs Lynn (5-8, 6.47)
Thu 6 July - Kikuchi (7-3, 4.08) vs Cease (3-3, 4.10)
Everybody's waiting
Road trip! And then the All-Star Break.
I was thinking about the Blue Jays offense, and you'll be impressed to know that this did not make me rush out and consume a number of very strong drinks. As has been said many times, I have the strength of ten men (I then like to quip that those ten men are the Seven Dwarfs and the Three Stooges, but never mind.)
Surely we saw this coming, to some extent. The idea behind the offseason changes was to improve the defense, recognizing that in the process the team would lose a bit of offense along the way. No one expected Kiermaier and Varsho to match the production of Hernandez and Gurriel.
This still isn't quite what we expected. Last year, Toronto had the second best offense in the AL, behind the Yankees. This year, they're eighth (just ahead of the Yankees.) AL offense is up this year, from 4.22 runs per game to 4.52 - but the Jays have fallen from 4.78 runs per game to 4.46, and it's not all Kiermaier and Varsho replacing Gurriel and Hernandez.
Vladimir Guerrero gets much of the attention around here, and takes most of the heat when things don't go as everyone hopes. Guerrero hasn't been bad this season. People shouldn't say things like that, because it's flat out wrong. (I might even point out that once upon a time the Blue Jays won a World Series with about this level of production from their first baseman.) But no one expects Guerrero to be merely okay, to be a solid complementary bat in a lineup of his betters. I trust we've all come to realize that a significant amount of his 2021 production owed a lot to his unique affinity for couple of ballparks that the team hasn't played in since. (I did make a point of telling all of you!) But even so - Guerrero's work this year is still not what this team needs from him, expects from him, and it's not what Guerrero expects from himself either. He's obviously been frustrated, and his frustration has at moments spilled over into other parts of his game. And what has to be really, really frustrating - for Guerrero and the team - is that it shouldn't be happening. It simply shouldn't He's hitting more balls hard than he's ever hit before. He's hitting more line drives than ever before. He's hitting fewer ground balls than ever before. He's striking out less often than ever before. This shouldn't be happening. But it is. This game will make you crazy.
The other big issue with this year's offense is behind the plate. In 2022, Alejandro Kirk turned in the best offensive season by a Blue Jays catcher in franchise history. And as wonderful as that was - Danny Jansen actually hit better than Kirk last year. This year - not so much. In fact, Kirk and Jansen have fallen off much more than Guerrero has. Now no one really expected the two catchers to be the heart of the offense, and maybe it was a bad idea to be counting on them to do it again. But still - Blue Jays catchers have made 336 Plate Appearances so far this season - not quite as many as the first basemen (368), but enough to make the wrong kind of difference.
In the process of preparing those paragraphs, I took the trouble - what else was I going to do on an off-day - to copy and paste all the Jays hitting records since 1977 into a spreadsheet, so I could compare Guerrero to all the other first basemen in franchise history, Kirk to the catchers. I'm a lazy sod, I started out just using OPS+. This, after all, is precisely what catch-all great statistics were made for - silly comparisons of large groups of seasons. Certainly not any kind of serious analysis. So in historical terms, Vlad's 2023 is middle of the pack for Jays first basemen. Somewhere in between a typical John Olerud season and a typical Lyle Overbay season.
I had lots of fun playing with the spreadsheet. I'm sure no one needs me to tell them that Josh Donaldson had the best offensive season by any Jays third baseman (2016, even ahead of his MVP year) and Jose Bautista the best by any right fielder (2011, edging out his 2010 season.) George Bell (1987) in left field is another no-brainer (Bell's own 1986 is next, though Gurriel's 57 games in 2020 ranks almost as high, albeit with some kind of asterisk.) Edwin Encarnacion has the best (2012) and third best (2015) seasons by a DH, with Molitor's 1993 in between. And Roberto Alomar's 1993 season comes out quite decisively ahead of Marcus Semien's 2021 - that 70 point advantage in OnBase more than makes up for a 40 point deficit in Slugging.
