A Scant Hundred Games Remain

 

club vibes

After yesterday afternoon's full-on drubbing of the still-good Phillies, the Blue Jays moved into a tie for second-place in the good-but-not-great AL East, and a tie, too, for the WC3 playoff position. All of this is good! You will recall that not long ago they were playing so poorly! And yet, after sixty-two games of this 2025 season—a number of no real importance, other that it leaves precisely one hundred games to play, which is also a number of no real importance, other that it is, in a sense, a pleasing one—here we sit at a perfectly reasonable 33W-29L, good for a winning percentage of .532 (despite our -1 run differential!), an eighty-six-win pace extrapolated over the fullness of the long summer. Eighty-six wins has been enough to get you into the playoffs in two of the three seasons since this welcoming new format has been adopted, a format which keeps you more or less in the running most of the way should you so much as stay slightly above .500. So far, so good, mostly? 

I thought it might be an interesting time to check in on how everyone is doing in the broadest sense, which is to say by having a quick look at everybody's fWAR, the FanGraphs version of Wins Above Replacement. A very general note on the scale of things here (feel free to quibble): by definition, a statistically determined replacement-level player would accrue 0.0 fWAR over the course of a full season; an average player would accrue something like 2.0 (one of the great virtues of WAR as a concept is it recognizes the significant value of being average: a roster full of replacement-level players projects to a miserable forty-something wins, depending how you do it; but a roster full of average, 2.0 WAR players would likely win more than ninety games and be a legitimately championship level team); 4.0 WAR represents a true All-Star kind of season; 8.0 WAR and you're looking at a league MVP (naturally, when using terms like "All-Star" and "MVP," we mean richly deserving ones, and not the super weird things that happen when weird votes happen, like when 1996 Juan Gonzalez wins the AL MVP as the third or fourth best player on his team [3.5 fWAR {a good season!}], whereas Ken Griffey Jr. did not, despite having literally one of the greatest seasons of all time [9.7 fWAR]). So that's the scale, and we're only sixty-two games in, so multiply any of these by 2.6 to get a sense of what these would be over the full season, if you like. Oh hey, quick note: Aaron Judge, I am noticing just now, is at 5.3 fWAR so far, so he's on pace for a 13.8, more than a full win better than any individual season by Actual Barry Bonds, though it would still come in a little under Babe Ruths's 1923 season. He's having a good first half! Shohei Ohtani, if you're wondering, is comparatively dogging it at 3.3 fWAR, which projects to a merely conventional MVP-level season of 8.6 in a season in which he is still rehabbing his elbow and therefore not pitching. You're embarrassing yourself, Shohei Ohtani. If you were wondering who is doing the worst by fWAR so far this season, it is the White Sox Andrew Vaughn, who put up -1.3fWAR before being sent to the minors, and about whom a recent headline reads, "Is There Any Hope Left for Andrew Vaughn?" That's a tough spot. Anyway, here are our guys: 

THE GUYS OVER ONE SO FAR: 

1. Alejandro Kirk 1.8

2. Ernie Clement 1.7

3. Addison Barger 1.5

4. Kevin Gausman 1.4

5. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. 1.4

6. Chris Bassitt 1.4

7. Bo Bichette 1.2

8. Tyler Heineman 1.2

LIGHT COMMENTARY UPON THOSE GUYS: Kirky! As he is called by his boiz! It is remarkable that he has become one of the best defensive catchers in all of baseball, which is worth a good chunk of fWAR on its own, but he's hitting everything of late, and so here we are. Ernie Clement is for sure a surprise here, but when we lost Matt Chapman at third, Clement's defense at that position was actually statistically better than Chapman's, plus they are also playing Clement all over the infield now, and he's been great everywhere. Addison Barger, who is built like a monster and hits everything super hard, has exceeded everyone's expectations so far, and it will be interesting to see whether, long-term, he settles in at third or in right (the José Bautista conundrum, defensively: great arm, but how is he at getting to his immediate left or right super quickly?). Kevin Gausman remains, like Chris Bassitt a couple spots below him, a yeoman of a guy, just innings upon innings. Vladdy is having a middle-of-the-road Vladdy season so far, and I will take one of those every year, please. Bo has started hitting for power again of late, which is a delight, and I wonder what they're going to do about his contract? It's a much trickier situation than the settled matter of Vladdy, really, and I would not at all be surprised to see him head elsewhere (I would get it, but I would not like it). Tyler Heineman's standing here again shows the value of a good defensive catcher who is able to hit, like, at all, and the Blue Jays continue their tradition of getting an absurd amount of value out of the catcher spot broadly. 

