There is baseball, but there is also life. And videogames. Portal 2 came out, and lo, I playeth. So now that I have an entire afternoon (wherein I put off playing with the latest Minecraft update), and the Jays are back at .500, some bits and pieces come forth to be observed.
Phobos
As of today, Jose is batting .372/.542/.795, good for a .559 wOBA, 269 wRC+, and 2.6 WAR. His walk rate is 26.2%. His ISO is .423. He sees a mere 34.4% of pitches in the zone (the result of the terror of opposing pitchers). He has amassed a whopping 1.93 WPA in a mere 23 games (equivalent to winning four games by himself). Those are videogame numbers, people.
Jose Bautista is the rough beast spoken of by Yeats.
Casualties
First they send down Cecil, now Snider. Cecil’s demotion was…understandable, if unfortunate. Shattered confidence, missing velocity, a delivery wrenched and torqued and disfigured. His frustration was radiant. Few questioned the resultant move.
Snider, however, was demoted amid intransigent fury. Parkes and Stoeten (and their frequent commentator, “Fullmer Fan”) lead the way in apoplectic confusion. (I would dearly love to see Stoeten spike his iPad in disgust on their post-game live stream, partly because Angry Internet Men are funny, and partly because I hate Apple.) What they miss (or disbelieve) is that the demotion is primarily about mechanics. The Jays’ front office isn’t expecting Snider to “prove” anything to them at AAA except that he’s leveled out his swing and isn’t flying open anymore. That’s it. His swing is fucked (note the 20% IFFB rate, the uptick in his GB%, the drop in LD%, and the plummeting HR/FB) and needs repair. It’s hard enough to rebuild a swing without having to embarrass yourself against AJ Burnett’s knuckle curve like so:
If you want some hard numbers, consider that LD% stabilizes around 150 PA (as per Pizza Cutter’s work referenced here), and Snider’s 99 PA was moving towards that plateau. ISO takes longer (550 PA), but ISO is also frankly park- and defense- dependent, and Snider’s had fewer extra-base hits this year than last at the same point (indicating that perhaps his current struggles won’t solve themselves, as they did last season before his injury). His walk rate has improved to 10.1% (vs 6.6% last year) while his strikeout rate has remained the same (26.4% this year, 26.5% last), so his approach seems sound – which mirrors what AA said to the press on the subject – and supports the idea of the issue being primarily mechanical.
I say we give Anthopolous (a smart cookie, by most accounts) and Farrell (who, y’know, ran the Indians’ player development at its height) some credit, and refrain from dismissing outright (without a shred of hard evidence, especially) the notion that it may be easier to completely overhaul a messed-up swing in an environment where you don’t face the best offspeed pitches around. If it were merely a matter of timing, sure, leave him up. But the mechanics are out of whack (a holdover from his injury?), and constantly feeling like he’s not contributing and letting his teammates down in the bigs might not help the process much.
Constants
Ricky’s doing great. 3.00 ERA to 3.07 xFIP. K/9 up to 9.46, BB/9 down to 3.00 even. FIP- of 80. Peripherals all in support of consistently excellent performance. I’m not sure he’ll win the Cy this year or anything, but he’s doing everything he’s supposed to, and improving somewhat on his numbers from last year. Not a lick of worry in my mind.
Brandon Morrow is looking very much like his second-half self from last year. With an FIP of 2.13 (good for an FIP- of 52!), a K/9 of 12.71 so far against a BB/9 of 2.38, he’s doing exactly what we were hoping. Only two starts so far, but good signs all around. (Except for his lowish 66% LOB, which will improve.) And damn, it’s good to have him back.
Runaways
For all the bitching Jays fans have been doing of late about the running game, the Jays have an overall steal rate of 77.1%. Cut out Corey Patterson’s 3 SB and 3 CS, it rises to 82.7%. If they’d stop giving Patterson the green light, it wouldn’t seem so bad. (Also, it’s a whole organization getting used to running more – there’s gonna be some growing pains.) The team as a whole is also 6th in baseball (4th in AL) in Spd, by Fangraphs’ reckoning. Could be much, much worse.
Exiles
Get rid of Dotel. Cut him loose. Get him gone. Eat the cost. There are too many left-handers in the lineups we face, and they always punish him. He’s got an overall FIP of 6.64 – a mere 1.41 against RHB, but 15.35 against LHB. I didn’t know FIP went that high.
Jo-Jo Reyes, on the other hand, gets a lot of lumps around the Jays’ blogosphere, and I think it may be undeserved. His ERA is an unsightly 5.48, true – the problem with a .400 BABIP. Morrow had that early last year, and we stuck with him (turned out well, didn’t it?). Reyes’ FIP, however, is a rather good 3.62. His RHB/LHB splits aren’t bad per se – 3.45/4.30. If he gets that ugly 9.64 BB/9 vs lefties down, he’ll do much better. I can fully understand wanting to stick with him, see if he figures it out. It’s not like he’s giving up home runs (a measly 0.34 HR/9, and zero for lefties) – when he gets hit, it stays in the park. His BABIP is going to come down. He may be useful yet, so don’t write him off.
Envy
You should all be reading Jeff Sullivan, who also helps Rob Neyer run SB Nation’s MLB site. He’s my model baseball writer – funny, ironic, smart as hell. The one thing he doesn’t have, however, is a bibliomancy section. That would be the purview of Royals Review. I’m jealous. You may see me steal it wholesale.
Funny how the worst teams get the best writers.
Rants Above Replacement
Patrick McCaw
Raymond Neilson
