 |
| safe, believe it or not, despite the lightly scorpioned Clement |
You might well think that this was more of the same—the Blue Jays go down early, as Patrick Corbin's five-innings-whether-you-like-it-or-not ends up being five runs over four-and-a-third; we eventually put some runs together, but the comeback falls short; and, ultimately, we lose our fourth straight since getting to .500 (this exact same thing has happened several times already this season!)—and that is certainly extremely true and very much the case. But this was actually, on the whole, pretty merry? I was cheered by the big Friday-night crowd's enthusiasm for just about everything as the Blue Jays made their way mostly back, let's say, from a pretty dispiriting start (three Rangers runs in the first, and two more in the third): the crowd chanting "Ernie" or "Vladdy" (as appropriate) with great spirit; the big cheers for Davis Schneider when he came in for Jésus Sanchez (badly rolled ankle at the wall, it looked like, for big Jésus); the full-on ovation when Alejandro Kirk pinch-hit late. These are huge crowds every night (41 689 most recently), and the amount of affection they have for their Toronto Blue Jays, for these specific guys, after last season (and really these last seasons [it's been a heck of a time!], remains just very stirring to be around (it's okay to be stirred, Beavis). They sure like some of these new guys, too: 岡本 和真 Okamoto Kazuma, for example, who hit another two-run home run in the eighth, and continues to be an absolute delight, and threatens to make us all retroactive fans of the 読売ジャイアンツ / Yomiuri Jaiantsu / Yomiuri Giants (what of our pre-existing loyalties to the 北海道日本ハムファイターズ / Hokkaidō Nippon-Hamu Faitāzu / Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, based in no small measure on sister-city relationships with 函館市 Hakodate, though? these are incompatible 日本野球機構 Nippon Yakyū Kikō loyalties!).
The other Blue Jays runs on the night came off the bat of the beleaguered but beloved Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who went two-for-four, knocking in a pair and scoring one. A solid night for him, obviously (in that two-for-four every night would make you toweringly awesome, what with the three-hundred-plus hits per season to go along with the 1.000 OPS and everything), but broadly speaking, his struggles continue. I have been quick to note, when the subject of Vladdy's unhappy first half comes up, that after playing tremendously for the República Dominicana in the WBC, Vladdy was hitting .354 through then end of April, with an absurd OBP, and an OPS north of .900; it's not that it's been a lost season, but just an improbably, seemingly impossibly bad very specific stretch, even allowing for the early Sabermetric semi-maxim that just about anybody is capable of just about anything over the course of one hundred at bats (this has honestly been as helpful to me as any of the full-on maths-stuff over the many years [indeed decades!] since I first encountered it). Andrew Stoeten, of the once mighty Drunk Jays Fans (an entity whose time and place of triumph are communicated entirely in this image, and whose downfall serves us still as a cautionary tale [Baseball Feelings is not for sale, private equity firms, so stop asking]), did us all the favour of breaking Vladdy's season down week-by-week in terms of wRC+, "weighted runs created plus," a measure which I concede to be the most useful (in the "quick comparison" sense) all-in offensive number available to us even though I am still a little mad about this 12/8/08 blog post in which FanGraphs dark overlord David Appleman announced "[t]onight we’ve completed the phasing out of Runs Created (RC) and Runs Created per 27 Outs (RC/27). In their place you will find two run stats based off wOBA, which is a sounder metric than the previously used Runs Created," a betrayal about which I have blogged previously, and will almost certainly mention again (pretty soon, too, I bet!). Anyway here's what Stoeten has for us week-by-week (in wRC+, one-hundred is league average; fifty is obviously half as good as that, and two-hundred is Aaron Judge when he is having an especially good year even for him [Ohtani's best, for example, is 180 {to be fair he is also often pitching}]; Vladdy's best seasons are 166 [2021] and 164 [2024]):
(we're gonna go "Week Of: wRC+" here)
3/23: 182
3/30: 105
4/6: 175
4/13: 133
4/20: 162
4/27: 120
5/4: 11
5/11: 40
5/18: 135
5/25: 153
6/1: 40
6/8: 53
6/15: 86
6/22: 6
That last one will have come up a little since Stoeten posted it (I have just now checked at FanGraphs [whose splits-leaderboard has actually gotten easier to query! I think!], and his most recent week now stands at 37, rather than 6, not that the week's over), but the overall result is a wRC+ of 102 on the season so far, which is to say that a borderline-incomprehensible Vladdy-slump has left us with a slightly above-average hitter over the first half, one who is actually still probably going to have a better overall season than his 2023 in terms of fWAR on account of improved fielding (just last night he made a nifty play to throw a runner out after a weird single that could easily have become a weird double!) and baserunning (he is six for seven stealing bases this season, somehow; also there is no accounting for the sheer joy of all involved [Vladdy, us, the cosmos] when he scores from first on a double).
So there's your Vladdy Report, or, more precisely, your My Feelings About Vladdy's Struggles And How I Think We Should Still Remember To Be Nice Report. I am finding internet responses to Vladdy's slump saddening, but it's my fault for reading them; I am finding in-the-ballpark responses to Vladdy's slump, in which a loving crowd encourages him [ganbatte, Vladdy-san]), to be quite bolstering. I hope that he does, too! I also hope for dingers—just all kinds of them—perhaps as soon as slightly later this afternoon?
KS
No comments:
Post a Comment