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Chapter 1: What happened in the Blue Jays game against the Braves?
Another bad one for the Toronto Blue Jays. This is Jays top class, Blake Murphy with you. Jays lose 7-3 to the Atlanta Braves yesterday. It's a fourth loss in a row. Things had felt a little better as they nudged back to .500 during that Orioles series, but dropped the Saturday game in the Jeff Hoffman ninth inning game. Have a bullpen day Sunday that doesn't go the way you're hoping for.
Lose an understandable one Monday. You know, Bryce Elder, who... underlying isn't anything remarkable against Kevin Gosman, who you always hope to get the Kevin Gosman day. But that's an understandable loss.
Chapter 2: How is the Blue Jays' offense performing this season?
It's a pretty straightforward one. And then yesterday, some of the shine comes off the job Patrick Corbin has been doing for you lately. The bullpen can't keep it close. And your bats once again struggle. This time against Grant Holmes, who from the outset really didn't have it. The Blue Jays failed to take advantage very early on when they get Grant Holmes' back against the wall.
And then kind of allow him to settle in. I didn't even think he looked that good, honestly, once he quote-unquote settled in. But you really let him get off the ropes. If you missed it, it was a 7-3 final. The Jays in the first inning loaded the bases with nobody out. and only managed to get one run. And that's kind of, you know, the story of their season is, is all the injuries.
The story of the offense so far this season has not just been the inability to hit in big situations, which we talked about Ben Nicholson Smith yesterday, but it has been an inability to hit period. This is still a team with nobody posting even an 800 OPS.
It is a team that ranks in the bottom 10 of the league in most catch all offensive metrics, or even if you don't want catch all most standard offensive metrics, they They don't strike out and they hit for an okay average, but from an OBP, from a slug, from a pop, from a weighted runs, creative plus, however you want to chop it up, this is a bottom 10 of runs.
If you want to talk runs and really simplify it, it hasn't been a particularly good offense. And that is really, really glaring. when you get big situations early in games and aren't able to take advantage.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of Vladimir Guerrero Jr.'s strike challenge?
A couple games ago in the Bryce Elder game, the Jays had two instances where they got a couple runners on and weren't able to do much damage with it. There was the second and third with nobody out that only resulted in one run.
There were a couple situations in the Marlins series, if you want to go back that far, when they had a chance to do even more damage on that 10-7 stretch where they had 17 games in 17 days. There were a lot of situational hitting issues during the home part of that 17-game stretch.
There was a Sunday where I think they went 0-10 with runners in scoring position and stranded 12 guys, or maybe I have those backwards. There was the first game of the Marlins series. That wasn't particularly close, but they missed a bunch of opportunities.
So if you are feeling like this team's issues are primarily hitting in big situations, hitting with runners in scoring position and things like that, the numbers back you up. To be at this point yesterday, over time, you will roughly perform to the level of your overall offense. But the Jays' overall offense isn't very good right now. So... You know, you load the bases out.
You load the bases with nobody out in the first inning against a pitcher who has had a solid year but is, you know, a four ERA guy roughly. And you ground into a double play and then strike out So you only get one run out of that. That's a huge missed opportunity. That is a huge missed opportunity, obviously, for runs on the board.
It's a huge missed opportunity to have those two at-bats end so quickly. Sanchez was on the third pitch of the at-bat, and you get two outs out of three pitches there, and then Ernie Clements, a five-pitch at-bat. So even if you weren't going to put on a ton of runs, make Grant Holmes work.
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Chapter 4: What is the plan for Simeon Woods Richardson with the Blue Jays?
You've loaded the bases. There's nobody out. He gets out of that down eight pitches with only one run scored, and the run scoring on the double play ball –
that is a that's a tough way to go and you don't yes this is a very good bullpen so getting to the bullpen is maybe not you know as effective against the Braves that is as it is other teams but it's a three-game series and if you are going to make them burn they have four guys that would qualify as kind of leverage arms for them if you can make them burn those guys on Monday and Tuesday or Tuesday Wednesday in this case then you have a better chance of winning Thursday's game
If you could get Grant Holmes out in the fifth inning instead of after six innings, you get to face one more guy. And they're not all Dylan Lee and Robert Suarez and Raizel Iglesias and Didier Fuentes. There are other guys in there. They got a run off Tyler Kinley. You maybe could have gotten to that part. So it's not just about the missed opportunity to put runs on the board there.
It's about the missed opportunity to chase a pitcher earlier and start to build something. I would imagine the pitchers are also facing a little pressure right now. They're pitching from behind a lot. They're pitching in close games where you can't bank on the Jays scoring a lot of runs.
Kevin Gosman kind of had quotes to that effect the other day, not putting it on the offense, but just, you know, after an okay, not great start, putting it on himself there. There was another thing that happened in that game or in that first inning that I didn't like. And I did want to talk about it. So we're going to have Arden's welding on in a little bit. Mike Petriello will join us later.
One of the DJs at Rogers Center who I'm pals with is going to come on and we'll find out what that's like ahead of it.
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Chapter 5: How does DJ Richie Guzman create the atmosphere at Rogers Centre?
It's Pride Night at the ballpark tomorrow. So we'll talk about that a little bit. Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and Effectively Wild will join us later in the show as well. And we'll get you set. for a bullpen day led by Mason Fluharty against Chris Sale. But I wanted to talk about Vlad's challenge in the first inning. And we're still pretty new with the ABS system.
