Richard Griffin of the Toronto Star missed his regularly scheduled mail bag feature at the end of last week, which was a rather disappointing thing for me, seeing as I’d believed it was his intention to keep shoving his bag in our faces ever year from here out. So imagine my excitement when I found out that, rather than having to wait a whole extra week to skewer his readers, he was holding a live chat yesterday at noon, which I’m so totally going to hijack (as always, without having read Griff’s answers). Starting… now!
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Report card for John Farrell?
I can’t give him anything but a solid D. Not because of the record, not because of the reported issues with the clubhouse or repeated mistakes– since that stuff gets so overblown in a year like this when the finger pointing gets so ramped up, and because it was a young team by design that got crazily younger through injury– but because some of his in-game tactics have just been so eminently questionable. I still think there’s room for him to improve– and that it’ll simply feel like he’s improved next year, by virtue of having a better club– but there’s no way to go higher after this disasterpiece of a fucking year.
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Even if the game means nothing in the big scheme of things, you can’t fault the Jays for celebrating getting a win like [Monday's]. Looking at it as a single game, seperate from the season at large, one can understand the exeuberance and joy.
I’m surprised his readers found anything to talk about this week *COUGH* but apparently they did, because here we’ve got yet another Griff Bag– aka Richard Griffin’s reader mail bag from over at the Toronto Star. Commence hijacking!
As always, I have not read any of Griffin’s answers.
If there’s a question you’d like me to answer, submit it to Griffin here, and maybe he’ll select it for a future mail bag. Fingers crossed!
Q-Hi Richard Stoeten,
As a former PR director, what do you think of the way the Escobar press conference was handled? Why not release Escobar? It sends a message and dumps the contract of a player who just sabotaged his own trade value.
Nigel Tufnel, Toronto
Well, first let’s just say, it’s like, how much more black could this season be? And the answer is none. None more black.
But let’s not go entirely fucking nuts here. Yes, the press conference smelled the glove, and it was like the participants turned the mixed messaging dial up to eleven, which helped nobody, but I think releasing Escobar kind of entirely misses the point. I’ll put this as succinctly as I can, because I think I’ve said more than enough about this issue by now, but almost as appalling as the phrase itself that Escobar wrote is the fact that he saw so little wrong with it. The Jays had to make the choice: do they punish him as a hateful bigot, in which case releasing him would be warranted, or do they punish him as somebody with horrible judgement who needs to be educated as to why such language is so hurtful. It’s easy to insist that ought to have been self-evident, but you don’t have to look far back into our own culture’s past to understand it’s more complicated than that, or to envision a time where too many of us would have also though such words relatively benign.
Yes, it requires some benefit of the doubt to be given to Escobar, but I don’t think that’s unreasonable given what we’ve heard from many Latino players and figures in the game, and ultimately, I think the Jays were right in interpreting this as a moment to forward education and awareness, and that a knee-jerk reaction wouldn’t have served anybody, unless it had been far more evident that Escobar’s words were hate-driven, or there wasn’t such linguistic and cultural ambiguity on the subject.
Could it really and truly be? Back-to-back weeks? Yes, it could be! After such a ridiculously long time in the desert, it seems we’ve come upon two oases in quick succession, as hot-ish off the presses, we’ve got another Griff Bag– aka Richard Griffin’s reader mail bag from over at the Toronto Star. Commence hijacking!
As always, I have not read any of Griffin’s answers.
If there’s a question you’d like me to answer, submit it to Griffin here, and maybe he’ll select it for a future mail bag. Fingers crossed!
Q. Maybe the Jays should let (John) Farrell go (to the Red Sox) and hire your old buddy, Tito (Francona). That would certainly add an additional level of spice to the division, wouldn’t it?
Francona was a great manager, has played in Canada and is well liked up here, so might be a good replacement. But if AA is genuinely committed to Farrell, then he MUST extend him right after the season. It makes the Jays look like a Mickey Mouse organization if their staff are always treated as the managerial equivalent of training wheels for a so-called big league franchise like Boston. It demeans the organization, the city and the fans, in my opinion. Thoughts?
Always love your column.
