Myles Straw Has Given More Than the Blue Jays Could Have Expected

It’s still early in the season. Lots of player gets off to hot starts before cratering, and Myles Straw has only played in 11 games. I can give you a dozen reasons why he won’t keep this up for the entirety of the season – and I will – but let’s be clear about something: Myles Straw has been excellent so far this season. He’s playing decent center field defense, running the bases, and batting .375 with a 153 wRC+. In all, he’s put up 0.3 fWAR, tied for fourth-best among the team’s position players. As the graph below demonstrates, it’s not at all an exaggeration to say that Straw is in the midst of one of the best offensive stretches of his entire career.

Alright. Now that we’ve established that Straw is hitting great, this is the part of the article where I explain that it’s largely batted ball luck, smoke and mirrors, or some other sort of sorcery. However, that’s not going to be the end of the article. I’m not here to bring you down, so let me just get through these two paragraphs and happy days will be here again, I promise. Here we go. Myles Straw has not suddenly turned into a better player. His defense, which was the only thing keeping him in the majors earlier in his career, has graded out as merely average. If he can’t keep playing above-average defense, it’s hard to justify keeping him on a big league roster at all.

Straw is running a .429 BABIP, which puts him in the 94th percentile. That’s not going to last. His swing decisions haven’t gotten better; in fact, he’s running the lowest in-zone swing rate of his entire career. Straw hasn’t magically started hitting the ball hard. He’s arguably hitting it softer than ever. Straw has a 156 wRC+, but according to Baseball Prospectus’s Deserved Runs Creates Plus, which evaluates a hitter’s deserved performance rather than their actual outcomes, he’s at 89, pretty much where he’s been his entire career. Straw only has two extra-base hits, both of them doubles, and one was literally in a fielder’s glove before falling out.

Okay, so we absolutely should not expect Straw to keep hitting like this going forward. Why is this article going to end on a happy note, you ask? Because even though we shouldn’t radically adjust our expectations of a player when they go on a BABIP-fueled hot streak, the team still gets to enjoy all that production. Straw may have had some good fortune, but he really has been a big part of the great stretch of baseball that has the Blue Jays in first place as of Monday morning. His production may dry up in the future, but those 0.3 fWAR and nine wins are already in the bank, and reinforcements will be coming soon.

Anthony Santander hit a big homer in Baltimore on Sunday, which could be a sign that he’s about to turn it on at the plate. Daulton Varsho is heading to Triple-A to begin a rehab assignment, which means that the Blue Jays won’t be as dependent on Straw anymore. The team needed some solid center field production while Varsho was out, and fluky or not, Straw gave them significantly more than that. The American League East is shaping up to be a tight race, and injuries always play a huge part in determining tight races. Varsho’s absence is a big one, but Straw has helped the team weather it while playing the best baseball in the division. Once Varsho returns, he’ll get to return to the role of defensive and baserunning specialist that suits him better in the first place. The Blue Jays have asked a lot of him over the first few weeks of the season, and he’s delivered and then some. Once Varsho returns, he will be able to keep helping the team, and will be in an even better position to succeed.