Throughout the 2021 season, Blue Jays Confidential will ask a panel of Sportsnet Blue Jays insiders to weigh in on issues big and small with the team and around Major League Baseball.
As the first month of the season comes to an end, the Blue Jays are one game under .500 in third place in the American League East.
Of course, how they got there is rather surprising. They’ve pitched incredibly well, especially considering the many injuries they’ve sustained, but with due respect to Vladimir Guerrero Jr., their offence hasn’t fully broken out yet. Now that George Springer’s back maybe that will change, but there are still many questions surrounding this team after 23 games.
Today, the Blue Jays are off before a weekend series against Atlanta so our MLB insiders are taking the time to weigh in on Steven Matz’s surprising start, the left side of the infield and some struggling catchers…
One month into the season, the Blue Jays are 11-12 despite some significant injuries. Now, reinforcements are here as George Springer debuted Wednesday. Big picture, what’s your read on this team?
Ben Nicholson-Smith
If the Blue Jays are going to return to the playoffs, they’re going to need at least a couple of months where they really make gains in the standings. Clearly, April won’t be one of them. At the same time, there are much worse places to be than one game under .500, especially considering all the injuries this team has had to withstand. The pitching deserves lots of credit for keeping the team competitive so far. Springer’s return to the lineup is encouraging. And Vlad Jr.’s transformation from useful but flawed player into an apparent MVP candidate might be the best development this team could possibly have wished for during the season’s opening month.
Shi Davidi
Four weeks into the season, there’s a lot of glass half empty/half full with this team. They’ve managed to hover around .500 despite their primary strength, offence, being stuck in the mud. They’re 11th in the AL in runs and a stretch like that would have projected as a major issue. To their credit, it hasn’t been. At the same time, it’s kept them from leveraging a pitching staff that’s second in the league in ERA and to get a month of pitching that strong, you’d expect more than 11-12. Factor in that 11 different players have hit the IL and it’s really been a wild opening full of resilience, thrills and disappointments. Having Springer back and the pending return of Teoscar Hernandez should get the offence untracked and at that point, we should get a better sense of their ceiling. But if the rotation issues don’t settle, they’re going to wear out a strong bullpen and a correction there will undermine the benefits of an offensive bump.
Arden Zwelling
They’ve been fine. Run production has been an unexpected challenge; run prevention has been a pleasant surprise. Plenty of injury adversity, but you won’t find an MLB club that hasn’t dealt with that. What else is there to say? The team hasn’t even played 15 per cent of its season. We ought not draw any broad conclusions until at least June. Considering the injuries this club’s dealt with, rolling into May with a similar record and run differential to what it has now — a game under .500 and plus-nine — puts the Blue Jays in a perfectly fine spot.
Jeff Blair
I haven’t seen anything to suggest this team can’t be someplace between 83 and 88 wins, which is more or less what Vegas suggested coming out of spring training. The biggest surprise for me has been the AL East. I think it’s going to be a much tighter four-way race than I envisioned, with three teams with pronounced strengths and weaknesses – the Jays, New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox – and the Tampa Bay Rays, who as usual don’t seem to have much of anything but maybe have just enough of everything, I’m not sure the Blue Jays can win without another starting pitcher; we’re getting perilously close to where they need Nate Pearson to be good.
So far, the defence on the left side of the Blue Jays’ infield has not been good. There’s obviously a need to compete now, but alongside that, some longer-term developmental questions exist, too. In your view, how long should the leash be with Biggio at third? And for Bichette at short?
Jeff Blair
Long, unless the Blue Jays trade for an established third baseman or shortstop. The organization spent way too much time working with Biggio in spring training to move off the plan right now, and while I think Bichette’s defence profiles better as a second baseman I don’t see that happening until he’s had a full spring training at the position. When Biggio broke into the majors all we heard was he could be a very good utility player. I’ve seen nothing to think that isn’t true.