Marshall, Toronto
What? Um… how the hell have the Jays been any kind of training ground for other organizations, exactly? Name me the last Jays manager to have managed anywhere else at the big league level after leaving Toronto– was it Jimy fucking Williams? IT WAS! I JUST LOOKED!
It’s been such an impossibly long time since the last one that I was starting to worry that maybe Richard Griffin had given up on our favourite feature, perhaps to focus on his new, infinitely long Bullpen column, but the fears about the Griff Bag’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, as he’s got a brand new one up, over at the Toronto Star!
As always, I have not read any of Griffin’s answers.
If there’s a question you’d like me to answer, submit it to Griffin here, and maybe he’ll select it for a future mail bag. Fingers crossed!
Q-Richard Stoeten,
My problem all year long has been the use of the 25-man roster. Why 13 pitchers which seriously depletes your bench strength? Then on Sept. 1, they recall two more pitchers when the rosters expanded! With no bench strength, the playoffs will be a dream only. You can’t just play the same eight (players) game-in and game-out — you’re just looking at someone breaking down.
Dave Mulholland, Toronto
Well, on Friday the Jays called up five players five players, three of whom (Brett Lawrie, JP Arencibia, and Yan Gomes) will strengthen the bench, so maybe that’s precisely what you’re looking for?
But, look, I get that the bench is important, and I haven’t agreed very often with the Jays’ usage of it this year– particularly the 70 man bullpen they’ve generally employed– but “with no bench strength, the playoffs will be a dream only”??? Seriously?
Alright! It’s time for our regular Friday trip around baseball to talk about the interesting topics (TM), with a little Jaysturbation (or not), cooking tips, heresy, trains (?), car noises, and even more depressing realizations about just how ridiculously out-of-whack MLB’s alignment is thrown in for good measure (or not): it’s a brand new episode of the Getting Blanked Podcast!
If you prefer to have a listen later, you can download the podcast right here.
Alternately, you can hit up the Getting Blanked iTunes page, which is humming along these days, and from now on until the end of eternity will have all our podcasts, mp3s and whatever other audio goodies we dream up posted there in a timely manner.
Apologies for missing the last one, but hoo boy, I wasn’t going to take another week off, as we’ve got a fresh new Griff Bag in our hands, and I’m pretty sure it’s a doozy. So get yourself a taste of a seriously caustic hijacking of it, even though that, as I may have mentioned before, sounds kind of disgusting, flavour-wise. But I’m sure it’s all good, as it’s time for me to answer Richard Griffin’s mail bag from over at the Toronto Star!
As always, I have not read any of Griffin’s answers.
If there’s a question you’d like me to answer, submit it to Griffin here, and maybe he’ll select it for a future mail bag. Fingers crossed!
Q-Minor league management questions for you. What is the objective for each level of the minors? Winning or player development? I would think player development in the lower levels is the greater objective, but then I look at the composition of the Vancouver roster and wonder if they are more focused on winning and attendance. Secondly, what goes into the thought process around promoting or demoting players. I look at some stats (I know that is not the full picture) and wonder why some players are not promoted when they seem to have mastered their level (e.g. Pillar or the Big 3 at Lansing). Then I see others (e.g. Knecht in FSL) and wonder why they are not sent down as they seem to be overmatched at their current level. And then I see players who have been at the same level for years with no signs of progress and wonder why they have not been released (e.g. Ahrens, Balbino). Tom F, Newmarket
To the first question, it’s player development all the way up to Triple-A, at which point there’s the side-function of being a taxi squad for the big league roster– though in the case of Vancouver, I think there might be some marketing concerns going on there as well, such as having a pitcher as advanced as Marcus Stroman pitch there, of all places, after being one of the club’s first-round picks.
As for the promotions and demotions, as you full well acknowledge, the stats don’t really tell the whole story– precisely because of the player development stuff, often. Guys can be working on different things that reflect poorly in their numbers while actually having successes from a development standpoint. Anthony Gose, for example, had the bunt taken away from him while he was in New Hampshire, in order to have him focus more on refining his approach. On the other end, the Lansing guys you speak of, because of the “piggybacking” system the club has employed, haven’t been forced to turn a lineup over very often this season, which is reflected positively in their numbers. So… it’s a little complicated.
