Blue Jays Mailbag: Bullpen Depth, Gibbons' Slow-Starting Teams, and Trade Chips

Andrew Stoeten answers your questions in our Blue Jays Mailbag, which runs weekly at VICE Sports. You can send him questions at stoeten@gmail.com , and follow him on Twitter.

The Blue Jays season just keeps on going. Five more months of this! Oh joy!

But on the field they've actually started treading water enough that fans can seriously contemplate a red-hot run putting their Blue Jays back in contention at some point—meaning the club's recent roster fluctuations aren't mere rearrangements of the deck chairs on the Titanic quite yet. Even if they sometimes have felt that way.

So let's do it to it and take some questions about the bullpen! *COUGH*

And if you have a Blue Jays question you'd like me to tackle for next week, be sure to send it to stoeten@gmail.com. As always, I have not read any of Griff's answers…

Hi Andrew,
With the Jays injuries to their pitchers and him doing great in Buffalo and a solid ST until the horrific injury from the line drive, why hasn't TJ House gotten a shot in the show yet?
Rian

Uh… I hope you're not asking this about T.J. House as though you think seeing him take the ball for the Blue Jays would be a good thing. It wouldn't. But I get why there might be a little confusion over this, because you're not wrong that House has looked good so far. He's struck out more batters in his brief spell in Buffalo so far than he has at any level for several years (25.2%, compared to 14.6% in 2016 in 72.2 Triple-A innings in the Cleveland organization), and producing a groundball rate over 50%, which has added up to a tidy 1.24 ERA on the season.

The thing is, it's not necessarily just performance that has to be considered. Especially when we're talking about Triple-A performance, which can be misleading at the best of times. (Remember when Randy Wolf sparkled for 23 starts for the Bisons in 2015, bristled about not getting a call-up, and eventually was sent to the Tigers, for whom he made seven starts, posting a 6.23 ERA, and then called it a career?) Still, maybe House had as good a case to get the call as Mat Latos or Casey Lawrence did, but the Jays said at the time that pair was first called up that they were looking for right-handers to face the right-handed-heavy Angels lineup. And House, of course, is a lefty.

There may have also been some kind of handshake deal with Latos, promising him the first available spot start in exchange for not opting out of his contract when he didn't make the club out of spring training. We have no idea if this was the case, but it's at least plausible, and a thing that teams sometimes do.

The other thing is that Lawrence has minor league options remaining, while House doesn't. If the idea was to bring someone up for only a start or two, perhaps the club felt it made more sense to use the guy they wouldn't have to sneak through waivers just to keep in the organization. (Though they've since designated Lawrence for assignment in order to bring up catcher Mike Ohlman in the wake of Russell Martin's recent shoulder injury).

Because House is the kind of guy the Jays might actually like to keep. The front office knows him well from the Cleveland days, and he started 18 games for them in 2014. That stint makes up the bulk of his big league résumé, and it's not a terrible one: 89 strikeouts in 117.2 innings, a 59.7% groundball rate, and 2.6 walks per nine innings—numbers spoiled somewhat by a higher-than-average home run rate.

Serviceable is the word. And while that's maybe exactly the kind of guy you'd expect the club to turn to, I don't think it's unreasonable that they chose to not imperil their already thin depth and go with Lawrence and Latos for a couple early starts, especially given the handedness issue relating to facing the Angels.

Hey, and good news, T.J. House fans, with the way Blue Jays pitchers have been dropping like flies, he may still get his chance! Though for now all eyes are on Joe Biagini, who had an excellent first start for the club on Sunday, and someone BP Toronto noted over the winter, maybe should have been a starter all along.

Speaking of…

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Bullpen plans for Gibby w/o his only reliable reliever now (Biagini). In case it wasn't painfully obvious.

@TheRealTayls17

Call me crazy, but I'm actually pretty comfortable with Danny Barnes, Ryan Tepera, Joe Smith, and Dominic Leone bridging the gap between whoever the hell the Jays are starting and closer Roberto Osuna. (For anyone wondering where Jason Grilli's name is here, have you not been watching?)

• Barnes has produced very good strikeout totals in the minors, and has limited walks and—despite having fly ball tendencies—home runs. His fastball isn't huge in terms of velocity (he sits in the low 90s), but it generates swing and miss, especially paired with a nice changeup. The ZiPS projection system has Barnes as being worth nearly 1 WAR for the rest of the season, which is based in part on his excellent minor league numbers, but a growing (if still minuscule) sample of big league success, too. So far this year he's allowed just three hits and two walks in nine innings of work. Keep riding him, I say!

