Like Lucy Ricardo, I have some ‘splainin’ to do.
I only saw the first two innings of today’s game, because of a prior commitment to a reception for a gallery showing of my wife’s paintings. This time it was a cat show, which is to say an exhibition of paintings featuring cats, in support of a cat rescue operation in Brampton.
And no, the cat show did not take place in a cat house. And if I have to explain that to you . . .
So, in the first two innings I got to see Marcus Stroman’s typically brisk and efficient first inning of work, and I saw two of the Chicago White Sox take him deep back-to-back in the top of the second. And I saw Toronto come back within one in the bottom of the second, thanks to a clutch two-out drive by Ryan Goins that bounced over the wall in centre, scoring Kenrys Morales from second, but unfortunately holding Troy Tulowitzki at third because of the ground-rule double, when he would easily have scored on the hit.
By the way, being the home team, it seems we get inordinately burned by the ground rule double rule; is there any hope of softening the warning track to dampen those ridiculous high bounces? Please?
Because of my firm policy of writing only about what I have seen, I’m going to keep this short and confine myself to comments about what I know to have happened, and the trends that they suggest.
Much might be made of three home runs given up by Marcus Stroman, but there has been a long string of top starters in baseball who had a propensity for giving up more than the occasional long ball. The trick is to keep the other guys off the bases and minimize the damage. The three today were solo shots, and they allowed Stroman to stay within the bounds of a quality start: seven innings pitched, three runs, six hits, one walk, five strikeouts, 90 pitches.
And was there any reason to pull Stroman after seven and 90 pitches? Ryan Tepera gave up the add-on run in the eighth; it was unearned, to be sure, but maybe things would have been different . . .
The not-so-invisible elephant in the room for the Blue Jays is their inability to score except via the home run. Okay, they scored two today without a dinger, but that wasn’t enough to win a quality start, was it?
I keep going back to Josh Donaldson’s eerie thought about ground balls being mistakes. It’s obvious to me that there are two cultures on this team around hitting. There’s the Donaldson/Tulowitzki/Bautista (to a lesser extent—he often becomes a different hitter with runners on and two strikes on him) cerebral approach that focusses everything on the question of launch angle.
From my own observations it seems that there is a direct connection between this approach and the propensity of these hitters to take called third strikes. It would seem that the philosophy is that if you don’t hit the home run, or at least the double, whatever else you do is irrelevant, and if you strike out looking it’s all the same. Next time.
I’m not going to bother trying to refute this notion, support for which comes from Donaldson’s famous quotation. It’s interesting, though, that just this evening I was dipping into a very old collection of baseball short stories. Most people who would recognize the name Zane Grey would know him as a writer of rather lame western fiction, dating back to the turn of the twentieth century. Fewer people would know that he also wrote a great deal of baseball fiction, some of it pretty corny, but the very best collected in a book entitled The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories.
What struck me about revisiting these stories is that the traditional kind of baseball that they describe, moving the runner up by hitting ground ball right side, taking the extra base, bunting, playing the hitter to pull, the best hitters spraying the ball to all parts of the field, is the very baseball that the Kansas City Royals of recent years rode to great success. The baseball played by Zane Grey’s minor leaguers seems very fresh, or perhaps the Royals’ style was a real throwback. I should mention that The Redheaded Outfield was published in 1915.
The point is, though, that the style worked. It worked then. It works now. Chicago added on a run today with a suicide squeeze. They also added a run when a play wasn’t made in the field. It was scored by a runner on third who got there by way of a single, a sacrifice bunt by Melky Cabrera, no less, and a tagup on a fly ball to centre. If the runner was still at second, he wouldn’t have scored on the error.
Did they take a lead they never gave up on their three homers? Sure they did. But at the same time the extra runs made it that much harder for a team relying on one or more four-baggers to get back in the game.
The other distinct style in the Jays’ lineup is the more free-swinging, take your chances style, as exemplified by, among the top seven hitters, Kevin Pillar, Kendrys Morales, Justin Smoak and Russell Martin. You can sort out for yourself which among these is more or less likely in a given at-bat to change the approach with two strikes, hit opposite the shift, go with the pitch, even shorten up on the bat from time to time. (And lest anyone didn’t hear Tuck and Babbie going on about it, we could see how much Joey Votto chokes up with two strikes on him.) The one thing that links all these Toronto hitters is that, just from observation, it’s far more likely if they strike out that they strike out swinging, rather than taking a pitch that’s marginal but they don’t like.
All four of the above hitters are most effective hitting straight away, or even a little bit opposite. The Smoak homers to left centre when he’s hitting left. The relatively high number of Morales base hits the opposite way with two strikes on him. The undeniable power of Russell Martin to the opposite alley. While all four of these batters share the likelihood of striking out in a given situation, they’re also far more likely to put the ball in play and “make things happen”.
The quintessential spray hitter with power who makes things happen is Devon Travis, but since he’s on the shelf again there’s no point in including him in the mix here. Nor is there any point in including Darwin Barney, Ryan Goins, Luke Maile or even the injured Zeke Carrera in this discussion, as they all share the need to scramble and give themselves up for the team when needed. Maybe with a guaranteed spot in the order one or more of them would be identified as in either camp, but that’s not possible at the moment.
It’s hard to include Steve Pearce anywhere, because we haven’t seen enough of him to make much of an assessment. Career-wise, with a .252 batting average and over 1700 at bats, he probably falls more into the main group of hitters headed by Pillar, Smoak and Morales.
So, from my perspective the anatomy of a long-term, team-wide batting slump, or perhaps the recipe for it, reads something like this: opposing pitchers taking an intelligent approach to our hitters; in the case of the Blue Jays, showering them with breaking balls, the more the better; cerebral sluggers sticking to their guns and not biting on “junk”, even junk in the strike zone; free swingers sharing a mix of bad luck and frustration over the steady diet of junk.
The corollary of all this, of course, is that in the absence of offensive production, every mistake made by Toronto (two uncharacteristic fielding errors by Josh Donaldson today, for one glaring example among many) is magnified beyond all importance, cranking up the tension on the entire team.
Are we at a point where we should be looking for answers, or at least assigning blame? Are the hitting coaches supporting the Donaldson/Tulowitzki approach, or are they hesitant to challenge it? Have Justin Smoak for sure and Kevin Pillar to a certain extent improved because of, or in the absence of, help from the hitting coaches? It’s interesting that both Smoak and Pillar are repeating narratives of reflection and readjustment they initiated themselves over the winter.
Last year, Toronto limped into the wild card slot in the midst of a major batting slump, pulled out a scintillating win against the Orioles, braced up for Texas and then reverted to recent form in the ALCS against Cleveland. And this was with a starting rotation that was deep, consistent, and firing on all cylinders.
Is it any wonder with the batting slump still the order of the day that the other changes experienced by the Blue Jays as a team have brought them to this tough situation?
More to the point, what, if anything, can be done to address the situation? If we wait for opposing pitchers to start throwing batting-practice fast balls to us, it’s going to be a long, hot, desultory summer.
But we’re not there yet.
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