Funny thing, pitching velocity. It’s over-rated. We’re told we’re fixated on it at the expense of some type of deeper understanding of zee craft of pitching. Yet for the Toronto Blue Jays, with this most unusual regular season leading to a now-likely date in most unusual post-season, a weekend of ticks upward on the radar gun has all but removed the stain of an 18-1 loss that could have unleashed all manner of demons.
What a wild ride 2020 has been: Bo Bichette is back, so is Ken Giles with Nate Pearson soon to follow and Teoscar Hernandez was actually swinging a bat this weekend despite whispers he could be out until the playoffs with an oblique injury.
And here we are, 13 days until the end of the 60-game regular season and 15 days away from the first round of the playoffs — if it’s the Blue Jays against the Minnesota Twins that could mean Josh Donaldson against Julian Merryweather at some point, which would cause Blue Jays Twitter to melt down — and in this year of pitching dangerously the Blue Jays brain trust will spend much of Monday’s off-day mulling over what to make of Hyun-jin Ryu’s stabilizing performance Sunday in a 7-3 win and Robbie Ray hitting 97 miles per hour in Saturday’s 2-1 win over a New York Mets team that had run roughshod over them the night before.
The Blue Jays are closer to first place in the American League East than they are to falling out of the expanded playoffs with a pitching staff of strangers who were robbed of the usual spring training after being sent home for three months during the pandemic. Injuries to Matt Shoemaker and Trent Thornton mean that the Blue Jays have had 38 of 46 starts made by pitchers who weren’t with the team last season. Indeed, the Blue Jays will roll into the post-season with Ryu plus two other starters who would have been with the team for less than a month: Ray and Taijuan Walker, which when you think about it is a helluva thing even in an age of video and analytics.
High-leverage situations in the bullpen have been held down by Anthony Bass, Rafael Dolis and A.J. Cole. They were off-season acquisitions. So was Shun Yamaguchi, who was all but useless in his initial outings after a move from Japan. Anthony Kay, Thomas Hatch and Ryan Borucki are holdovers transitioning from starters. You get the picture, I think. No wonder, then, that as we try to guess along with Charlie Montoyo as to how the manager will handle his rotation these next two weeks and line things up for the playoffs it appears as if he and pitching coach Pete Walker will rely more than ever on feedback from the pitchers themselves.
Ryu is essentially calling the shots when it comes to extra days rest – getting ready for Game 1 of the post-season is of much greater importance in my mind than whether he faces the New York Yankees the rest of the season – which is predictable since Walker said very early in the restart that Ryu was the pitcher whose routine could be most affected by this whole jigsaw puzzle.
As for Ray? He’d already regained lost velocity in August before the deal between the Jays and Arizona Diamondbacks was made. The issue was finding a happy medium with his mechanics after a couple of years of tinkering following an oblique injury. Still, it was the pitching version of a fitful night’s sleep, trying to find just the right way to position your pillow at 3 a.m. So Walker told Ray to just go out and do what he wanted in his first outing then tweaked a few things here and there. The way Ray explains Saturday’s outing, he sat down briefly in the middle of his bullpen session, bounced up again and felt it was really good. Ninety-seven miles per hour good, as it turned out.
[radioclip id=4969420]Look, Ray isn’t Ken Giles, who joined the Blue Jays in a trade with the Houston Astros in a sale of distressed assets: Roberto Osuna and his legal issues going to the Astros in return for Giles, the closer who punched himself in the face coming out of a game and who lost the confidence of his manager, A.J. Hinch, in the post-season. And yet, Giles experienced a quick career renaissance under the Blue Jays and Walker, to the point where until a bizarre injury over the All-Star Break last season Giles was one of the hottest names on the trade market. Even while the pitcher professed a desire to sign a long-term deal with the Blue Jays and had, from all accounts, turned into the type of teammate you’d want. He was hurt earlier this season but if he finishes the year healthy he will go into the market as something more than the distressed asset of his Houston days.
What if Ray experiences a similar career adjustment under Walker? Ray, who is eligible for free agency. joined us on Baseball Central last week and was clear. He views himself as a starter, but for now, he’s willing to do whatever the Blue Jays ask. Still, he said he enjoys “working late into games.” Translation: although this winter’s free-agent market could make the disjointed nature of this regular season look mild by comparison, Ray – who is, after all, just 28 years old – is not yet ready to undergo the same kind of transformation that saw Andrew Miller go from a hard-throwing lefty fighting a losing battle with velocity to a bullpen weapon who has earned $80 million since the age of 30. Ray is a much more established (and higher-paid) pitcher than Miller was when he made his transition.
But this is the neat thing about where the Blue Jays and their pitchers find themselves Monday morning, with options galore in a season that requires being light on your feet, experiencing the kind of clarity that can only result from a pennant race. The weather’s getting cooler, the games become more meaningful and nothing’s off the table in the drive to the finish. It’s the first time this season that stuff feels normal.
Blue Jays Newsletter
POP UPS
• Ah, the beauty of switch-hitters: the Cleveland Indians shook up the top of their lineup Friday after a streak of 42 games in which the order ran Cesar Hernandez, Jose Ramirez, Franciso Lindor and Carlos Santana. Lindor moved back into the lead-off spot, a spot he manned for 141 of 142 games in 2019 and 366 career games. Jose Ramirez was slotted into the third spot. The result? OK, the Indians were swept by the Twins all three games. Still, Indians manager Terry Francona suggested moving Lindor to the third spot to increase his at-bats with runners on base. But Lindor hit just .133 with runners in scoring position and suggested the shuffle to interim manager Sandy Alomar, Jr.,.
