Matthew Elmslie's Blog, page 12

On the Toronto Blue Jays: the Starting Rotation

Here’s a little chart showing some details of the Toronto Blue Jays starting rotation over the years.

First column: year.

Second column: where their runs/game ranked compared to the league. (I wanted to use ERA or ERA+ but R/G is what Baseball Reference had in easy-to-get form so that’s what I used.)

Third column: how many pitchers made starts for them.

Fourth column: how many starts their top five pitchers made for them.

1977 13th 11 131

1978 13th 8 132

1979 14th 13 112

1980 10th 11 118

1981 11th 8 90

1982 4th 9 147

1983 7th 8 150

1984 6th 8 153

1985 1st 10 141

1986 6th 9 140

1987 1st 11 139

1988 6th 8 133

1989 4th 12 145

1990 3rd 11 141

1991 1st 11 137

1992 8th 9 136

1993 5th 8 146

1994 6th 7 110

1995 12th 10 110

1996 6th 11 128

1997 3rd 10 135

1998 4th 9 140

1999 9th 8 140

2000 11th 12 124

2001 6th 9 123

2002 9th 13 111

2003 10th 10 134

2004 8th 11 121

2005 6th 9 135

2006 5th 12 119

2007 2nd 11 128

2008 1st 8 139

2009 11th 12 127

2010 9th 11 127

2011 11th 12 116

2012 11th 12 113

2013 13th 13 121

2014 9th 9 144

Here’s the point of this chart. Look at the 2014 team compared to the teams right before it. Obviously, it’s a big improvement. The top five guys started 144 games; that hadn’t happened since 1993. Only nine guys made starts; that’s not common for the Jays, especially these days.

Now, the pitchers who turned in this performance were mostly the same guys whom the Jays had been counting on for the past few years: R.A. Dickey, Mark Buehrle, Drew Hutchison, Brandon Morrow, J.A. Happ. The results hadn’t been good in 2011 or 2012 or 2013, but in 2014 they were. Once Gibbons settled on a rotation of Dickey, Buehrle, Hutchison, Marcus Stroman, and Happ, the same five guys took the ball every day and performed consistently all year. What we saw in 2014 is what it looks like when those guys pitch and everything goes according to plan.

…But it wasn’t actually that great, was it? 9th in the league in runs per game; that’s not terrible, but it’s nothing to write home about. If 9th in the league is the best you can do, then the starting rotation is not one of your team’s strong points.

Four of those guys are going to be back in the rotation this year: Dickey, Buehrle, Hutchison, and Stroman. Happ’s spot will be filled by either Daniel Norris or Aaron Sanchez, or at least that’s what it looks like right now. I think it’s quite likely that this rotation will turn in worse results than last year’s, and here’s why:

– Dickey and Buehrle are at an age when it is unreasonable to expect drastic improvements, but sudden dropoffs in performance are always a possibility

– Hutchison pitched a lot last year, after coming off an injury. He’ll be doing well just to stay healthy in 2015

– Stroman was a rookie in 2014, and was fantastic. It’s not reasonable to expect more of him than he delivered last year

– Sanchez and Norris are untried rookies. It’s possible that they could do better than Happ’s perfectly decent 2014 season, but you certainly can’t count on it

– the starting rotation was disgustingly healthy in 2014. It’s not reasonable to expect that to last

– Stroman, Hutchison, Sanchez, and Norris are all young pitchers, and young pitchers will break your heart

Now, they’re all talented pitchers, of course; I haven’t named anybody who’s not worth trying in a major league starting rotation. I wouldn’t want to point at any one of them and say, “That guy’s going to fail!” But chances are someone’s going to get hurt. Chances are someone else is going to have a disappointing year for no particular reason. And then where are the Jays going to be?

Most of the discussion this off-season about the changes the Blue Jays need to make has focused on second base and the bullpen. (And for good reason.) People haven’t mentioned the starting rotation much. But I think the rotation needs the help just as urgently.

On the Toronto Blue Jays: Garbage Clowns

I’ll spill the beans now for those who haven’t already guessed it: I don’t think the Toronto Blue Jays are going to go to the playoffs this year. (My pessimism runs a lot deeper than that, actually, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Some notable commenters on the Blue Jays don’t think much of this character of opinion. It seems that, if I have a negative outlook on the Jays, then I am therefore a garbage clown, which means that I

a) am stupid,

b) am a jerk who wants to spoil other people’s good times, and/or

c) derive satisfaction from the Jays’ losing, or at least from being the first one off the bandwagon.

