TORONTO — I’m writing this while knocking on rhetorical wood, but for now there is no reason to not take Kevin Gausman at his word and rinse away the memory of Saturday’s start in the Bronx.
“Cold” is a relative term when your roots are in southern Manitoba, but balaclavas don’t lie, I guess. So, when Gausman shrugged off a pronounced drop in velocity and failure to get a single swing and miss on his split-fingered fastball as being “the cold weather more than anything?” Yeah, I’ll buy it. His recent starts in cold weather back it up, the Toronto Blue Jays are back home on Monday and Gausman’s next three starts are at Rogers Centre.
But I’d be lying if I wasn’t a little concerned, given the pitching carnage we saw this past week. You know the names: Spencer Strider. Eury Perez. Shane Bieber. Why, I even saw one social media commentator claim that it might be “the worst week ever in the history of fantasy baseball,” and if that’s not a crisis, I don’t know what is.
Seriously, though: when the Major League Baseball Players Association and Major League Baseball stage a battle of news releases on a freaking Saturday, you know sensitivities are high. You don’t hear from Rob Manfred and Tony Clark on a Saturday unless collective bargaining has collapsed.
It’s no surprise that the MLBPA took advantage of the situation to take a shot at Manfred, the baseball commissioner, whose allies comprise a majority of the 11-man competition committee that cut an extra two seconds off the pitch clock this winter against the wishes of the four players on the body. Given that he’s busy stomping out the dying embers of a coup and facing calls for an investigation into organizational finances, this was a free throw for executive director Clark.
More surprising, I thought, was the quickness with which the commissioner’s office responded pointedly, citing a lack of empirical evidence for the MLBPA’s claim, referring to the chaser for velocity and increased spin, and noting that it is in the middle of a study into pitching injuries that began last season. A bit unseemly, to my mind, and not entirely necessary.
I’d like to think baseball will follow the science wherever it leads and there’s an altruistic angle to this, but that’s not how it works, is it? History has taught us that when it comes to professional sports, it’s economic considerations that rule the day. Professional sports are a mostly conservative business, and not much changes until there’s a financial inflection point for ownership. Is this it? None of us know. But younger and cheaper has been the recent trend, and elbow issues know no age minimum. This has bitten, it would seem, where ownership has the most to lose.
In the meantime, rather than rolling our eyes at the investment that Blue Jays ownership has made in sports science and falling for the accidental tourist’s view that all this capital investment is some kind of vanity play or just a fig leaf to cover up for the on-field product, let’s at least acknowledge that it might have played a role in the 2023 Blue Jays doing a better job than 98 per cent of MLB in keeping healthy what was a not-so-young group of starting pitchers.
That’s no guarantee of success in 2024 — indeed, pitchers like Gausman are a year older, have an additional 185-200 innings under their belt, and we all know Father Time is undefeated — but at this time it is something to hang on to …
Cupholders are swell and all, but will the Rogers Centre play any different in 2024? Can the Blue Jays rediscover their offensive edge at home?
Bo Bichette joined us on Blair & Barker early in the off-season and admitted that the Blue Jays’ loss of power and productivity at the newly configured Rogers Centre was a “thing” for hitters during the 2023 season. Whether there was some new environmental factor introduced by the stadium renovations or the Blue Jays’ emphasis on run prevention instead of offence manifested itself especially at home, there were times in 2023 where not a lot was going on when the Blue Jays were at the plate.
And now here come the Seattle Mariners to open the home portion of the schedule with — give or take Framber Valdez — the three best starters the Blue Jays have seen so far this season. Given the skepticism surrounding the off-season additions to the lineup, you can be assured the Blue Jays are going to get a short leash from the faithful during this homestand.
So, I found it intriguing that hitting coordinator Don Mattingly sounded a kind of warning on the weekend when he talked about the team’s hitting philosophy and concluded that: “I don’t really see us as a huge power club, but we do have the chance to have four or five guys hitting 20 or above, and that would be good for us.” Maybe we should all adjust our sights accordingly. Maybe instead of power we need to prepare for more spunky, blue-collar stuff. Not sure I’m up for that, but it’s all I have for you …
Upon further – and I mean further – review …
Very quietly last season, the commissioner’s office sent an in-season missive to the games official scorers that essentially urged them to err on the side of the hitter when making their calls. That’s no surprise: quantifiable evidence is necessary to back up claims that the game is becoming more offensive. And personally? I’ve always felt that’s the way the game should be scored, that putting the ball in play should be rewarded whenever a 50/50 situation arose.
So, I’ll admit that I was surprised this weekend when MLB issued a scoring change that retroactively ended Nolan Schanuel’s career-opening, 30-game on-base streak. Schanuel went into Friday’s game with a 35-game streak, then found out during the game that MLB changed an infield single to an error on the Baltimore Orioles’ Mike Baumann … in a game played six days earlier. I’ve railed against my favourite sports being too forensic in using video replay but, man, this seems to be extreme. Schanuel’s official streak is still the third-longest in MLB history, behind Alvin Davis (47) and Truck Hannah (38).
Let’s test that third rail, shall we?
Lord knows we’ll need to tread lightly when it comes to discussing Davis Schneider’s playing time because he’s that guy for Blue Jays fans in 2024, and woe to those who do not worship at the altar. But if I can play devil’s advocate a bit here, can I at least make a case for the virtues of consistency when it comes to putting together a lineup?
I mean, the idea that an organization would spend all this time and energy on analytics, and then go away from it one day because a guy homered and come back to it for another couple of days and then go away again … yeah, I’m not certain that’s on, folks. The days of managers such as Buck Rodgers admitting they called a decision “gut instinct” because it was a way of shutting down a follow-up question or John Gibbons saying he did something “so I didn’t have to answer the question ‘Why didn’t you do it?’” are gone …
Dumbing down the discourse
Two things about the Oakland A’s moving to a triple-A ballpark in Sacramento for three or four years, beginning in 2024: first, my guess is Blue Jays vice-president Marnie Starkman is going to be asked for her input considering the job she did managing the team’s COVID-necessitated stays in Buffalo and Dunedin. Second? I’ll bet Ross Stripling — who was a player representative on those Blue Jays teams and is now on the Athletics — is wondering what the hell he’s done to offend the baseball gods.
Jeff Blair hosts Blair & Barker from 2-4 p.m. ET on Sportsnet 590/The Fan and Sportsnet. He also hosts Blue Jays Talk with Kevin Barker following weekday games.
