Friday Look-Ahead and Look-Behind

I’m feeling a bit guilty after having missed my bloggerly duties on the weekend. Life gets in the way sometimes. As penance, though, I’m back with a Friday post, in which I celebrate, lament, and generally overreact to a Blue Jays series loss to the Tampa Bay Rays, and look ahead to the next 3-game set in Kansas City.

Beating the Best

It’s disappointing to drop two of three to a division rival. The unbalanced schedule makes damn certain that division records matter when it comes to contending for the post season. In the AL East, the expectation should always be that over the course of a season, the Yankees, Rays and Red Sox are mostly going to kick the holy hell out of non-division teams, eliminating a potential opening for a team like Toronto to rack up non-division wins themselves, in a bid to make up for a weaker record against division rivals. But it is just April, and the Jays will have plenty of opportunities to prove their mettle against the Beasts of the East.

Late Meltdowns

Giving less cause for optimism, though, is the way the late innings in the two losses to Tampa Bay descended into something halfway between comic farce and violent chaos. (Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration.) I do believe that the bullpen is improved from last year, and will be seen as a team strength by the time 162 games are in the books. But if you’re the kind who doubts the relief corps can effectively hold down the fort when leading games, watching them inflate Luke Scott’s RBI totals in back to back games where the team is trailing late is probably not helping much with your faith and rationality. Games that were at least within reach were quickly and emphatically turned into routs. I’m not saying the Jays would have come back in the ninth innings from 4 and 3 runs behind, respectively, but you’d still like to see your mop-up guys actually mop up, not spill another bucket of spoiled mayonnaise onto the kitchen floor on top of the existing mess.

Coming Up

Note - I had erroneously posted that the KC series was three games instead of four, hence the strikethroughs and corrections below. Thanks to the anonymous commenter who pointed out how badly I read my pocket schedule.

Four Five things apparently coming up this weekend: three (3) four (4) away games against the Kansas City Royals, and one (1) 21-year-old starter who has pitched 31.2 innings above A ball. Word is that despite the Tao’s metaphysical assurance that Jesse Chavez would get the call from Vegas to fill in the fifth starter spot tomorrow, it’s current New Hampshire Fisher Cat Drew Hutchison who will toe the rubber at Kauffman Stadium. Hutchison has picked up about where he left off last year at AA, although in his three starts, his strikeout numbers are down from the gaudy 12.5 K/9 he put up in an equally small sample last year. Over his minor league career, he’s been more than a strikeout-per-inning guy, and there is understandable excitement about seeing him make his big league debut.

The Alex Anthopoulos era in Toronto has been characterized by enthusiasm for the young, high-ceiling arms in the system. The Lansing Lugnuts at low-A have an embarrassment of riches right now, and if you’ve checked in on the reports about Noah Syndergaard, Justin Nicolino, and Aaron Sanchez, you may need to stay sitting down for a little while if you know what I mean. With the arrival of Henderson Alvarez last season, the apparent settling-in of Kyle Drabek this year, and now Hutchison’s call-up, we’re starting to see some “green shoots” at the major league level too.

The Jays have nine ten games coming up against Kansas City, Baltimore, and Seattle – before they have to face Texas and the Los Angeles of Anaheim Angels of California. One game at a time and all that, but damn, I’d like to see them at 13-8 14-8 when Rangers roll into Skydome. Here we go now *clap clap*.

The Bright Side of a Very Bad Trip

When the Jays left town for an 11-day road trip, things seemed pretty frickin' rosy. They'd won two of three games in their first two series, with the allegedly dreadful Mariners and the struggling Red Sox on the itinerary, it seems as though the Jays were ready to roll through the first month of the season.

But it hasn't even remotely played out that way. The roadtrip finished up 3-7, but has felt longer and more miserable than even that record would suggest.

And yet...

(For those of you who hate it when we go into apologist mode, you might want to skip ahead to the comments, where you can begin castigating us for our weak-kneed sycophancy.)

The Jays weren't that far off from coming home with an even 5-5 mark, if Bob Davidson's awful extra inning call doesn't go against them, and if they buckle down against the Mariners when they held their comfortable lead. Obviously, there's no spot in a team's record for hypotheticals, so this is all so much blather. And we'll cop to that.

Still, a team is going to have rough road trips in the run of a season, and given that this one saw them travel to the West Coast and back and facing a tough Red Sox team that was highly motivated to pull their bloated carcass off the mat, we can almost swallow the seven loses.

Almost.

Mind you, the team is going to have some issues to address, most notably a free-swinging offense that mustered up a grand total of three runs in the past three outings, and ran into outs (which we know some of you scrappy-doodle-dandies love, but it makes us nauseous. On the other side of the ball, there's a starting staff that pitches around the opposition, racking up strikeouts (yay!), high pitch counts (boo!) and early exits that tax the bullpen to the point where reinforcements need to be called in to bail out a 12-man staff (double boo!)