• For the longest time Justus Sheffield was the name you always heard whenever talk turned to the future of the Yankees rotation or, by extension, trade rumours. The industry never seemed as sold on him to the degree the Yankees wished – many saw him as a middle or back of the rotation guy, at best. The Mariners ended up acquiring Sheffield in the deal that sent Ladner, B.C.’s, James Paxton to the Bronx. The Mariners are one of the games surprise packages this season, with 11 quality starts by pitchers aged 24 and younger, led by Sheffield’s five. Second is Justin Dunn, who had a string of quality starts in a row end at three Sunday when he walked five and threw 66 pitches in just two innings work. He was bidding to put together the longest streak by a Mariners starter since Taijuan Walker – now with the Blue Jays – who rolled off seven consecutive quality starts from May 29 to July 1, 2015.
• Tampa Bay Rays outfielder Kevin Kiermaier was one of the MLB players to complain about glare off the cardboard cut-outs behind home plate at Sahlen Field. The cut-outs were removed ahead of Sunday’s game and will only be in place for night games. I’d just as soon like to see them go away forever … but that’s just me.
• I still think there are going to be a bunch of teams regretting they didn’t go all-in for the Rangers Lance Lynn at the trade deadline – and that includes the Dodgers, whose smugness when it comes to pitching has killed them in the past. Lynn tossed 110 pitches in Sunday’s 6-3 win over the playoff-bound Athletics, his 35th consecutive start of 100 more pitches. It’s the fourth-longest streak of that kind since they started tracking these things in 1988. Randy Johnson had streaks of 38 and 37 starts twice in his career, while Justin Verlander’s streak of 80 set with the Tigers between June 27, 2010 and Sept. 2, 2012, might as well be a pitching’s version of Joe DiMaggio’s 61-game hitting streak – ain’t that right, Tanner Roark?
• So what constitutes the 60-game equivalent of a 30/30 season? If it’s 11 homers and 11 stolen bases, the Rockies Trevor Story (10 homers, 14 steals) and the Indians Jose Ramirez (11 homers, 10 steals) have reached the mark first. Likely to join this week are the Padres Fernando Tatis, Jr., (15/9) and the Nationals Trea Turner (9/9).
• The Rays tried to trade Nate Lowe at the deadline, thinking they were well set at first base with Ji-Man Choi and, if necessary, a platoon partner in righty-swinging Mike Brosseau. Choi, however, suffered a hamstring injury and is expected to be out of action in the playoffs. In the meantime, Lowe and Brosseau will platoon. Jose Martinez, who made six starts at first, was traded to the Cubs at the deadline.
• Covid-19 outbreaks have made a mess of the National League Central race, with the Cardinals about to play five double-headers in their last 19 games – albeit against teams currently under .500 – and the Reds now 12-16 since additional testing and contact tracing resulting from a positive test to a Reds player resulted in the postponement of games on Aug 15-16 and Aug. 18. Since that four-day layoff, the Reds are hitting under .200 with a team ERA of over 4.00.
• Here’s one statistic that won’t require an asterisk if it comes about: the Twins Nelson Cruz is five home runs away from Dave Winfield’s single-season club record of 21 HRs for a player aged 40-plus. Winfield took 547 at-bats to hit 21 in 1993; Cruz has 16 in 157 at-bats. Remarkable.
• Alec Mills’ no-hitter was perfect for this season: although the only ball barrelled up by the Brewers was Jedd Gyroko’s 102.1 miles per hour liner to centre in the second inning, the Brewers did put 11 balls in play with an exit velocity of 95 MPH or harder, and the Majors batting average this season on balls hit that hard is .513. Not Sunday, however.
• I don’t know which is the stranger statistic: that Clint Frazier’s 17 consecutive games in the cleanup spot is the most by a Yankees hitter since early 2017 or that it’s Starlin Castro whose 19 games hitting fourth is the high-water mark.
THE ENDGAME
Yeah, yeah, it’s 60 games and pandemic baseball. So get your asterisks ready. But with the season beginning its penultimate week, shortstops figure prominently in both, the American and National League batting races. The Chicago White Sox’s Tim Anderson leads the AL at .362 and the Washington Nationals Trea Turner is hitting .348 and is third in the NL behind teammate Juan Soto and Donovan Solano of the San Francisco Giants. Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated writes in his deeper dive on Turner, that he is bidding to be the first NL shortstop to lead the league in average with a mark over .350 since Arky Vaughn of the 1935 Pittsburgh Pirates, further proof that we are in a golden era for shortstops. More to the point, Turner would be the first player on the franchise to win a batting title since it moved to D.C. from Montreal where Al Oliver hit .331 in winning the 1982 crown and Tim Raines hit .334 to take the 1986 title. The last NL batting champion to play most of his games at shortstop was Jose Reyes of the New York Mets in 2011. If you’re wondering, the last AL shortstop to win a title with an average over .350 was Nomar Garciaparra of the Boston Red Sox, who hit .357 and .372 while winning the AL crown in 2000 and 2001. Alex Rodriguez won his only batting title as a shortstop in 1996 when he hit .358 at the age of 20. Anderson won last years AL title with a .335 average, and consecutive winners are nothing new in the AL since Garciaparra went back-to-back we’ve seen it done by Jose Altuve (two in a row and three in four years), Miguel Cabrera (three in a row and four in five years), and Joe Mauer (two in a row and three in four years.) Until Christian Yellich’s back-to-back NL batting titles in 2018 and 2019, Maple Ridge, B.C.’s Larry Walker, was the last national leaguer to pull off the feat, winning the 1999 and 1998 titles. He also won in 2001.
Jeff Blair hosts Baseball Central from 2-3 p.m. and Writers Bloc with Stephen Brunt and Richard Deitsch from 3-5 p.m. ET. He also co-hosts A Kick In The Grass, Canada’s only national soccer show, with Dan Riccio on Monday evenings across the Sportsnet Radio Network.