THE GUYS BETWEEN ZERO AND ONE: 

9. Myles Straw 0.8

10. George Springer 0.7

11. Daulton Varsho 0.7

12. Brendan Little 0.7

13. José Berrios 0.6

14. Nathan Lukes 0.5

15. Mason Fluharty 0.4

16. Andrés Giménez 0.4

17. Yimi Garcia 0.3

18. Nick Sandlin 0.2

19. Paxton Schultz 0.2

20. Davis Schneider 0.2

21. Braydon Fisher 0.2

22. Jonatan Clase 0.1

23. Josh Walker 0.1

24. Jeff Hoffman 0.1

25. Eric Lauer 0.1

26. Yariel Rodriguez 0.1

27. Casey Lawrence 0.0

28. Jacob Barnes 0.0

29. Michael Stefanic 0.0

30. Ali Sanchez 0.0

INTERMITTENT COMMENTARY UPONST THEM: In this range we find a mix of everyday players who are doing alright-to-pretty-well, bench guys who are doing a good job or maybe even overperforming in their limited roles, a whole lot of relief pitchers (whose specific contributions are not necessarily captured in WAR, as their real impact is a product of leverage more than anything, right?), and several players who were on the roster for like twenty minutes. It must be said that Myles Straw, whose acquisition was much maligned, has been fantastic in his limited playing time, and all the bench outfielders have really done well in the absence of Daulton Varsho, who has been great when healthy, but barely healthy so far (a true drag, that, and not unlike the Gimenez situation, I guess, too). George Springer, who is legitimately old now, is hitting! But he is no great shakes in the field at this point, despite his continued efforts, and has been DHing quite a bit. It's not a lot of fun to see José Berrios in this mix, but I'm unconcerned; he'll be at least fine, I bet. Bullpen standouts so far have been Brendan Little and Mason Fluharty (what a name!), whereas I am sorry to report that I have very little faith in closer Jeff Hoffman.    

NEGATIVE WINS ABOVE REPLACEMENT CAN'T BE A GOOD TIME FOR ANYBODY:

31. Alan Roden -0.1

32. Erik Swanson -0.1

33. Richard Lovelady -0.1

34. Easton Lucas -0.1

35. José Urena -0.1

36. Dillon Tate -0.1

37. Max Scherzer -0.2

38. Will Wagner -0.4

39. Chad Green -0.4

40. Bowden Francis -0.7

41. Anthony Santander -0.8

SAD THOUGHTS ON THESE GUYS BUT NOT TOO SAD: It's easy to slip into a false sense of precision with fWAR, or really with any all-in-one value like this, and it's important to remember that even the staunchest proponents of this measure are quick to caution that there is no meaningful way you can look at fWAR and fWAR alone and say that Player A's 4.2 fWAR season was for sure better than Player B's 3.9 fWAR season; Dave Cameron used to always caution (perhaps he still does, in his private life; who knows) that fWAR is useful to within about one full win, and beyond that, you've got to start digging if you want to make finer distinctions. The benefit of fWAR is that, despite its complicated and varied inputs, it offers us a quick and coarse measure with which we can broadly distinguish between different types of seasons. But someone who is at -0.1 at this point is not necessarily having a very different time from someone how is at 0.1, so we can't get too bent out of shape about this sort of thing. All that said: Anthony Santander, now on the Injured List, has been just awful so far, unfortunately; Bowden Francis, who was utterly thrashed by the Phillies this week, hasn't been much better, and what is up with Chad Green? Being at -0.4 fWAR in only twenty-six innings is wildly bad, especially from a long-reliable reliever. I hope this isn't the end of the line for him, but he's thirty-four now, and one cannot help but wonder. Still with old pitchers: Max Scherzer was for sure with a shot, but it's hard to see it working out all that well from here, probably, right? Ah well. So it goes.  

Anyway, those have been our guys; long may they continue to win slightly more games than they lose, and thus enrich our summer tremendously. Let's enjoy further baseball! And then reconvene to discuss it a little! 