But aside from that...All's well!

One-Two Gut Punch of Outrageous Fortune
We hate to play the game of figuring out what is going on in the mind of the players. Still, we wonder if the meltdown against the Mariners and the blown call against the Angels didn't take some of the spring out of their step. (By the end of today's 9-1 drubbing, it was hard to pick out Juan Rivera from the pack of lifeless zombies shifting their weight around the dugout.)

Up Next - The Evil Empire
Because there's nothing quite like Mr. Steinbrenner's crazy collection of superstars coming to town to help a team out of their funk, the Jays get two games against the Bronx Bombers starting tomorrow.

But a win featuring a fine performance by Kyle Drabek and a manhandling of A.J. Burnett? That might just salve over the wounds of a lousy week.

So Much Blame, So Few Strikes

You see how happy those guys are, right there? That's how pissed we are. Tired, grumpy, and frankly, just a bit stabby.

We're sure that someone might want to go back through our Twitter feed, and assess some blame to us for attempting to cash out at 2 am last night when the Jays had a 7-1 lead. Yes, it did occur to us that we might be tempting fate by walking away from a game still in progress, but we're not so silly as to assume that our decision to head towards Sleepytown was in way really responsible for the shit-tastic bed-shitting that ensued.

And OH! What a spectacular evacuation from the the pitching staff!

On a night when the men who swing clubs hang seven runs on Felix Fucking Hernandez, King of the Two-Seamer, Archduke of the Sinker and Commander-in-Chief of the 90 MPH changeup, you'd expect your pitchers just to go out and throw strikes. It's not much more complicated than that.

This is the Mariners, and this is Seattle, and this is Safeco Field. You could put the ball on a tee for last night's opposition, and they probably don't score eight runs in the final three innings. And yet, somehow, the Jays' pitching staff looked utterly Canadian in their unwillingness to impose their presence on the strike zone. ("Oh, excuse me. Sorry. Pardon me. I'll just leave this pitch down in the dirt. Oh no really. I insist.")

And don't go stroking anybody's ginger beard after his performance last night. Sure, Jesse Litsch pitched in and out of trouble for several innings, and performed some escape routines that would make Houdini envious. There were no runs on his ledger, but he also only got 15 outs for his team, and left 12 for his partners in the bullpen. That's not a good start. That's not, as one departed soul used to say, pitching like a man.

And here's a funny thing: Carlos Villaneuva, who gave up the first run of the game, pitched like an hombre. Yes, Milton Bradley got ahold of one of his pitches - a good pitch in a good location - but he also exited the game quickly, and when things got dicey after a walk to Justin Smoak, he nutted up and threw some goddamned strikes.

(And yes, the strike zone last night was tight. Look at the pitch charts on Brooks Baseball, and you'll find more than a handful of balls that were either inside the zone or just on the cusp that went for balls. If it's a Sunday afternoon, the Jays might walk away with a 7-1 win, and David Purcey walks away with strikouts and a hold. But that only underlines the fact that you can't try to counteract bad calls on the margins of the strikezone with more nibbling around the plate.)

We were about to close this off with a clichéed "today is a new day." Except that it just occurred to us that yesterday happened today. Which only serves to make us feel angry and sleepy at the same time. Let's hope the Jays can cap off a terrible Tuesday on a much better note.

Coffee is for closers

You can insert your own standard caveat about how early it is in the season to even consider having these sorts of conversations. But what is the point of having the role of a closer and the save stat if you can't piss and moan about it every time the man in the role hacks it up.

Thus, piss and moan we shall.

It could be that the members of Tank Nation could give a fuck about how the Jays seal the deal to win games because, somehow, being the worst team in the league is going to guarantee that we draft first and get our shot at the next Dale Hawerchuk. But we're convinced that winning breeds winning, and young players who play on teams who find ways to win develop a culture and a mindset that promotes winning in the future. And if learning how to win a seemingly meaningless game in April 2010 means that The Rosy-Cheeked Phenom is in the proper headspace to hit a walkoff dinger in October of 2013, then let's learn to win now. Shall we? Mmmmkay?

So far this season, every Jays game has had a save situation, and given the razor-thin margin for error that the team will have, they will be in plenty of close games. And if we're going to try to win games every night, let's at least have a look at what is going on with the closer now so that we're not handing back wins in April that might make this team look respectable in September.

So let's get down to brass tacks: The Jason Frasor that has taken the mound five times this year is not The Sausage King. Frasor's velocity is down (91.2 MPH vs 93.8 on average last year), and our guess is that he knows it. He's trying to finesse his way around at bats.