We're still figuring out, you know, what is the best strategy? How are teams going to use this? Who should, who shouldn't use it? You look overall and the correct challenge rate is 58% for catchers, 47% for batters. So you already know that a batter is not going to be nearly as effective as a catcher maybe is going to be. But Vlad's, in the first inning.
So for anyone who missed it or doesn't remember, it's a 3-1 pitch with runners on first and second, nobody out, facing Grant Holmes. Now, there are three things that I'm looking for this early. Again, we don't have a perfect model. We don't have this figured out just yet.
But the three things that I'm looking at when a batter challenges a pitch, time of game, leverage of the situation, and chances of success. So I want to look at this because I thought it was a really bad challenge, even though it satisfies one of those three criteria.
Chapter 6: What are the expectations for the Blue Jays' upcoming games?
The first thing is time of the game. And that's important because you only get two challenges if you get one wrong. If you get it right, the time of the game doesn't really matter, but you have to factor in that you don't have 100% accuracy. Like I just said, batters are a little below 50%. Even if you figure it's a 50-50 call,
You have to play out the scenario where there's a 50% chance that in the top of the first inning, you have burned one challenge for your team. And, you know, I'm not saying that there's no scenario early in a game which you'd use it. Leverage is important. But the bar is much higher, especially as a hitter, early in the game, I think. And because Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
made that challenge and they lost it, there were two instances as things... not got away from Patrick Corbin, but in pretty important at-bats where there was a wrong call and you could tell Brandon Valenzuela gave it a thought and it would have been the team's last challenge. So once you're down to one challenge, that bar goes even higher.
If it's a third inning and you only have one challenge left, you better be 100% or 90% sure that you're going to get that right. And we saw Brandon Valenzuela on two occasions decline to challenge and kind of look like he was in between. So the first criteria here is time of game and Vlad's challenge didn't satisfy that. The second one is your chance of success.
Now that Vlad is now, he was wrong in this case. And it was of Vlad's challenges this year.
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Chapter 7: What insights does Meg Rowley provide about the Mariners?
And of any challenge made in baseball last night, it was the worst one. It was very clearly a strike. Vlad is now five for 11. which is about minus 0.2 runs versus expected. More importantly than that is we can look at pitches that Vlad did challenge and pitches that Vlad didn't challenge and start to assess, does Vlad have a good eye for when to challenge?
And the data suggests early on, no, he does not. Of 16 pitches that MLB has qualified as, that would be a reasonable challenge. Vlad has only challenged those five times. So he's left opportunities on the table. Of the 11 balls that he has actually challenged, only five of those were deemed reasonable.
So more than half of his challenges, the way we can see it on Baseball Savant or MLB.com says, yeah, you probably shouldn't have challenged that. It wasn't worth the challenge. It wasn't in the mix there. So that's two of the three criteria that weren't satisfied. Now, leverage is important.
So a 3-1 count, runners on first and second, even in the first inning, had Vlad got that correct, we're talking about a 4.2% swing and win probability. That's how valuable it is to load the bases. There were nobody out. We know how it played out. We know Jesus Sanchez didn't deliver, and it was a grounded double play, and then Ernie Clement strikeout.
Chapter 8: What are the implications of the Blue Jays' recent roster moves?
But Vlad has no way of knowing that. So from a leverage perspective, the leverage index on this plate appearance was almost double an average situation. And had he got it right, you're talking about the addition of about half a run of expected runs in that inning for the Blue Jays.
So the leverage was actually there, but this early in the game and that bad a call, the Jays have to get a little sharper with this. As a team, on the hitter side, They've been all right.
They've been a little better than average, but Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Andres Jimenez, and Jesus Sanchez have all been pretty ineffective knowing when and where and understanding, you know, situationally how to use those challenges. Again, this isn't why they lost the game. Vlad ended up working a walk. The loss challenge probably had an effect on Patrick Corbin and Brandon Valenzuela from there.
But I had 10 minutes to fill before Arden joins us today. So I wanted to get that out there because it's an analysis that I'm probably not going to get a chance to do on Blue Jay Central because it's just too tight a window to really go into the three criteria you're looking at there.
But it's something to keep on the radar because I think coming into the year, there was some concern about... Vlad argues a lot of ball strike calls or shows up a little bit. So was he going to have the right... Was he going to have the green light? And was he going to have the right read on it? You know, not the end of the world. And he did end up working a walk in.
Jesus Sanchez was the one who granted him to do a double play, not Vladimir Guerrero Jr. But when you're struggling the way you are, when it's that early in the game, you've got to be really, really sure in that situation. So a little context there. We're going to take an early break here. We had to do some guest juggling today. Arden's going to join us on the other side.
We'll go into some more of the stuff from the game today. We'll talk about the addition of Simeon Woods Richardson, how the Blue Jays are going to handle a pseudo bullpen day again today. If Chad Dallas is maybe going to be in the mix, we'll talk to Mike Petriello. We will talk to Meg Rowley of Effectively Wild as well. All of that is next as Jay's Talk Plus kind of starts here. Early break.
Apologies for the juggling. But Arden and Mike Petriello join us on the other side as we continue on the Sportsnet Radio Network.
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