• Tepera has been up and down between Buffalo and Toronto a bunch over the last few years, so fans know him fairly well. He lives on his heat (94-95), throwing a four-seamer, cutter, and sinker, with little offspeed or breaking stuff mixed in. He hasn't been a dominant reliever, and has tended a little too much toward issuing walks—including 9 in 17.2 innings this season—but I don't think it kills you to give him some higher-leverage opportunities than he's seen.

• Leone's results haven't been great so far with the Jays, but the peripherals look pretty good. He's another somewhat hard thrower (93-94), has a good cutter and a slider he could maybe use more of (Brooks Baseball notes that his fourseamer "is basically never swung at and missed compared to other pitchers' fourseamers, results in more flyballs compared to other pitchers' fourseamers, has essentially average velo and has some added backspin"). The 4.73 ERA doesn't look great, but 16 strikeouts in 13.1 innings is something to work with, and the 5 walks (one intentional) work, too. Again, not a dominant guy, but a guy who'll do fine enough most times to get some looks in higher-leverage situations.

• Smith, the sidearmer, has been quite good so far, gives clubs a different look, has over 650 games of big league experience, and a spell closing for the Angels in 2014. He's going to look like trash if his pitches frisbee into the middle of the plate, but when he's on it's a thing of beauty.

There's also Grilli, once he finds himself (which we all, y'know, hope he will), the newly-acquired Neil Ramirez (who looks somewhat like a poor man's Grilli—the good version, that is), and whoever else might come up from Buffalo.

So… yes. The bullpen is in flux. This, I think, was always to be expected, even if the sudden loss of Biagini to the rotation, and the less-than-sudden shittiness of Grilli, has thrown a wrench into whatever vague plans were there. John Gibbons is probably going to get heat for it whenever he makes the "wrong call" and a game ends up going sideways. And with guys who look more like middle relievers than late-inning ones being asked to pick up a lot of slack, it's definitely going to happen. But the thing is, even the best of relievers blow games, and these guys here now have a chance to really grab an opportunity and turn themselves into the next Biagini. It could work!

At the very least, it'll be OK. And if the offence ever starts not being completely useless, we might not even notice so much, anyway.

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Hello, I recently read a stat that since 2013 (the year Gibbons was rehired) the Blue Jays have the MLB's worst record in April. While I detest the 'fire Gibbons' refrain whenever the team plays poorly, I can't help but feel that it is a legitimate criticism of Gibbons and the coaching staff for not doing the right things during spring training to adequately prepare the team to start the season well.

How much responsibility should the coaching staff shoulder for slow starts? Or is it primarily a matter of the type of roster assembled?

Would appreciate your thoughts on this.

Josh

Holy shit. Speaking of John Gibbons taking heat!

But, to be fair, this is actually quite a reasonable way to frame a question that's hard to ask without sounding like you're unduly shitting on the manager. Which is mostly because asking it at all means unduly shitting on the manager.

What are these magical "right things during spring training to adequately prepare the team to start the season well"? And if John Gibbons doesn't know them, why isn't he being steered toward them by Ross Atkins, or Mark Shapiro, or DeMarlo Hale, or Luis Rivera, or Tim Leiper, or Alex Anthopoulos, or Tony LaCava, or Jose Bautista, or Mark Buehrle, or J.P. Ricciardi, or anyone he worked with as the bench coach for the Royals, or the Jays' new high performance department, or the '86 Mets team he played for, or any of the countless other people with vast experience in the game that he's been surrounded by over the years?

Y'know????

I'm not saying that we should just wave this stuff away and pretend it doesn't exist—you're not wrong that slow starts have been a hallmark of some of Gibbons' teams—but this idea that, in the absence of anything else to point to, the manager must be to blame simply doesn't make any sense. I'd be happy to hear some reasoning for it beyond "well he was there and he was the manager, so it's ultimately on him." But what might such reasoning even look like? Is he doing anything differently than any other manager in any other organization? If yes, sure, we should look at it. But if he was, and it seemed possible that it was impacting the team's starts so significantly, my suspicion is that one of the huge number of knowledgeable and successful people who've been in his sphere along the way would have noticed—and if they did notice and try to correct him and he wasn't receptive, then that should have been noticed.

Until you show me something concrete that he does that might explain this, the best explanation is, unfortunately, "shit happens." I know it's not very satisfying to not be able to have someone to point a finger at, but shit happens.