Where The Sausage King of 2009 went after hitters, stepping on their throats with fastballs for strikes to get ahead in the count, then kicked them in the teeth with his reprehensibly nasty off-speed foshiness. But Jason Frasor 2010 is attempting to tickle-fight hitters into submission, tossing pitches on the margins of the zone, falling behind and having get-me-over pitches sent back the other way at alarming rates. In his first 4.1 innings pitched, he's given up eight hits, including three doubles and a homer to go along with three walks. And were it not for his ability to squirm his way out of some of these predicaments with his six strikeouts, we're sure that he would have given up more than just three runs and two wins.

Okay, let's snap back to reality: Just one week of the season is down, and there are 25 more to get through, so it is probably too early to start making rash decisions on bullpen roles. It's been a crappy week for Frasor, and a good week for big giant manly-man closer-type dude Kevin Gregg. (Although surprisingly, Gregg's fastball velocity is clocking in at just 91.9 MPH, which is shocking to us considering the way we've swooned every time he shot puts a heater past someone.)

Frasor's progress over the next few weeks bears monitoring. If the velocity comes back or balls start finding gloves or Frasor starts getting calls, then we can all chill. But a few more walks and a few more extra base hits, and just maybe The Manager should put loyalties aside and look to find the most effective arm in the bullpen to shut things down.

Here's where it all goes wrong

Clearly, we were getting spoiled by all of the good news coming out of Dunedin.

First comes the news that the Jays were taking a flyer on Armando Benitez, the free agent head case who has pitched himself out of the closer role on too many teams to name. Which seemed peculiar...

...until we heard from Robert McLeod on the Globe Blog that the linchpin of all hopes and dreams for 2008 Casey Janssen was suffering from shoulder soreness. Shoulder soreness! Argh!!!!! No! Stop!

And so, it begins.

(We can't tell you how painful it was to create an Armando Benitez tag. Jiminy Christmas.)

Well, so much for that

Just moments after Jamie Campbell and Tabby waxed poetic about Casey Janssen's sub-1.00 ERA (complete with graphics demonstrating his clear superiority to all and sundry relievers in baseball), our boy gave up six earned runs to cough up the lead, handing the Dodgers an 8-4 win.

To be fair, the Dodgers put a couple of good pitches in play (especially Captain Canuck Russ Martin's 2 run single, which blew the whole thing open.)

Previously, Janssen had given up four runs all year, and his ERA jumped from 0.90 to 2.37.

We're vaguely philosophical about this blow up. It had to happen at some point, and if you comb through the game logs for the All-Timers like Henke and Ward, you'll find a few of these sorts of outings.

Still, there remains a concern that Janssen, Downs, and Accardo are seeing too much action, and that fatigue is starting to set in.

The Marathon Men: Jays Win In Thirteen Innings

Before last night's game, we discussed Tomo Ohka's return to the rotation and how he had hoped to get real run support when he signed with the Jays. Well, he got it last night. By the time he left in the eighth, the Jays had scored 7 runs on 3 HRs leaving the rock solid bullpen combo of Janssen/Accardo with a Cadillac Comfortable 7-2 lead. Happy ending for Ohka right?

Add bullpen meltdown as a tag to the right hand column. Janssen came in and got jacked by Michael Cuddyer for two runs in the eighth. In the ninth Jeremy Accardo had his run-free innings streak snapped big time by a Twins team that put on a batting clinic resulting in a tie game. And the marathon began.

Brian Tallet was the pitching star last night. The gangly left hander pitched 2.2 innings of no hit baseball to allow the Jays offense the time to squeeze out the victory in the 13th on an RBI single by Lyle Overbay.

Highlights:

• "Is it safe?" The play of the night was our pal Sal Fasano's blocking of the plate to get Michael Cuddyer out at home in the fifth. He forced Cuddyer to slide past the plate without tagging and then darted towards him once he had stopped to get the out.


• Homer Dome indeed. The Jays (Overbay, Stairs, Clayton, and Rios) slugged 4 HRs in last nights game. Highest total this year.


• Manny? Matt Stairs' play in left field reminds us of another guy who often gets little respect for his defense. Like Manny, his arm sometimes makes up for his lack of agility. For the second time this week, Stairs recovered from fumbling the ball by nailing a baserunner trying to take advantage of the situation. We'd like to think that he does that on purpose.


• Rios and Stairs are red hot right now. Take note of that Gibby. No more riding the pine for Rios.


• Hard as Ohka. Tomo Ohka pitched a gutsy game last night and gave the team every opportunity to win. He was cheated.
• Defense with a capital D. John MacDonald's stellar double play at 3rd base in the late innings yesterday made our collective jaws drop. He can stick around.