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I would complain far less if Gurriel or Chapman were to bat leadoff vs Tapia but neither of them is a very good choice for leadoff as they simply haven't been able to find their way onto base with any regularity. Perhaps over the course of an entire season Gurriel and Chapman will each have better numbers than Espinal but that's not the case for the season as a whole. If you go back over the last two seasons Espinal has the best WRC+ of the three at 114, Chapman is at 101, and Gurriel is 106. The numbers don't really back up either Chapman or Gurriel clearly better hitters although to be fair Espinal didn't necessarily earn his numbers last season and Gurriel is super streaky and hasn't hit his yearly hot streak yet. I tend to think lineup construction should be a bit dynamic based on who's hot and who's not. Guys like Springer, Teoscar, Vladdy etc. can be more or less locked into place based on the quality of at bats they tend to regularly have, but everybody else should be shifted up or down as needed. If you look at the last two weeks Chapman has an OBP of .218, Gurriel is at .259 and Espinal is at .347. One of these to my eyes is a far better leadoff choice than the other two for this reason alone. Espinal has outperformed each of these hitters by most objective measures and his expected stats back that up as well. Among the regular starters he's produced the 3rd best WRC+ on the team and to me it makes sense to get him more at bats and not bury him at the bottom of the lineup on days when Springer is unavailable. There's no way Tapia should ever be receiving more at bats given what we've seen offensively from each player so far this season.

I agree with most of this but I would absolutely hit Espinal in the leadoff spot on days when Springer is unavailable. The alternative seems to be Tapia up to this point so it should be an easy choice between the two.

I specifically recall an interview with Atkins where he stated emphatically that Charlie has full lineup autonomy. Some stuff is taken out of his hands in terms of overall availability when a player is being load managed, but he is in charge of who plays out of the available players and where they are placed in the batting order. Maybe Atkins is lying here to save face but it's incredibly hard to see how the front office would be directing Charlie to hit one of their weakest hitters in spots like the top of the lineup, cleanup, fifth etc.

If Charlie were to bat him appropriately in the 8th or 9th spot it would be a lot easier to handle seeing his name in the lineup. Tapia's expected stats look nice but the hits haven't been dropping for him as you say. Something I've wondered about is whether statcast is able to account for increased drag levels on the baseball. This year's baseball looks to have greatly increased drag compared to recent seasons and league wide offence is down to a large degree as a result. Maybe this could lead to some pretty sizeable gaps between WOBA and xWOBA when the ball simply doesn't travel to the same degree as the quality of contact would suggest.

I found the velocity readings in a futurejays article, it turns out the numbers were from a small 3 game sample. He maxed out at 94.2 with a minimum of 90.6 so definitely on the lower side for a modern day reliever. This was taken early season so it's possible his velocity may have ticked up a bit as the season progressed. Spin rate isn't great either with average of 2077 RPM over this sample. https://futurebluejays.com/2021/10/16/blue-jays-organizational-all-stars-relievers/

Info I saw from 2021 shows an average of 92.7 MPH so he's not a complete soft tosser.

Vladdy is all of 23 years old and Bo is only 24. Are you honestly suggesting that these guys have peaked at these ages and they are already in their decline phase? Why won't Bo repeat his numbers from last season? His career WRC+ is 121 and last season he produced a 122, exactly 1 point higher than his career average. Since his breakout in 2019 Teoscar has produced a WRC+ of 136. His WRC+ last season was 132. Why is he not going to be able to recreate his numbers from a season ago? Vladdy is struggling at the plate a little bit but despite this he still sits at 149 for the season. Once he gets going again his numbers are going to rocket upwards again.

This team is still 4th in slugging and 9th in OPS. The team has had few problems getting runners on base, the biggest issue has been the .172 average with runners in scoring position. Last season for comparison the team hit .270 with RISP with largely the same lineup. It's been reported that they have faced the highest average velocity and have regularly faced very good quality pitching. It is far too early to make any meaningful predictions about where they are going to finish offensively as this team hasn't had a chance to tee off against the weaker teams yet.

That's mostly as a result of the pitiful average across the team with RISP. Do you really think that this collection of hitters is going to continue to bat below .200 with runners in scoring position? Once back to full strength this will largely be the same collection of hitters that regularly terrorized the opposition in 2021.

The majority of the Jays wins this season have been of the high stress variety but Romano loading the bases in the ninth kind of took that to new levels.

