What happens when a confident closer loses his fastball? Through three seasons, Roberto Osuna has become a star closing out games for the Toronto Blue Jays. The now 23-year-old right hander has brought stability to a volatile world of bullpens. The 2015 season doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, but from the time […]
Category: Articles
The State of the Bullpen: What the Past Tells Us About the Future
Editor’s note: This piece was written prior to Thursday’s doubleheader, which has obviously had an impact on the short term makeup of the bullpen. However, as the long term outlook remains unchanged, the analysis herein should still be applicable. – JH Coming into the 2018 season, the consensus among many experts was that if the […]
When Nightmares Become Reality for a Minor League Team
I have put off writing about this because there are rare, scary, and traumatic moments in sports. Look no further then the recent Humboldt tragedy. I don’t want to piggyback on that, or take light away from the many, many, many impactful fundraising initiatives that have brought Canadians together. Sadly, I mentioned a tragedy like this […]
The Rangers Are Taking the Analytics Game to a New, Scary Level
Earlier this afternoon, Evan Grant of The Dallas Morning News sent out the following tweet containing a Texas Rangers press release: NOW, this is way cool from #TexasRangers for y'all who want to go into baseball pic.twitter.com/53G244Pgnt — Evan Grant (@Evan_P_Grant) May 3, 2018 On the surface, this looks like a great new initiative to […]
Minor League Report: A Lug-Nutty Start to the Season
The full-year minor league season is about five months long and made up of ~140 games. One of the dangers of passionate prospect watching is that one becomes easy prey to sample-size errors. You need a decent sample of games to even bother to make an observation. As of now we’re 1/5 of the way into the […]
Artificial Turf Wars Ep. 99: Ups and Downs
Episode 99 Greg and Josh discuss the latest developments for the Blue Jays including Lourdes Gurriel taking over for the demoted Devon Travis, injuries to Steve Pearce and Randal Grichuk clearing the playing time logjam in the outfield and at designated hitter, Teoscar Hernández’ improved hitting and adventurous defending, the struggles in the rotation and […]
The New Teoscar Hernández May be Here to Stay
At this point, there are no Blue Jays fans who are unfamiliar with Teoscar Hernández. The 25-year-old outfielder burst onto the scene with eight home runs last September, and has done nothing but hit in the early going in 2018. As such, the conversation has shifted from “how long will Hernández stay with the big […]
Tim Mayza Is Tipping His Pitches
Tim Mayza has incredible raw stuff. Over the first 18 and 2/3 innings of his major league career he’s struck out 33.3 percent of the batters he’s faced, which is among baseball’s elite. Roberto Osuna posted an identical strikeout rate in 2017 and ranked 18th among the 235 relievers with 30 or more innings of […]
The One Sign of Optimism for Randal Grichuk
The Toronto Blue Jays brought in Randal Grichuk from the St. Louis Cardinals this past offseason in exchange for pitchers Dominic Leone and Conner Greene. This was the second time the Blue Jays and Cardinals hooked up for a trade this winter, also acquiring Aledmys Diaz, who, in the absence of Troy Tulowitzki, is now their primary […]
Artificial Turf Wars Ep. 98: A Swing and a Miss
Episode 98 Eno Sarris of The Athletic stops by to discuss his latest article that looks at the correlation between launch angle and strikeouts ($). He discusses the differences between practice testing vs live games, the dual importance of swing angle and plate discipline, the financial impact of the high home run/high strikeout era, and […]