July 3-4 Welcome home: Flip the bat vs Flip the Bird

[dagger]

Mets vs Jays

Joey Bats is back, probably for the last time. Let's give him a big O, then cheer when he strikes out. Meanwhile, the Jays anemic offence can flip us all the bird again.

Jul 3, 7:07 PM EDT
Zack Wheeler (2-6, 4.47 ERA) vs Marco Estrada (4-7, 4.53 ERA)

July 4, 7:07 PM EDT
Corey Oswalt (0-1, 9.82 ERA) vs Marcus Stroman (1-5, 6.02 ERA)

[vaff87]

Bautista is my all time favourite Blue Jay.

[Myth11111]

Near the bottom for me.

What happened to Estrada?

[BigLeagueChew]

Marco had not allowed a home run in 3 consecutive starts.

[johanliebert]

Lmao pillar

[So_Fresh]

1 hit through 5 innings. Instead of looking to swing for the fences at every AB why not try to make contact and get a hit or hit for extra bases instead. A BB would be nice too. ffs! This team and coaching staff is a joke.

[rotty]

Bautista is just a walk machine...

[vaff87]

Gurriel is intriguing.

[Fairview4Life]

1 hit through 5 innings. Instead of looking to swing for the fences at every AB why not try to make contact and get a hit or hit for extra bases instead. A BB would be nice too. ffs! This team and coaching staff is a joke.

The spiciest of takes.

[polo007]

Read on Twitter

[Natural11]

1 hit through 5 innings. Instead of looking to swing for the fences at every AB why not try to make contact and get a hit or hit for extra bases instead. A BB would be nice too. ffs! This team and coaching staff is a joke.

Jays use the Domingo Ayala approach. The whole video is worth a watch, but 03:41+ is particularly relevant.

Watch on YouTube

[So_Fresh]

alright here are the signs. If i touch my chin it's a bunt.. and that only applies to two players. any questions?

Thanks for sharing the video. Funny stuff!

[BigLeagueChew]

Stroman doing his Jon Gray impression. 6.50era/4.48fip/3.89xfip

[Schad]

Stroman doing his Jon Gray impression. 6.50era/4.48fip/3.89xfip

Stroman's is a bit more explicable than Gray's. One of the highest percentages of hard-hit balls in baseball, and one of the highest pull percentages in baseball. There's absolutely bad luck in there (his strand rate, mostly) but he was giving up an average exit velo of 91.3 MPH entering today...we're going to need to put helmets on the infielders when he's pitching.

[Schad]

Informative piece from Jeff Sullivan:

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-mlb-landscape-of-negative-war/

Last year, we were near the bottom of the league in team WAR, and part of that owed to the sheer number of innings/at-bats we got out of negative WAR players.

This year, we're still pretty near the bottom in team WAR, but we're actually getting less sub-replacement production than most teams.

So we've gone from being dragged down by our worst players to being dragged down by the combined weight of our team-wide mediocrity.

[vaff87]

Informative piece from Jeff Sullivan:

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-mlb-landscape-of-negative-war/

Last year, we were near the bottom of the league in team WAR, and part of that owed to the sheer number of innings/at-bats we got out of negative WAR players.

This year, we're still pretty near the bottom in team WAR, but we're actually getting less sub-replacement production than most teams.

So we've gone from being dragged down by our worst players to being dragged down by the combined weight of our team-wide mediocrity.

But part of that is because we’ve been without our best player for so long, and he probably wasn’t even healthy when he did play. We’ve been without our best reliever for so long, and one of our best starters has missed so much time, and wasn’t healthy for most of his starts to date.

[Schad]

But part of that is because we’ve been without our best player for so long, and he probably wasn’t even healthy when he did play. We’ve been without our best reliever for so long, and one of our best starters has missed so much time, and wasn’t healthy for most of his starts to date.

That doesn't move us as far toward being good at baseball as one might think. Assume that their replacements have been, well, replacement level; assume that Donaldson/Osuna/Stroman play at last year's level, prorated. That'd move the needle by about 4 WAR: enough to be around the league average instead of being in the low 20s, but still not good, and we're now looking at a scenario where we'd be getting significantly better health luck than most of our competitors.

[dagger]

And as a replacement for Donaldson, Solarte hasn't been awful. I'd never argue who the better player is when healthy, but he's done alright, heading for career highs in a number of categories. He's actually enhanced his trade value. Donaldson also missed a lot of time last season. He seems fragile for a guy who projects toughness. At his current age, missing a third or more of the season might be his normal.

[Skin Blues]

And as a replacement for Donaldson, Solarte hasn't been awful. I'd never argue who the better player is when healthy, but he's done alright, heading for career highs in a number of categories. He's actually enhanced his trade value. Donaldson also missed a lot of time last season. He seems fragile for a guy who projects toughness. At his current age, missing a third or more of the season might be his normal.

If Donaldson was healthy, Solarte would still be in the lineup at 2B or DH. Travis/Urshela/Morales are the ones whose probably would have lost at-bats (hell, we probably wouldn't have had Urshela in the first place).

But yeah, it's not just Donaldson, although that was a huge loss. It's that Donaldson along with 3/5 of our rotation (Stroman/Sanchez/Garcia) being well below what was expected of them. Between those 4 players alone, we're 5.3 WAR short of what they were projected to accrue through the first half of the season. Then we've been missing our closer for the better part of the year. And we haven't had anybody play over their head to balance it out, really. Teoscar has been good, sure, but our overall OF production is right about where we should have expected it to be between all the moving parts.

So if those 4 guys don't collapse, maybe we're 45-41. But then you look at the standings, and the team leading race for WC1 is 56-28 and WC2 is 55-32. So we didn't have much hope regardless what we did. We could have had a fully healthy and productive team, plus Max Scherzer instead of Jaime Garcia, and still missed the playoffs entirely. Last year being 45-41 at this point we would have had the 4th best record in the AL tied for the WC1 spot, and in spitting distance of winning the division. That's just the way it goes sometimes.

[I_Like_Dirt]

Sure, those guys cratered? But who here didn't have Luke Maile penciled in for at least a slight negative WAR instead of the 1 WAR he's currently sitting at right now? And frankly, penciling in absolutely everyone being healthy and up to projections simply isn't realistic. Somebody was going to get hurt. That's just the way of it. If absolutely everything went right, the Jays might have been in the wild card chase if everything didn't also go absolutely right for other teams.

As for Solarte, I'm actually suspicious that the Jays added him in part because they were concerned about Donaldson even in the offseason. If true, it would make it tougher to argue the Jays lost out by not trading him then, but if Donaldson is healthy, who says the Jays even trade for Solarte in the first place?