KS

     

Catching (baseball pun? an exceedingly light one?) Up

fun to see but honestly I would hate this so much
and not be a very good sport about it
 ("Vladdy," I would say, "we discussed this, and I said no")

Since last we spoke, the Blue Jays dropped two of three oddly excellent games to the oddly excellent Detroit Tigers (long may they prosper; R.I.P. to our old friend Neil), looked unstoppable against the ever-interesting San Diego Padres (solid contenders for best uniforms in the game, especially when you factor in their outrun/synthwave City Connects), scored but two runs over the course of three games whilst being swept by the Rays in their fairly charming minor-league non-Trop home for the season (hurricanes: remain no joke), continued not to score—almost even, at times, to unscore—in Texas but came away with a pair of wins all the same, then completed a truly rad four-game sweep of the tragically reduced Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas/Nowhere Athletics to peak up over the .500 mark and join the six-team Clutterbuck that constitutes the AL Wild Card situation. It's been good stuff! And so far this week, the Blue Jays got so trounced so early by the Phillies on Tuesday night that you couldn't even really mind the loss (if you stick with all nine innings after a first that looks like that, rather than find another way to spend your evening, that is quite frankly on you at that point), and followed that game with a walk-off win that saw Vladdy steal second (I was so happy for him) on account of how Phillies closer Jordan Romano (remember him?), for all his virtues, has never been much for holding runners at first, before Alejandro Kirk knocked one off the wall in for the game-ending RBI single (they might have had it as a double; I guess it depends on how swiftly Vladdy made his way home [okay I have checked, and it was a single {good hustle, Vladdy}]). Kirk, who is the least emotionally expressive professional baseball player I have ever observed in my forty-or-so-years of such observation, permitted himself quite a smile and even a little helmet toss as he was swarmed by his bros as he rounded second. It was all pretty nice! There's an afternoon game today of the "getaway-day" variety with a nice pitching matchup (Bassitt and Luzardo), and I am fairly stoked for it. These 2025 Toronto Blue Jays are by no means world-beaters, at thirty-two and twenty-nine (tidily outperforming their minus-nine run differential!), but they remain totally in the mix, and have been a likeable bunch. I would take this literally every year, honestly. Let's all enjoy a pleasant summer very much like this, please.   

KS

Haunted Once More by the Rays

 

everybody just loves this guy, on account of how he is "neat"

I tuned into Tuesday night's game just in time to see Vladdy and Springer work two-out walks ahead of Varsho's second homer of the night—this one off the facing of the upper deck in right—to put the Blue Jays ahead 7-6 in the eighth. John Schneider got Hoffman up quick in the pen, as one would do, and I remained quite stoked right up until the moment Hoffman set the ball on a tee for a Junior Caminero grand slam that stood up for the win despite a pair of Blue Jays runs in the bottom half. "This game has had way too many events," I texted to a couple of pals in the immediate aftermath; "Fewer events next time please, guys." Having got my letter, the Blue Jays then played a tight game marked mostly by how rad Alejandro Kirk remains, throwing out one of the fastest players in the game early, and hitting a three-run home run to win it late. Then they got clobbered on getaway day. And so the Blue Jays are again below .500 as the excellent-so-far Tigers come to town (they're twenty-nine and fifteen!). I don't know, man. I don't know.  

KS

Counterpoint: Maybe West-Coast Road Trips are the Greatest?

go Bo

If our west-coast road trips are going to take us to Seattle, where thousands of Blue Jays fans show up every year and make things utterly delightful, and we're going to sweep our way back to the .500 mark, I am willing to settle down, at least in a preliminary sense, about west-coast road trips broadly. A little. 

KS 

West Coast Road Trips Exist to Make Me Sad Right Before Bed

 

Logan "Hippity" O'Hoppe

Even though we took the third game of the series on the strength of another fine outing by our agreeable psycho Chris Bassitt, the first two were just crushing, given both the particular pitchers who got lit up—first Yimi (Yimi!), then Hoffman—and, even more than that, the sheer time of night (or indeed morning). I was in the very act of getting ready for bed! The very act of it! This is the danger, I suppose, of having baseball on one's computer-phone, rather than on one's non-phone computer (or even "tv"). 

KS

Please, not Yimi; anyone but Yimi.

 

oh no

As a longstanding Yimi Garcia ultra, Saturday's 5-3 loss to Cleveland, in which four of those Cleveland runs came on an eighth-inning Daniel Schneeman grand slam allowed by that very same Yimi, was a particularly difficult one for me personally. I note, sadly, that things really aren't going very well at all so far, are they? Fourth place, a couple games under .500? It is certainly true that there is a lot of baseball left to play, but if the old Billy Beane maxim about the shape of the season—that you've got two months to figure out what you've got, two months to try to fix it, and two months to see if it worked—holds true, we are quickly getting towards the end of the first third of that eminently sensible way of thinking about things, and it's not great (aside from how I am really quite enjoying watching at least a little bit of baseball most days).   

KS

Comebacks! Dingers! Comeback Dingers!