How much money for real grass and drainage? Would trading JD, JB, Stroman, Sanchez and Morales for cash cover that amount?

@StephenDame

I know you're being facetious, but I've seen a few people try to make this kind of a direct connection between a player's salary and the coming renovations at the Rogers Centre, and I really don't think we need to be so scared of that.

I can't claim to know exactly how it's all going to work, but the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into extending the Rogers Centre's life won't be taken directly from the Blue Jays' payroll. Some of it might be! Don't get me wrong, I don't have a whole lot of trust in the company that may have intentionally devalued their own team for years just so they could get a sweetheart deal on the building—which they bought for just $25 million in 2004. But there have been some rather major projects over the last couple of years—a massive upgrade to the roof and the installation of the dirt infield being key among them—and the payroll has been healthier than ever.

Unfortunately, the future upgrades I'm talking about very likely don't include retrofitting the building to have a full grass field—the cost of which seems like it will ultimately prove prohibitive. Hey, but at least we got to swallow that sweet false hope for a few years, eh? Thanks, Beeston!

IF the jays do end up as sellers come trade deadline who do you think is most likely to be moved and what kind of haul could they get for them?

Rian

I think you could probably figure this out on your own, to be perfectly honest, Rian. If they're out of it, they'll certainly move guys who will be free agents once the season ends, which means Bautista, Estrada, and Liriano.

Grilli and Barney will be free agents, too, but whatever the Jays might be able to get for those two as rental players isn't going to be much of a haul. They might nab some interesting depth pieces—the Blue Jays gave up shortstop Dawel Lugo for Cliff Pennington in an August 2015 deal, and Lugo has had a couple very good seasons with the bat since, and ended up the Diamondbacks' tenth best prospect this winter, per Eric Longenhagen of FanGraphs—but nothing that's going to turn the franchise around any time soon.

Unfortunately, there's probably not going to be any kind of massive haul for the big three, either. More than the other two, Bautista's value will depend on is performance heading into the end of July. If he gets right and teams aren't scared off by his reputation, I still don't see him netting much more than Carlos Beltran did for the Yankees last year. That package, if you don't recall, was pretty underwhelming: a couple of arms that look like they're probably relievers, and Dillon Tate, who was the fourth overall pick in 2015, but whose stock dropped massively post-draft. Keith Law had him as the Yankees' 14th best prospect this winter at ESPN.com, calling him a future reliever as well, so…

The market could play out differently for the Jays and Bautista this summer, if that's what it comes to, but I think two months of Beltran is a pretty good baseline, and it's not going to get anybody terribly excited.

As for Estrada, the dream is something like the Jays gave up for two months of David Price in 2015. But, as much as Blue Jays fans may love their AceStrada, I don't think he has nearly the same cachet. He almost certainly isn't going to get back what the Reds did when they moved Johnny Cueto to the Royals, either, but maybe the Jays could get something of a similar shape. That package was centred around Brandon Finnegan—a still-improving young arm who was able to start 30 times for Cincinnati in 2016—and also featured couple other pitchers (John Lamb, Cody Reed) that were ready to step into the big leagues and be bad, one as a back-end starter and the other as a reliever.

Liriano will be worth even less, one would imagine. And with the pitching market expected to be rather robust in terms of supply, it's not impossible that both will be worth quite a bit less.

Isn't this fun?

Hey, but there's always the chance that the Jays can package a couple of these guys and get something better than what they might bring back as individuals. At last year's deadline the A's sent rental players Josh Reddick and Rich Hill to the Dodgers for a trio of interesting arms: Jharrel Cotton, who has struggled out of the gate in Oakland's rotation, but made five very good starts at the end of last season; Grant Holmes, a big, hard-throwing prototypical A's starter who Law suggests they may have bought low on; and upper-90s throwing relief prospect Frankie Montas.

Useful pieces, in other words. Pieces that, at least in these cases, were at least able to step in and contribute the next year—which could be especially useful for the Jays. Good players, but guys with flaws—with limited ceilings or still steep learning curves—and not quite the kinds of mega-prospects we've seen moved in the last year for studs with years of control remaining, like Chris Sale, Adam Eaton, Andrew Miller, Aroldis Chapman, or even Drew Pomeranz.

Of course, the Jays have a guy who could net prospects from out of that higher tier, but they'd essentially be saying goodbye to both 2017 and 2018 if they were to move Josh Donaldson, and it's still a little too hard to envision them having the stomach for that.