(There is, by the way, little effort made to distinguish between someone who speaks their mind in a restrained and intelligent way and the dolts who tweet stuff like, “HAHA JAYS SUCK!!1! NICE BULLPEN GUYS LOLLLLL”.)

I’m not really interested in debating the first two points; there’s enough of my writing visible here and there on the internet that you can make up your own minds about them if you’re interested in putting in the time.

The third one I’ll touch on briefly. Yeah, there’s a little bit of satisfaction that you get when it turns out that you were right about something; I think we all know that. But I’d trade it in a second for a division title. (As for the bandwagon thing, I haven’t been on the bandwagon since 2009 at the latest, so it’s kind of an irrelevant charge at this point.)

The idea here seems to be that, if you’re an optimistic fan who is enthusiastic about his or her favourite team, you can shout that from the rooftops, but that if you have the bad taste to think it ain’t gonna happen, you should shut up and keep it to yourself.

What are the responsibilities of a baseball fan?

Legally, none; obviously. Just because you like baseball doesn’t mean you have to do anything.

But let’s say you want to take your fandom of your favourite team seriously. Is there a way to do that that you should take, as opposed to some other way? What would that involve? Maybe

– attending as many games in person as you can manage, and buying tickets from the team instead of from a scalper

– not booing the team’s players

– voting for the team’s players for the All-Star Game

– staying positive about the team’s chances

– buying and wearing team merchandise

…something like that?

No.

I don’t really think there is even a hint of an obligation to do anything like that. Look: the one most valuable thing about baseball, the one thing that is at the base of all the billions of dollars that these teams are worth, is the fans’ interest in the game. Without that, everything else goes away. The Toronto Blue Jays depend entirely on the thousands or millions of people who take an interest in them, and they know it, or should.

So if you’re a baseball fan, your attention, your caring, is something that is very much in demand, and as such everybody wants to control it. The teams themselves want to control it, the media wants to control it, even other fans (for some reason) want to control it. But it’s yours. You control it. Nobody gets to tell you that this is what a baseball fan is and you have to be that; however you want to do it is the kind of baseball fan you are.

Therefore…

If, as a Blue Jays fan, I am unwilling to substitute anyone’s judgment for mine, then that’s that. And if, as a Blue Jays fan, I feel like voicing that opinion, then that also is that. And if you don’t like it, you should, because you can do the same.

So here we go: for the past 20 years, the Jays have had some talented players surrounded by enough mediocrities to hold them back from winning anything interesting. And they haven’t won anything interesting. In 2015, they will have some talented players surrounded by too many mediocrities. Why should we expect a different result?

On the Toronto Blue Jays: The Short Term

Sometimes a baseball team is in a position where it should make moves for the short term. Sometimes it’s in a position where it should make moves for the long term. Sometimes it can do either or both.

Right now the Toronto Blue Jays should be making moves for the short term. See, most of their best players are getting up there in age. They’re going to be relying heavily on RF Jose Bautista (34), 1B Edwin Encarnacion (32), SS Jose Reyes (32), C Russell Martin (32), SP R.A. Dickey (40), and SP Mark Buehrle (36). That’s a lot of guys past their prime. They’re still good, mind you, or at least they were last year and there’s reason to believe they will be again this year. The point is not that these guys aren’t good.

But they won’t be good for too much longer. It’s a rare baseball player who’s still good at 33 years of age.*

So, if the Jays are going to win with these guys, it had better be pretty soon.

And the Jays do want to win with these guys.

So it had better be pretty soon. Like, this year, preferably.

Therefore they should be making some moves that will pay off this year, as opposed to a few years from now.

But that’s not what they’re doing.

– They’re turning centre field over to Dalton Pompey (22), who looks good, but who knows if he’s going to be able to put it together in 2015? He might need a year or two to acclimate to the major leagues.

– They solved their second base problem by trading for Devon Travis (24), who probably won’t be ready for the major leagues by the start of the 2015 season, and will get by as best they can with Maicer Izturis and Steve Tolleson and Munenori Kawasaki and Ryan Goins and Ramon Santiago until then.

– They’re going to be using some combination of Marcus Stroman (24), Drew Hutchison (24), Daniel Norris (22), and Aaron Sanchez (22) to play key roles on the pitching staff. They all looked good last year, but young pitchers will break your heart.

