Blue Jays Mailbag: Goins vs. Tulo, Pillar's Start, and the 10-Day DL

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 is back on! All it took was a nice series win against Cleveland and a visit from a the beat-up Mariners and their Triple-A rotation, and the boys in blue are back in business. Or something at least resembling business!

What this means for our purposes is that we have here some questions that actually have some positivity embedded within them, and oh man, I'm going to savour that.

So let's get on with this week's edition of the mailbag!

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…

So is Kevin pillar a good hitter now? Oh, good. I'm glad he willed himself into a guy who can get on base 35% of the time.

Simon

In Josh Donaldson's absence, Kevin Pillar has basically been the Jays' MVP so far, which is an utterly crazy thing to contemplate. It's especially crazy to me, because I've always felt rather pessimistic about Pillar's ability to magically one day decide to be a better hitter.

Of course, his improvements aren't simply magic. They are a product of him identifying an area of his game that could be improved and taking the necessary steps to do it. One of the great things about Pillar is the fact that he did the same thing with his defence, transforming himself from a prospect that few felt could play centre field on a regular basis into one of the majors' best defenders at that position. It makes it somewhat easier to believe in what he's turning into as a hitter.

Plus, we see it in his stats. In limited playing time in 2014, he swung at 43.3 percent of pitches he saw that were out of the zone, and walked in just 3.3 percent of his plate appearances. Among 443 batters with at least 100 plate appearances, he ranked in the bottom 25 and the bottom 10 in all of baseball by those metrics, respectively. After steady improvements over the last two years in his rate of pitches swung at outside the zone, he's sitting at 31.4 percent for 2017 entering play Monday. It's not an elite number—Jose Bautista regularly posts marks in the low 20s, for example—but it shows substantial progress.

Not only has his walk rate improved to 7.7 percent so far this year, but the increase in his ability to lay off has led to Pillar hitting in better counts, which seems to have helped his numbers across the board.

The key there is, of course, "so far." Plate discipline numbers usually stabilize fairly quickly, so Jays fans can feel pretty good that Pillar is genuinely better equipped to lay off pitches now. That doesn't mean he's not due some regression in terms of things like his .341 BABIP, or the 10.6 percent home run/flyball rate that looks like a significant outlier compared to his previous 1,500 plate appearances. We may be in an adjustment period for pitchers across the league, and they may yet figure out better ways to neutralize his bat with their sequencing and approach to him.

Part of me—the part that's always tended naturally to be pessimistic on Pillar—can't help but think of someone like Michael Saunders, who last year set the world on fire with his bat in the first half, before a total collapse in the second. But if you're going to believe in a player who is suddenly producing like he never has before, you'd best make it one where you can point to something tangible he's changed that could explain the better results. With Pillar we certainly have that. Some portion of these improvements should be sustainable.

---

Hi Stoeten,

It seems like injuries are up a little around baseball (although I don't have anything to support that, and might be basing that off of a Jays series against the even more beaten-up Mariners).

Do you think that the new 10-day DL is responsible, or that it is just one of those flukey things?

It seems like most of the Jays' injuries would have still required DL trips even if 15 days was still the minimum, but I don't know about the league in general.

Thanks,

Dan

I think you're entirely right—that there are definitely injuries that would have seen players go on the old 15-day DL if it was still in place, but that clubs are definitely changing their behaviour based on the shortening of the minimum DL stint to 10 days.

I haven't looked into the data, but you'd figure this effect will be especially pronounced among starting pitchers, because if there's a single off-day during their 10-day DL stint, they're really only missing one start, provided they're ready to pitch again once being eligible to come off the DL.

Back in December, when the new collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players association was announced, Mike Petriello of MLB.com looked at the possible effect, and considered a starting pitcher going on the DL with an off-day upcoming:

Could a scenario like this be what's really up with Francisco Liriano? That's obviously impossible for any of us to say, but it makes you wonder.

You're also perhaps—though, again, I haven't looked into the data—seeing fewer instances of position players with potentially quick-healing injuries taking up a roster spot for a few days before deciding whether a backdated DL stint is necessary. Taking a 10-day hit while adding a bench player for the full extent of it is probably a better move than playing shorthanded a few games, then deciding to take the 10-day hit anyway. The calculation for clubs has changed.

As for your original question, I guess what I'd tell you is that if you're hearing stats and facts about an increase in trips to the DL or the number of pitchers used in 2017 as compared to a previous year, definitely take it with a grain of salt. It's not really an apples to apples comparison. (That said, with league-wide increases in velocity and a still-growing number of hard-throwing pitchers, I don't think we can discount the idea that players, and especially pitchers, might be getting hurt at a more frequent rate, either.)

---

"I don't know what to do when Josh and Tulo come back, Barney and Goins are getting quality at-bats" worst take seen this year, or ever?

