2023 Game Fifty-One: Rays 6, Blue Jays 3

 

this happened so many times

A couple of late runs once again made the final score look respectable (the Rays, despite their overall super excellence, will probably look for a couple more bullpen arms as they put the finishing touches on this championship-seeming roster), but this one was over early, because Alek Manoah is just not a good pitcher this year, and to just a brutal extent: if you just go with simple ERA, Manoah is the fifth-worst pitcher in baseball of those who have thrown any real number of innings, and if you look really any deeper into the numbers than that, he is quite plainly the worst. The very worst one! Many agreed that Manoah had outperformed his underlying numbers so far in his career, but nobody saw anything like this coming (regression to the mean, man; to the mean). I don't know if this is the most frustrating part to Manoah personally, but to the viewer, the most unwatchable aspect of all of this (or the least watchable, I suppose) is Manoah's inability to do anything at all about the running game, just letting the pitch clock tick down to two or one on every pitch. The runners just take off with these incredible jumps, and Alejandro Kirk, who is squarely average at throwing out baserunners (which is fine to be!), has no shot against jumps this nasty. And it takes Manoah so many pitches to do any of this. To me, and this is easy to say at a distance, and not dealing with actually real live people, it is to the point where he needs to skip a start or two, whether that means a phantom IL stint or really just whatever. Trevor Richards, who pitched three spotless innings of relief, and whose change-up is fooling just about everybody, is a much, much more viable pitcher than Alek Manoah right now, and a scheduled "bullpen day" with Richards as a designated three-inning guy would make a lot more sense to me than the next Manoah start, and honestly might be the more humane option for all involved. 

Despite the low-key horrors of this deeply improbable last two weeks, the way the pitching lines up in Minnesota this weekend, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the Blue Jays swept: perhaps I am merely a fool, but we're missing the top of the Twins' excellent rotation, and we've got Gausman, Bassitt, and Berios going. Even two-out-of-three would be fine! But I wonder if a series loss would put John Schneider on pretty thin ice, especially when you've got Don Mattingly sitting right there next to him. Until things fell all to HECK at the start of the Yankees series, the John Schnieder Blue Jays had the best record in baseball since the day he replaced Charlie, but things can happen pretty fast. I believe we're two "players-only" meetings into this slide so far. Three would seem like a lot?   

KS