Shi Davidi
This conversation shouldn’t get hijacked by small-sample-size panic, and mid-June is probably the right time to really start evaluating this, although there are important trends that merit the development of contingencies, just in case.
Let’s start with Biggio. In the minors, he played 47 games at third base. In the big-leagues, he’s up to 24. The hot corner is ridiculously difficult at the major-league level, where the exit velocity is consistently harder and spin on the ball more difficult, yet he’s been tasked with learning on the position on the fly. So, props to him for the job he’s done to this point despite not being an innately gifted defender and let’s not make real judgments here until he’s at least deep into June. The ceiling for him may be competence there, but given all the other elements Biggio brings, he deserves patience, and third base can always be addressed at the trade deadline.
As for Bichette, he’s got 89 games of big-league shortstop under his belt. There are flashes of brilliance. There are troubling errors on routine plays that should correct. The difference is that the Blue Jays have Marcus Semien sitting over at second, and the presence of such an intriguing alternative may shorten Bichette’s runway. That being said, the Blue Jays need to be sure before moving him, since the roster’s outward projection changes dramatically if he can’t hold on at short.
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Arden Zwelling
Let’s say this first: During an MLB era in which there are fewer defensive opportunities than ever, with more than 36 per cent of plate appearances this season finishing without the ball being put in play, the attention, scrutiny, and, in some cases, sheer panic paid to this team’s admittedly imperfect left-side-of-the-infield defence is baffling. And that’s without even mentioning the fact the Blue Jays have allowed the fewest runs in the AL, and third fewest across MLB. They’re preventing runs just fine. Scoring runs — as this team is built to do — has been the problem. Solve that and suddenly defence will be the last thing we talk about.
Anyway, Bichette gets the entire season to prove his long-term viability at shortstop one way or another. You didn’t have him put a half-decade of developmental sweat equity into improving at the position to pull the rug out from under him now. If it’s not working by the end of this season, you go out and acquire one of the many premium shortstops available on the free agent market and shift Bichette to second. Simple.
Meanwhile, Biggio’s best utility to this club is as a multi-positional, plug-and-play piece a la Ben Zobrist and Marwin Gonzalez in their heyday. So, his leash at third is only as long as how often the club needs him to play the position in order to field its most competitive lineup. If there’s a better alternative to play third and match up well with the opposition’s starter, the club ought to go with it. But most days, with the roster as presently constructed, there isn’t one. That could change when Jordan Groshans or Austin Martin is a big-leaguer. Until then, have a little patience.
Ben Nicholson-Smith
To state the obvious, the defence hasn’t been good enough thus far. This is a win-now team that would benefit greatly from stable defence, but with 11 combined errors, Bichette and Biggio have surpassed the team totals of six big-league clubs. Now it’s a question about what to do next and I see the two positions a little differently.
At shortstop, I’d be inclined to show Bichette more patience as he continues the years-long process of learning the game’s most difficult infield position. If he improves, everyone’s happy. If he keeps making six errors a month, there’s a real question here mid-season. But we’re not there yet.
At third base, I don’t think the Blue Jays love what they see from Biggio (otherwise, why start him in right field for five of the last seven games?). Yet with outfielders returning, he’s due for more playing time at the hot corner. That’s OK for now. He’s a good athlete who has learned on the go in the past. At the same time, I see the leash here being weeks rather than months. If his play doesn’t improve, the Jays could mix in more bench types at third – or eventually promote a prospect and consider trades.
Wednesday’s struggles aside, Steven Matz has looked like a great pickup for the Blue Jays this season. Have you seen enough to believe this is mostly sustainable?
Ben Nicholson-Smith
To me, Matz looks like a No. 3 or 4 starter, which is a lot more than I would have anticipated following a year in which he posted a 9.68 ERA. His fastball and changeup are both very good pitches that have helped him generate a career-high called + swinging strike rate of 31.2 per cent. So I do think it’s largely sustainable and that’s a good thing for a Blue Jays team that essentially has a two-man rotation right now.
