What's to watch

It’s an odd thing to be excited to watch reruns of classic baseball games. It is, perhaps, odder still to cede control of which old games to watch to a cable TV network that’s currently starved for content.

But these are odd times, and I am indeed — and oddly — excited for the fact that over the next three weeks Sportsnet will continue to air more than a dozen classic Blue Jays games (as they did on Monday night, and began to do over the weekend). Even if they’re maddeningly being played at warp speed, game-in-an-hour style, as Monday’s airing of Game 4 of the 1992 ALCS was.

Sports are communal. You can’t replicate what it felt like as Toronto and all of Canada were swept up in the Raptors’ championship run last year (which is also now being re-aired, in full, on alternating nights by Sportsnet and TSN). Or how it felt when the Jays made their magical ALCS runs in 2015 and 2016. For die-hard Blue Jays fans who had followed every game through ups and downs over the long period between the World Series years and 2015, it was a thing of genuine beauty.
In Toronto, it felt like the Jays were on in every cab in the city, and every coffee or grocery lineup transformed into an impromptu sports bar.
The reality was surely not quite so monolithic, but that’s how it felt. People with usually no interest in the sport were suddenly all-in. There was a sense of “us.” That for all the good and all the bad the comes with any place, on this, the Blue Jays, we were all pulling in the same direction.
That’s rare. That’s special.
Sports without community is just exercise. A community without sports has a giant hole in its heart. And that, I think, is why the suspension of sports was what finally made the very serious situation the world is in right now, real.
Fortunately, as we all start coming to grips with and getting used to the new normal, we can still turn to sports. Yes, there are thousands of games archived on YouTube, and in various other places across the web, which any of us could watch whenever we wanted. But without that sense of community, without anybody else to talk about it with, or tweet about it with, the essence is missing. We can’t do it all on our own. I mean that not only in the sense that we need someone to direct the programming but in the bigger sense, too.
I guess what I’m saying is that I expect I’ll be watching a lot of old baseball games in the coming weeks (or hyper-speed facsimiles thereof), and hoping a lot of other fans do too. No, it won’t be the same as watching live and in real-time, hanging on every pitch. No, these reruns aren’t going to unite the country — we’ve got bigger things to be worried about anyway. But for those of us who do choose to keep baseball part of our daily ritual in whatever way possible, they’ll give us something to talk about. And because of the particular games that are being selected, they’ll give us a chance to relive — or live for the first time — memories and achievements that really mean something here.
It’s a lot better than nothing. It’s Blue Jays baseball. It’s us.

Back in the considerably more dire present, Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro spoke to reporters this week via conference call. The Athletic’s Kaitlyn McGrath has everything he said covered, from the important bits — like the effort to ensure the organization and the public stay safe, and that minor leaguers and gameday employees are “made whole” financially, to the comparatively trivial.
“I would say to pick up the paper or turn on the TV, recognize where we are in the curve and when the curve starts to flatten, you can start to project weeks out that we could begin to play games,” Shapiro said, regarding when the 2020 season might actually be able to begin. “Until then, we’ll just think about what the math looks like, what the projections look like and scenario plan off of that.”
That shutting down of camps has sent most players back home, but not all. As was fairly well known (and addressed by Shapiro during his conference call with reporters over the weekend), Hyun-Jin Ryu is in Dunedin as he’s been unable to return home to South Korea due to pandemic-related travel restrictions. Two other new Jays pitchers, Shun Yamaguchi and Rafael Dolis, remain in Dunedin as well.
Less publicized has been the fact that the Jays have 18 young minor leaguers from Venezuela, including one of the team’s top prospects, 20-year-old catcher Gabriel Moreno, have also been unable to go home. The Athletic’s John Lott has their story — one that he says is “is like a pebble in a landslide when viewed in the context of a pandemic.” But which is harrowing nonetheless.

Was Donaldson’s 2015 MVP award a mistake?

You’d have an awfully hard time convincing Blue Jays fans, who saw up close everything that Josh Donaldson did for their team in that magical MVP season of 2015, that he probably wasn’t deserving of the award. I will attempt to do no such thing here. But if anybody did want to make the case for the 2015 AL MVP award going to someone other than the then-Blue Jays third baseman, they recently received some excellent ammunition.