These are all long-term moves. They’re moves that you make because you expect them to work out well in a year or two, but not necessarily right away. But necessarily-right-away is exactly what the Jays need right now.

They need to win this year. Not because the manager and general manager are worried about their job security; that’s their problem. But because the clock is ticking on their strongest assets. This is not the year to try to get by with prospects and spare parts.

(Note: of course it’s true that veterans can let you down just as badly as young players. Their performances are somewhat more predictable in the short run, though, and you take what edges you can get.)

—

* Let me put it this way. Here’s a list of everybody who’s ever played for the Jays who’s going to be exactly 33 in the 2015 season (according to seasonal ages on Baseball Reference):

Jeremy Accardo

Taylor Buchholz

Buck Coats

Ben Francisco

*Aaron Hill

*Casey Janssen

*Kelly Johnson

Shaun Marcum

*Dustin McGowan

David Purcey

*Guillermo Quiroz

Mark Teahen

Merkin Valdez

Jamie Vermilyea

Only fourteen guys; I thought it would be more. Oh well. Anyway, of those fourteen, only five still have major league careers: Hill, still a regular but it looks like he’s on the downside; Janssen, still a closer but starting to show some cracks; Johnson, clearly on the downside; McGowan, who hasn’t signed with anyone at the moment and whose future is unclear; Quiroz, a bench player who had two major league at bats last year.

Of the rest, some of them are never-weres, but there are also some good players there. Guys who couldn’t make it to where Bautista, Dickey, and Buehrle are now. So, great for Bautista, Dickey, and Buehrle, but with every year it makes it a little more likely that they won’t be able to do it again the next year.

This is the club that Reyes, Encarnacion, and Martin are joining in 2016.

On the Toronto Blue Jays: Paul Beeston

I’ve been trying to put together a big blogpost on the Toronto Blue Jays for quite a while now, but I’ve been having a hard time finding the handle. I’ve got too many thoughts about them to write one single thing about. So maybe what I’ll do is, I’ll write about them separately and keep the whole thing manageable. And maybe I’ll be able to keep that up for a while.

There are rumours floating around that the Blue Jays are looking for a new president to replace their current president, Paul Beeston. Apparently Ed Rogers, who is part of the Jays ownership group, has been talking to the Baltimore Orioles about hiring away the Orioles’ general manager, Dan Duquette, who has a very plausible resume for a job like this. This is, to me, a sideshow, a detail that I’m only writing about so that I can clear it away and make room for the stuff that really matters.

I mean, what does the team president do anyway? I imagine he or she must do something, but is it anything I can see from where I am? Should I understand what he or she does? I don’t know that I should.

Beeston has a long history with the Jays. He was the team president, or co-general-manager with Pat Gillick, throughout the team’s early years, up until the late 1990s. Then he was president of Major League Baseball for a few years. Then, a while ago, the Jays were looking for a team president and hired Beeston to find someone who’d be good. Beeston did a thorough search of his own glove compartment and ended up hiring himself for the job, which he has held since 2008. But he’s getting up there in age and it’s probably time to bring someone else in anyway.

There has been criticism of how the Jays organization has been handling this. Apparently they haven’t been going through the proper channels to try to recruit Duquette or whoever. Plus, they haven’t shown Beeston enough respect. The line is, after everything Beeston has done for the team, he deserves to depart with more dignity than this.

I don’t think a lot of that argument. This is baseball. Who gets to go out on their own terms? Not a lot of people. George Bell, Jim Clancy, Ernie Whitt, Willie Upshaw, Lloyd Moseby, John Olerud… their exits were quick and unceremonious. I don’t see what Beeston has that they don’t. Anyway, he’ll be fine; he doesn’t need anybody’s tears.

The Jays don’t need him anyway. Sure, he was there for the team’s glory years from ’83-’93, and he can have his share of credit for that, but he was also there from ’94-’97, when they were kind of a garbage dump, and they haven’t been much better from ’08 to ’14.

Not that I expect Duquette or anybody else to make a difference in that respect. First, as stated above, I don’t know whether any president makes that kind of difference to a baseball team. And, second, the Jays organization isn’t good at hiring people; so much so that the mere fact that they want Duquette makes me suspect that he’s not the man for the job.

See, when it comes to hiring people for important jobs, the Jays are kind of shy. They don’t like to make new friends. They’d rather give the job to people who’ve already done that kind of work for them, and if they can’t do that, they’ll give it to whoever happens to be hanging around the office. And when they get tired of that and reach outside the organization to do a proper interviewing process on some external candidates, they tend to pick the wrong guy anyway. Look at who’s there now:

President: Paul Beeston. Former employee who hired himself for the job.