 

they call him "Kirky," though the origins of that sobriquet remain obscure

Taking two-out-of-three at home against the Red Sox is a fairly normal outcome, but this pair of come-from-behind wins felt pretty special, in particular to the extent that they had homers in them. Blue Jays ones, even! It is a deeply weird to me that the Blue Jays are hitting so few homers, because I do not think it is unreasonable to look at their roster and think that there would be some homers in there? And not even tucked away too deeply? But just sort of self-evidently there? And yet no, that would not seem to be the case, at least not so far. I saw the other day that in terms of the straight-up differential of home runs allowed vs. home runs enbombened, the Blue Jays were a league-worst negative twenty-two (I am sure the exact figure is somewhat different these several days later). There are lots of ways to win baseball games, surely, but the dinging of dingers has proven an extraordinarily effective way of doing so over these many years, and I would invite wholeheartedly the Blue Jays to explore this possibility further as soon as they are able. Thanks guys. 

KS 

It did not go that well in New York

 

can we . . . can we talk about this?

Well, Friday night was fine, and even good, actually: a three-run top of the ninth, Alejandro Kirk knocking in a pair after throwing a couple guys out earlier in the game? That's great stuff! And perhaps gave me unrealistic expectations for the remainder of the weekend. After a Saturday rainout, the thought of a doubleheader Sunday quite delighted me, in all honesty, but Kevin Gausman's fifty-three pitch inning (fifty-three! that's the most any Blue Jay has ever thrown in an inning! because of how it is way too many!) early in game one really set the tone for how miserable this was all going to be. Dropping the Sunday games by a combined score of sixteen to three is dark, but it is a darkness I largely escaped by just doing other things with most of my Sunday afternoon. But that is not a decision I should have to make, Blue Jays; don't put me in spots like this; not on Sunday afternoons.

KS

Nine hits in three games? Blue Jays, I can divide

 

I will never not find José Altuve neat

Whither the bats? Have they withered, the bats?

KS

Et tu, Rowdy?

 

incredible that he hit it without a bat!
(j/k if you look closely there actually was a bat)

The first of our old friend Rowdy Tellez's home runs over the weekend was inoffensive enough, coming as it did in a Friday night Mariners loss; his third, on Sunday, was honestly fine, too, because the Blue Jays were done anyway. But the middle one, the twelfth-inning grand slam on Saturday, that one cut me pretty deep. I watched way too much of that game to enjoy something like that at the end of it. I honestly felt I had been made a fool of. It was not a good feeling. 

KS

Hey Gang, It's Vladdy

Vladdy can finally afford a jacket that is sufficiently pink for his needs

Unless my recollection of this season's FanGraphs projections fails me—and I am reasonably sure that it does not!—the only two teams projected for ninety-or-more wins  this year were Atlanta (sounds about right) and the Dodgers (it would be very weird for them not to). So far, though, Atlanta has played really very poorly, which is just fine by me, since we had to play them three times just now. The series was bookended by Vladdy, who did the public-facing part of his reupping with the Blue Jays for fourteen more years (yay) on Monday, and who hit his long-awaited first home run of the season in Wednesday afternoon's getaway game (it was school day! you could really hear all the kids!). "It's about fucking time!" he could be heard to remark, cheerfully, in a hot-mic-in-the-dugout situation. Things are going pretty well! Mariners coming in for the weekend! And they haven't been great so far! Let's go!

KS

Middling Fun in Baltimore

 

still the perfect ballpark probably

Friday night, I felt fairly aggrieved when I clicked on Rogers Sportsnet and found no Blue Jays game, thinking Apple TV+ must have stolen away another one (for they are villains), but it turns out it was god himself who denied us Blue Jays baseball on this night by making it rainy. Saturday was not much better (other than that it was sunny), in that the Blue Jays hit into five double-plays—five! that's so many! the AL record is six!—though in fairness, one was a strange situation where Vladdy was said to have left first base early on a very heads-up tag-up play, when in fact he did not leave early at all (as revealed through Jomboy analysis), but nobody challenged (aside from Vladdy, in his heart, and also somewhat verbally). However! Sunday ruled! In that the Blue Jays kept kind of blowing it but clawing their way back in, helped by some bottom-of-the-order scrappiness plus also a key hit by Bo Bichette, who is the literal top of the order, so that part's different. But it was all very good. I will take the split. These young Orioles no longer seem quite the menace they once did, but they've for sure got some guys who are going to be a problem for us for like a decade.