The season most affected by this dip? You guessed it: Donaldson’s 2015.
But the eye test Jim, the eye test. Yes I know he passed the eye test, but stats do not lie either.

His DRS for 2015 had been +11, but is now shown as -3. Donaldson lost 1.4 fWAR in the new calculations, meaning that instead of a whopping 8.5 wins above replacement, he’s now calculated (by this version of WAR) to have been worth (an only slightly less-whopping) 7.1 WAR. The change turns 2015 from the best season of his career by nearly a full win to now his third-best year, by fWAR. Donaldson’s revised totals give him 7.2 WAR in both 2013 and 2016.
I hate new fangled stats.

Adding insult to insult, this now means that Donaldson ranked 10th overall in the major leagues by WAR in 2015, sixth among position players, and third among American League position players. By the Fangraphs version of the metric, he trails the Angels’ Mike Trout by half a win, 8.7 to 9.3. But now, according to Baseball-Reference, Trout is significantly ahead of him: 9.6 to 7.1. Worse, then-Orioles shortstop Manny Machado has managed to leapfrog Donaldson on the leaderboard, coming in at 7.5.
WAR isn’t the be-all, end-all, of course. The fact that it can be made retroactively so volatile tells us that quite clearly. And there are other factors that voters often choose to make an MVP award about — fairly or unfairly, like whether a player’s team made the playoffs. In this case, Trout’s team did not, while Donaldson’s did (albeit not until they added Troy Tulowitzki and David Price to the roster). But 2.5 wins is no marginal gap!

That’s not to say Donaldson didn’t deserve the award, or that his season wasn’t bloody spectacular, or that anybody should think any differently in light of these changes. It’s simply to say that 2.5 wins is no marginal gap!

What of the pitchers?

With a shortened season an inevitability, things aren’t going to be normal, even when they get back to normal. Last week The Athletic’s reporter went deep into the data, and used his incredible connections, to give us a picture of how pitchers — starting pitchers, in particular — will bear the brunt of the coming changes to the schedule.
For the time being, he says, in order to avoid a rash of injuries down the line, they need to keep throwing.
“A full shutdown would take pitchers all the way back to October and mean they would need a four-month process to return to being ready for the season,” he writes.
Concerns about pitching injuries are relevant to every team, but the Blue Jays need to be especially mindful of their potential ace, Nate Pearson. Not that the events of the last few weeks have been ideal for any team, but they certainly haven’t been great for Pearson or the Jays. The club would have undoubtedly loved to see him build up as many innings as possible in 2020, and take a huge step toward becoming a top-of-the-rotation workhorse. As things stand, that’s going to be tricky. And expect the Jays to err rather heavily on the side of caution, as Pearson is an incredibly valuable piece of their future — something we can see (and hear) quite clearly in the words of MLB Pipeline’s Jim Callis, who gushed about Pearson last week as he revealed Pipelines' to 30 prospects for the 2020 season, as well as on the most recent episode of The Athletic’s own Blue Jays podcast, Birds All Day.
As co-host of that podcast, I heard first hand just how excited Callis is for Pearson — whom he believes could pitch in the majors right now, and may already be the Jays’ best pitcher.

Look, a roster move!

Late last week, the Blue Jays actually made a roster move, announcing that pitchers Anthony Kay and Sean Reid-Foley have been optioned to Triple-A Buffalo. Though not an especially surprising move, the timing was obviously a little odd. I’d have expected the Jays to wait until late into camp before sending these two down, and it wouldn’t have shocked me if Reid-Foley had managed to find his way into the bullpen at the big league level, either.
The Jays had been stretching him out as a starter this spring, but it seems clearer and clearer every year that his future is probably in relief. That’s not to say that the Jays are wrong here — it’s best to keep any pitcher a starter for as long as possible — but with the Jays sitting on a load of starting depth for Buffalo, one of the obvious ways to ease the logjam might have been to finally accept that Reid-Foley’s best chance to success is in the bullpen.

As always folks, stay safe and stay indoors if at all possible.