Shi Davidi
Some of the underlying numbers certainly suggest that the way he’s pitching is sustainable, and even in his clunker Wednesday night, he got BABIP’d to death and squeezed on a key call. He’s in the upper third of the game in expected wOBA, ERA and batting average, numbers that aim to measure the quality of contact he surrenders. That indicates his performance thus far is real. Now, he is in many advanced measures outperforming his best past seasons, so perhaps there’s some regression coming. Or maybe he’s simply putting all the pieces of his game together and taking a step forward.
Jeff Blair
When I hear pitching coach Pete Walker and Matz talk about how unpredictability has been a key to the start, I worry. It’s tough to keep out-smarting hitters over 25-30 starts. But the question with Matz has always been his resilience. Let’s see how quickly he flushes away his misfortune against the Nationals. The stuff’s been better than I thought, frankly. That gives me reason for optimism.
Arden Zwelling
Matz encountered some really hard luck on balls in play — not to mention a couple brutal ball-strike rulings from behind the plate — in Wednesday’s outing against the Nationals, so it’s safe to look past the ugly pitching line in that one and focus on the fact he continued to limit hard contact and run up swinging strikes.
Like all pitchers, Matz will have his good and bad days. But he possesses the tools to have more of the former than the latter. Matz’s fastball and changeup each rank among MLB’s top-15 by Baseball’s Savant’s run value. But his stuff has always been this good — the difference is he’s found a way to use it more effectively, create more deception, and avoid the disaster innings that submarined his 2020.
Credit to the Blue Jays pitching department, which identified Matz as a guy who could dramatically improve his results with some tweaks to his sequencing and delivery, and then helped him execute on those adjustments. Remember, development doesn’t stop once you’ve reached the big leagues.
The Blue Jays’ catchers haven’t played particularly well, either offensively or defensively. What do you make of what’s happening at that position?
Arden Zwelling
I’m extremely sympathetic to the insane workload of modern-day catchers, who have one of the most demanding and difficult jobs in all of professional sports — but the Blue Jays still aren’t getting enough offence from the position to this point. Both have been fine defensively (Jansen in particular) and deserve credit for their role in helping produce the exceptional pitching results we’ve seen from this team. But the offensive standard for the position is extremely low and neither Jansen nor Kirk is meeting it. Thing is, what’s your alternative? The Blue Jays don’t have a better one, so they’ll have to continue rolling with this pair and hope that some of the increased hard contact we’ve seen from both of late leads to better results.
Ben Nicholson-Smith
As a group, NL pitchers are hitting .102/.129/.132. Blue Jays catchers, meanwhile, are hitting .114/.205/.177. Yes, it’s just a month. Yes, I think they’ll improve. But still… it’s been really rough for Danny Jansen and Alejandro Kirk so far and that’s before we even get to the fact that 13 of 15 stolen base attempts against the Jays have been successful. So what to do? In this case there’s little choice but to keep working behind the scenes and trust that better results are ahead. And for now, Kirk should probably play a little more than expected since he’s the one hitting better.
Jeff Blair
I didn’t expect much from either Danny Jansen or Alejandro Kirk, so they’ve met my expectations – although I can see signs of why Kirk’s bat impresses everybody within the organization. If Hyun-Jin Ryu is happy with Jansen’s catching and Robbie Ray is OK with Kirk behind the plate, then I guess I’m OK. I don’t need either catcher to win games for this team. Just don’t lose games, either. This needs to be the last season of uncertainty, though.
Shi Davidi
A cumulative OPS of .382 is a troubling number and Danny Jansen’s hitless streak running up to 0-for-34 isn’t going to help matters. At this point, it looks like the correction has started for Alejandro Kirk, who has hits in seven of his last nine outings and unless Jansen gets going soon, it’s going to become harder to justify not giving the 22-year-old rookie more reps. Jansen’s defence remains a strength – he’s already been worth three runs according to the Defensive Runs Saved metric – but he can’t be an offensive non-factor at the plate, either.