But centre field gave me pause. Lloyd Moseby (1983) and George Springer (2022) lead the way with an OPS+ of 134 - but in 2003, Vernon Wells a) had an OPS+ of 132, which is awfully close, and b) had 130 more Plate Appearances than either Moseby or Springer. And if I start making some kind of appropriate adjustment for Plate Appearances, things get muddied elsewhere on the diamond. Carlos Delgado's 2000 season just barely inches ahead of Olerud's 1993 season at first base. I'm not sold on that at all. Delgado's raw numbers that year were obviously much more impressive than Olerud's in 1993, but the offensive context was very, very different. But hey - Delgado has lots of other seasons in the team's top 15 at the position, and Olerud doesn't have any. Maybe it should be Carlos.
The good news, I suppose, is that Bo Bichette is putting together the best offensive season ever by a Blue Jays shortstop. At this point he's just competing with himself, as he already has the top two before this season even started. But what I think we really ought to consider, in light of the team's current troubles, are the worst seasons ever at each position by a regular.
Ready? Abandon all hope, etc. etc.
Catcher - Danny Jansen, 2019 (.207/.279.360 OPS+ 70). You may also want to hoot at Rod Barajas for 2009 (he was about as bad as Jansen, and batted 80 times more often.)
First Base - Lyle Overbay, 2007 (.240/.315/.391 OPS+ 85). You may prefer Willie Upshaw's final Toronto season - his numbers are almost frighteningly identical to Overbay's, over 100 more Plate Appearances.
Second Base - Aaron Hill, 2011 (.225/.270/.313 OPS+ 58) No one else is really close, and just two years earlier Hill had what was at the time the best ever season by a Jays second baseman not named Alomar.
Third Base - Danny Ainge, 1981 (.187/.258/.228 OPS+ 38) Kelly Gruber's 1992 was the worst by an actual baseball player.
Shortstop - Alfredo Griffin, 1984 (.241/.248/.298 OPS+ 48) Like Bichette at the top of the list for the position, Alfredo is mostly competing with himself down here.
Left Field - Alvis Woods, 1981 (.247/.291/.309) Distinctly worse than Reed Johnson's work during the Season From Hell.
Centre Field - Otis Nixon, 1997 (.252/.343/.304 OPS+ 72). We'll definitely take votes for Rick Bosetti in 1979, who was almost as bad as Nixon and came to the plate almost 200 more times.
Right Field - Bob Bailor, 1979 (.229/.297/.287 OPS+ 59) The other contenders are Lloyd Moseby in his rookie year, and Jose Bautista in his final year. But Bailor has them beat, easily.
Designated Hitter - Joe Carter, 1997 (.234/.284/.399 OPS+ 77) He even drove in 102 runs! Man, Carter's final year here was so awful that I think it's left a permanent scar on the psyches of everyone who lived through it, causing everyone who witnessed it to forget that Joe was a pretty good player when he got here. But then he got old. And bad.
Well, enough of this foolery. On with the business....
The White Sox came to Toronto, back in May, in the midst of a losing streak that would eventually reach ten.
Mon 24 Apr: Chicago 2 Toronto 5 - Andrew Vaughn's third inning double staked the White Sox to a 2-0 lead. They would not score another run until they were back on American soil. Their lead didn't last very long, either. The Jays came up to bat and immediately jumped on Lance Lynn for four runs, the big blast being Cavan Biggios' three run homer. Chris Bassitt worked into the seventh, allowing just three hits; Pop, Mayza, and Romano finished up.
Tue 25 Apr: Chicago 0 Toronto 7 - Jose Berrios held the White Sox to four singles over seven innings. Nate Pearson, making his season debut, and Bass finished the shutout. Danny Jansen hit a pair of homers to account for much of the scoring.
Wed 26 Apr: Chicago 0 at Toronto 8 - It was Yusei Kikuchi's turn to blank the White Sox, which he did for 5.2 innings while fanning eight. Bo Bichette had three hits, one of them a homer, drove in three and scored two.
Curiously, the Jays have the same three starters in the same sequence lined up for this series
Matchups
Tue 4 July - Bassitt (8-5, 4.06) vs Giolito (6-5, 3.53)
Wed 5 July - Berrios (8-6, 3.74) vs Lynn (5-8, 6.47)
Thu 6 July - Kikuchi (7-3, 4.08) vs Cease (3-3, 4.10)