Nice for the boys to salvage a victory, especially after the debacle in the 7th inning last night. Marty Foster had a rough night behind the plate but at least it was both teams getting f***ed this time and not just the Jays. I have to give Charlie credit for getting Phelps out of there as fast as he did when it was apparent that Phelps didn't have it tonight, there have been far too many times in the past where he's left the reliever in the game to give up a bushel load of runs. Hopefully Teo coming back can spark this offence a bit, too many guys seem to be pressing right now. The less of Tapia and Zimmer we are subjected to the better, it's painful that there have been a bunch of games where both guys are in the starting lineup.

You are overreacting to a large degree based on some early season struggles. The team has played all of 25 games and faced a ton of high velocity good quality pitching with a quarter of their games coming against the Yankees who look to have one of baseball's best pitching staffs up to this point. They haven't had much of a chance to pad their stats vs the lesser teams of baseball either. I recently posted some statistics comparing last year's offence to this year's offence, and outside of RISP leading to a little less scoring this year's team is off to a better start in almost all relevant categories. Up to this point last season the offence had a collective 80'ish WRC+ compared to 110 WRC+ for this year's team. If you believe that this collection of hitters is going to continue to hit below .200 with RISP for the entire season then sure this offence is going to flounder all year, but I think there are simply far too many talented hitters with reinforcements on the way soon as well.

My thoughts exactly. If Zimmer isn't even going to be used appropriately to pinch run in late innings then he really has no place on the roster.

Looks like hard hit balls have been finding gloves as his xERA is an even 6.0. His statcast page is pretty ugly to say the least.

This makes TJ Zeuch look like Justin Verlander by comparison.

Manoah has outperformed Gausman by both ERA and xERA so your Manoah best Jays pitcher prediction hasn't been totally blown out of the water yet.

Even with the added juice he hasn't started swinging for the fences as his flyball percentage is only up about 4-5% over 2021. The biggest change has been jumping his line drive percentage by 8% which is perfect as it indicates a swing designed to produce line drive contact.

Hey it's a hot take so I might as well be bold. If you read the embedded tweet from earlier on this page he has a 2400 RPM fastball with elite movement that has generated a 50%+ whiff rate, a slider with a 100% whiff rate (super small sample of pitches) and it's declared that his change up may actually be his best pitch. I can't wait to see what he can do against better competition once he starts to move up the system.

That might have been true in 2021 but that's no longer the case. He's 65th percentile for hard hit rate so he's been making a ton of hard contact. His numbers have been steadily climbing as the hits have finally started to fall in for him. On April 20th his WRC+ stood at all of 70, however over the last two weeks his results have improved dramatically as he's produced a 128 WRC+ over this timeframe. These are the type of results that his quality of contact is predicting.

If he can continue his current level of performance offensively and defensively (seems pretty likely to happen for both) Espinal is there already. If you go back to last season Espinal has been playing at a 4.4 win pace if over 550 plate appearances. His WRC+ is within a point of each other for both years and the defence at second base is arguably even better than what he showed at third base.

That seems eminently possible given what he's shown so far. I've seen estimates that statcast batted ball estimators stabilize within 50 plate appearances, and Espinal has an xBA of .309 at the moment. Walk percentage potentially needs a little longer to stabilize but given that Espinal sees a very large amount of pitches per plate appearance it's certainly possible that the walk rate ticks up over time. At any rate he's not far behind his career walk rate even with this year's drop compared to 2021.

Seems unlikely as it's been reported the team wants to send him out on a rehab assignment first. I think they were going to send him to Buffalo but the weather forecast was iffy so they sent him down to Florida instead.

Espinal's contact rates are down but not a super dramatic drop by any means. His chase rate is up about 3% but a bigger issue is chase contact rate being down about 7%. Perhaps this is simply a function of swinging harder than previously. Whiffs are up about 5% but even so his whiff rate is very good at 76th percentile. Aside from the Rangers series the Jays have faced quite a bit of tough pitching so far this season. I suspect once the team finally gets to start playing the weaker sister teams we will finally start to get a clearer picture regarding Espinal's true offensive potential.

I think when it's all said and done even with the less patient approach Espinal is still a much better overall offensive performer compared to his previous output. In 2021 his 115 wrc+ looked to be largely undeserved given the extremely low exit velocities, and xWOBA was 37 points below his actual. I had serious doubts that he would be able to maintain this type of WRC+ going forward as it largely relied on weakly hit balls finding holes in the defence. His xWOBA is showing an opposite trend this year where it's quite a bit higher than actual with a 38 point gap between WOBA and xWOBA. It seems quite likely that he's been a bit unlucky with his batted ball results given the quality of contact he's produced. Over time I suspect his numbers may actually climb a bit compared to where they sit presently if he can continue to square up baseballs at the rate he's done so far.

Yeah I've noticed that as well. There's a weird box made up of white dots on the upper left corner of the screen. I was first a little worried there was an issue with my tv but it's only present during Jays broadcasts.