General Manager: Alex Anthopoulos. Was the assistant to the previous general manager, J.P. Ricciardi, when he got fired.

Manager: John Gibbons. Was the Jays manager before; they brought him back because they needed someone and he was available.

Now, Duquette has never worked for the Jays before, so that’s a little unusual for someone they’re pursuing. If they do end up making him their president, he’ll be an external hire in much the same way that J.P. Ricciardi was for the general manager’s role, or that Tim Johnson or Jim Fregosi was for the manager’s job.

Then there’s the issue of what kind of compensation the Jays will have to send to the Orioles in return for prying Duquette away from them. Apparently the Orioles are asking for the moon. Most people who have two brain cells firing know that you don’t send anybody really good to the other team in return for hiring away a non-player. But nobody’s quite sure if Ed Rogers knows it, and that’s a scary thought. Imagine the Orioles asking for Jose Bautista or Daniel Norris or someone in return for Duquette. I’m just making that up, of course, but the point is that Ed Rogers is coming across like quite the loose cannon and who knows what’s going on.

To sum up:

– Paul Beeston being shown the door: not an issue.

– Who specifically replaces Beeston: probably doesn’t matter.

– Paul Beeston’s dignity: not an issue.

– Compensation to the Orioles: better not be an issue.

– Jays’ ownership: unpredictable and not in the good way.

Next time: trades and free agent signings.

Update

I haven’t posted here much because I’ve run into some hiccups in my writing. I’m still doing it, but not as regularly as I’d like. I wonder if anyone would object if I started using this space to express some of my thoughts on the Toronto Blue Jays, about whom I haven’t blogged in years.

On The 13 Clocks

I haven’t updated this website in quite a while. I am still writing. Not as often as I’d like, but I am still writing.

Here’s something that I realized recently. And for all I know, I’m the only one who’s realized it. I did search the web to see if this was a well-known thing, but found nothing.

It has to do with James Thurber’s fantasy novel The 13 Clocks. The 13 Clocks has been somewhat in the news recently, thanks to Neil Gaiman’s laudable efforts to bring attention to it and get it back into print. I first heard of the book, I dunno, a bunch of years ago and tracked down a copy at a library discard store. I liked it but I don’t know if I had reread it since that first time before just recently.

When I heard about Gaiman’s crusade, I thought to myself, I should read that again. So I read it to my son as bedtime reading. Now, there’s one part… hold on.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

There’s one part where Zorn, the hero of the story, and his friend the Golux have to collect a bunch of gems in a really short time. They’ve heard of a woman named Hagga who cries gemstones, so they figure they should go to her. They use this magical rose that they have to find their way to her, but when they get there, they can’t get her to cry. She’s all cried out because everybody wants her gems.

The good news is, tears of laughter produce gems too. They don’t last as long as the cried kind but Zorn doesn’t mind that. So they try to get her to laugh. This doesn’t work well either, and it looks like they’ve failed. And then, suddenly, Hagga starts laughing like crazy for no particular reason and cries jewels all over the place. Zorn and the Golux collect up the gemstones and thank her and take off out of there.

So, when I read it, I thought that that was pretty weak. They need her to laugh, and she doesn’t, and then all of a sudden she does? Inexplicably? Because of nothing that Zorn or the Golux did? That’s no way to tell a story. So why did Hagga laugh?

But! Then I noticed the last paragraph of that chapter, after Zorn and the Golux have left:

Inside the hut, something red and larger than a ruby glowed among the jewels and Hagga picked it up. “A rose,” she said. “They must have dropped it.”

Obviously this is the magical rose they used to find her in the first place; that part is no problem. The key thing here is, “dropping a rose” is a euphemism for farting. And in the world of The 13 Clocks, the boundaries between the metaphorical and the actual are pretty blurry. So maybe that’s what Hagga was laughing at! Maybe Thurber had the plot of his fairy tale, and the fates of Zorn of Zorna, Princess Saralinda, and the evil duke, all depend on his own fart joke.

Does this hold water for anybody?

I’d really like to know what Neil Gaiman thinks about it. Oh well…

BTF Problems 2

BTF Forums Problem

2014/4/4 Superhero of the Day: Ri

Ri.

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Uzma Abidi.