Dave (@dbeat123)

I hope that's not a real take, because it's a-fucking-bysmal. But the thing about this is—and this is something I struggled with as I tried to write a piece on the Goins-Tulo thing late last week (which I didn't end up being able to)—I think everybody who isn't a squelching dumbfuck pretty much gets it.

It's not like Goins' stats are jumping off the page at anybody. He's had some timely hits, and done exactly everything you'd want your backup infielder to do, but his on-base for the season is still sub-.300, and his wRC+ is just 80. Oh, and since Tulo last played on April 21, Goins' wRC+ is 79.

So, such a take this time doesn't even rise to the level of the hilarious nonsense that was the drive to replace Jose Reyes with Goins in 2015, or supposed plans to move Tulowitzki to first base. He's done his job, and he's done it well, but his job is to be a backup. There's a reason for that, and it remains a simple one: he doesn't hit enough.

---

Hello Stoeten,

I have a question regarding Ryan Goins, don't worry I won't be asking why he's not a full-time starter (à la Martinez, Tabler, Howarth, Zaun, etc.).

On both the TV and radio broadcasts he is always lauded for how he is an elite defensive infielder. But his defensive metrics on Fangraphs the last two seasons are very pedestrian. He is 28th/41 in UZR/150 among SS with at least 300 inning at -8.2 since the start of 2016 (Tulo is 14th). At 2nd (min. 300 innings) he is 24/46 with a UZR/150 of -0.7. My question is why is there such a difference between what the public perception about him is and what the stats show (and I am as guilty of this as anyone because when watching I think he looks pretty good defensively)?

Dylan

This is an awesome observation. Granted, these defensive metrics really require bigger sample sizes before they're truly meaningful. For example, in 2017, among 21 centre fielders with at least 200 innings, Kevin Pillar's UZR/150 ranks 19th. Small misplays can sway these numbers a lot, and so I don't think any of this necessarily means that Goins is bad. But, anecdotally I certainly won't disagree with what they seem to be telling us here: Tulo may well be a better defender at short than Goins.

Thing is, even if he's not, I don't think it's as by as much as the people wowed by Goins' spectacular-looking plays will have you believe. Which isn't to say that Goins isn't a good defender, it's just that Tulo is so steady and makes it look so easy that it's maybe harder to appreciate. I'm immediately reminded of Vernon Wells, whose defence was wrongly maligned by fans for a number of years (before it actually did kinda go to shit), mostly because you didn't see him going all-out diving for balls. But the reason for that was that he didn't really have to.

Something Jays fans will I think have a hard time believing comes out of the fielding metrics run by Inside Edge. Inside Edge separates each ball hit to a particular fielder into buckets based on the likelihood that an out will be successfully recorded. Balls classified as "routine" will be turned into outs with 90-100 percent frequency, 60-90 percent is a "likely" play, and so on.

In 2016, Tulo made two outs on 10 on plays considered "unlikely"—a 10-40 percent chance of an out being made—and four outs on eight plays where Inside Edge had determined shortstops had an even chance (40-60 percent) of making them. Goins has made just one "even" play in five chances over the last two seasons, and no plays with a higher degree of difficulty than that. Mostly this is a factor of his limited number of opportunities, but what it maybe suggests is that Goins is maybe making some of his more "likely" plays look more difficult than they are.

That said, Goins has made 100 percent of his 7 chances for a "likely" play over the last two years, while Tulo has only made 19 of 24. So maybe that's an element of it, too.

As for the public perception, I think you answered a large part of the question yourself. Not only does Goins make plays that look spectacular (even though it's maybe debatable whether some of them are spectacular or not), but when he does, fans sure do hear about it.

---

Hello

The current lineup looks really bad due to injuries, but if the Jays cannot right the ship, will we have to wait until September to see some prospects in the high minors (Alford, Smith Jr, Urena, Mayza, Tellez etc.) get called up?

If it is going to be a losing season, I'd much rather see young guys trying to figure it out at the big league level rather than veteran replacement level players getting ABs

Thanks
Joshua

Honestly, I don't think you really would rather see that. Potential stars of the future getting tied in knots and frustrated for months on end as they accrue service time and end up getting more expensive sooner? Hard pass.

I also don't think it's good for a player's development to have him come up and face the best in the world unless he's genuinely ready to succeed. I don't think it's necessarily going to ruin anyone, but the big leagues aren't a great place to be trying to figure yourself out, and the learning curve is steep. Which isn't to suggest clubs should be too conservative, but for a lot of players success won't come right away, and it's important for them to have somewhere to go to work on the adjustments that they need to make to be successful the next time.

A lot of time and thought is put into player development and the apprenticeship that takes place as players move up the ranks, and while I wouldn't say that we shouldn't question some of the orthodoxies of that process, I'd also say that it's the way it is for a reason, and that a team abandoning those kinds of ideas just because it's no fun to watch a bunch of AAAA scrubs for a couple months would be making a mistake.

Not that we have to worry about that now anyhow. PLAYOFFS!!!!!