KS

Blue Jays Win Nearly All the Games

 

whenever I see Bo these days my brain just kind of fills in the hair

After the Blue Jays took game two of this four-game series in Fenway, I texted one of the two pals with whom I text about Blue Jays baseball, boldly and almost correctly arguing that the Blue Jays, an unstoppable juggernaut comfortably on pace for a one-hundred-win season, were going to take all four, and that it wasn't even going to be all that hard. Wednesday's game, in which the Sox (lightly) touched up Nick Sandlin, made a fool of me, but Thursday's, in which Nick Sandlin got not only his revenge, but mine as well, left me feeling just great about the whole week, honestly.

KS

So As Not to Show Off, the Blue Jays are Swept in New York

 

in which Mr. Met gives in to astonishment

The Blue Jays dropping all three against the Mets is one thing—disappointing!—but a Saturday baseball game that starts at 7:10PM? Instead of in the afternoon? What are we even doing here, boys? Saturday baseball is to be contested in the afternoon, as a backdrop to ones chores or, through the radio broadcast, also possibly errands. It is not for Saturday evenings! Unless it is a west-coast road trip, in which case there is little to be done! But the biggest Blue Jays news coming out of the weekend, arguably, is the fourteen-year, $500-million-dollar extension that will see Vladimir Guerrero stay with the team until he is forty, and, just as importantly, until I am sixty. In addition to being an entirely sensible deal for both sides—about two-thirds of the Juan Soto deal? making Vladdy the ninth-highest paid player in the game as of this moment? that all sounds about right, doesn't it?—this is also just lovely, and makes me sad all over again about how the Blue Jays didn't so much as offer my favourite baseball player Carlos Delgado a contract after the 2004 season. This is a whole lot better than that! And as I saw someone point out on this very same internet through which we are speaking even now, this would seem to all but guarantee that Vladdy will end up as the most productive Blue Jays position player ever (could he maybe even take a run at Dave Stieb's fairly bananas 56.4 bWAR?). Vladdy's at 21.6 bWAR so far at age twenty-six, and here's the position player top ten:

  

Pretty interesting, isn't it? The wild thing about José Bautista coming out ahead of both Tony Fernandez and Carlos Delgado like that is that he wasn't even good for all that long, really; it's just that for those few years, he was like insanely good. It really was quite a time. 

And now it's Vladdy's! Go forth, young Vladdy! Why not prosper! A series in Fenway seems like a perfect opportunity for dingers! Let's get some! Of those! 

KS  

Why Wouldn't We Sweep the Nationals?

 

safe at home / safe as houses

At absolutely no risk of getting ahead of anything at all, I note eagerly (though not overly) that these five-and-two 2025 Blue Jays are on pace to surpass the 114-win 1998 Yankees and match the 116-win 2001 Mariners (a team that you may well recall for being the first one that had Ichiro Suzuki on it [hey he's going into the Hall of Fame this year, isn't he?]). I would note further that not even the gods themselves could prevent this from happening. 

KS   

Opening Weekend 2025: A Split! I'll Take it!

 

this is my new friend Andrés Giménez

After an Opening Day debacle that really couldn't have gone worse—aside from how we had hot dogs, root beers, and crinkle-cut fries—the Blue Jays' big Friday-night win came on an Apple TV+ game, making it worse than if it hadn't happened at all (a radical view, but one that I hold resolutely). Saturday afternoon, they'd just gone up 4-2 on Andrés Giménez's second home run of this our young season (he has also already made some very nice plays at second) when, like fools, we decided to go for a nice walk. When we returned, of course, all was blasted. How pleasing, then, to see the Blue Jays hold on to their 2-1 first-inning lead (I missed the first inning) throughout the long remainder of yesterday's game, tacking on a late run on a homer from Taylor Heineman, of literally all people (just his second in career that has seen him bounce in and out and around the majors since 2019 [he was stoked about it]). A season-opening split is fine! I have no problem with it! I don't know that the Orioles will be ninety-plus-wins good again this season, but they sure don't seem likely to be bad, so I'll take it without complaint (aside from those listed above). It is regrettable that Max Scherzer seems to be lightly hurt already, that Daulton Varsho continues to be unwell, and that we have already DFA'd our best-named relief pitcher (Richard Lovelady), but I am genuinely looking forward to this season of Blue Jays baseball, not in the sense that I have great hopes and aspirations of a remarkable outcome of any sort (I agree with FanGraphs projection of eighty-four wins!), but more that I am just very into the idea of it being, like around. Let us endeavour to discuss it here! Lightly! A little! Things definitely trailed off around these parts last season, but so too did the Blue Jays themselves, you may well recall, so I only (baseball)feel(ing[s]) a little bad about it. Anyway, the Nats are in next! I have no ideas of any kind about them! Let's see!

KS