And the guys who seem to make no progress? Well, you need to fill the roster of a lot of affiliates somehow, no?
As you’ve probably heard, somewhere beyond all the trade innuendo of these many past, insufferable off-day hours, the Oakland A’s are a streaking, surprising club, having just swept the New York Yankees, and looking to add pieces– like Yunel Escobar, we’re supposed to believe– for some kind of a charge at the one-game Wild Card play-in.
Well, to think like that, they’d have to be looking past Brett Cecil, who the Jays send to the hill tonight at Rogers Centre in a somewhat meaningful game for both him and the club. JA Happ is sitting in the bullpen, waiting for Cecil, Laffey, or Villanueva to crack, and the way the other two have looked of late the safest money would seem to be on Cecil, even though he hasn’t been particularly awful either.
Cecil took the loss in his outing against the Yankees last week, but only gave up three earned on six hits through six innings, with five strikeouts and only two walks. That’s a completely fine stopgap outing for a team trying to hold on until they can make a deal for some front-line pitching help, or at least until August 11th, when Brandon Morrow is eligible to come off of the 60-day DL (according to Wilner’s best recollection, via Twitter).
I speak of Morrow’s return with optimism for a reason: John Lott of the National Post tweets that John Farrell told reporters today that the Jays’ ace is throwing live batting practice today, and if all goes well, he’ll be making a rehab start for Dunedin on Sunday.
Scuttlebutt
Both via the invaluable MLBTR, Tom Haudricourt of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel tweets that the Jays are among the teams who have had interest in Zack Greinke (Okaaaaaaay), while Peter Gammons tweets that the Marlins told teams they would only trade one of Anibal Sanchez and Josh Johnson, so it would take a “blowaway” offer to land JJ.
If he does move, Jack Moore of FanGraphs wonders if Johnson will be able to solve his problems pitching out of the stretch, which have been a major issue this season.
Gold from Gregor, as BlueJays.com’s Chisholm tweets that Sergio Santos had surgery today, and that John Farrell says that the rotation is constantly being evaluated, which, like I say, could be trouble for tonight’s starter Brett Cecil. Chris Toman adds that Farrell says he’d be comfortable moving Cecil to the bullpen– where a lot of us were thinking over the winter he might be best suited for anyway– and notes that of the eight starts he’s made this season, this is the first time Cecil’s been paired with JP Arencibia and not Jeff Mathis.
Speaking of rotation changes, Robert MacLeod of the Globe and Mail writes about the Jays’ rotation tumult, noting that the club has been clear that any of their struggling pitchers could be replaced by the newly-acquired JA Happ, or anybody else who may come along. They then quickly realized that they forgot to mention that Ricky Romero, who has struggled as much as anyone, has a shit-tonne more rope than, say, Aaron Laffey.
In the National Post, John Lott writes that Jason Frasor will be out for a month, but that Jose Bautista continues to progress nicely, and may be hitting off a tee by the end of the week.
Speaking of Bautista, our old friend Dustin Parkes tweets that he heard Eric Byrnes on KNBR radio in San Francisco, saying that he thinks the Giants are going after the Jays’ slugger. Um… right. Good luck with that.
Jays Prospects talks to Marcus Stroman, the first-rounder who is finally getting comfortable with the Vancouver Canadians, and still may find himself in the Majors this season.
Lastly, for your between-innings viewing pleasure, here’s today’s edition of Getting Blanked…
TV: Sportsnet
And now the lineups, by way of the live box score at theScore.com. And for those of you who’ll be out and about, be sure to follow all the action on your phone with Score Mobile…
Toronto Blue Jays
B. Lawrie 3B
C. Rasmus CF
E. Encarnacion 1B
A. Lind DH
J. Arencibia C
K. Johnson 2B
Y. Escobar SS
T. Snider LF
R. Davis RF
B. Cecil LHP
Oakland A’s
C. Crisp CF
J. Gomes DH
J. Reddick RF
Y. Cespedes LF
C. Carter 1B
B. Inge 3B
D. Norris C
B. Hicks SS
J. Weeks 2B
