Blue Jays' Struggling Offence Plagued by Bad Luck

If you're a Blue Jays fan, you probably don't need something else to fret about. You know the offence is a shadow of last year's juggernaut. You know the starting pitching has been generally praiseworthy and the bullpen generally unreliable.

Depending on your point of view, this could make you feel better or worse: the Blue Jays have been hitting into bad luck all season. The numbers say so.

That hardly explains away the team's utter mediocrity through the first third of the season. And while many predict otherwise, there's no statistical guarantee that their bad-luck numbers will balance out with good ones over the course of the season.

But according to FanGraphs, the Blue Jays are hitting balls harder more often than they did last year. Their "hard-contact" rate of 33.7 percent is third in the majors. Last year they were 13th at 29.7 percent.

The difference? More of those hard-hit balls are being caught. Their batting average on balls (BABIP) in play is .281, which puts them 25th among the 30 teams. Last year, their BABIP was .298, which was roughly average.

Josh Donaldson has noticed. He says he does not often dig into those numbers, but last Thursday in New York he checked his own.

"I looked at my ball-put-in-play average. It was .260," he said Friday afternoon before the Blue Jays opened a weekend series against the Red Sox. "That's why I'm hitting .240. The times I do hit balls hard right now, it's kind of going at somebody.

"Do I think that'll even out over the long haul? Yeah. I'll say this: I feel like that's the case for a lot of guys on our squad right now. When we hit balls hard, it's right to guys."

That night, Donaldson hit four balls that were not caught. Two left the park. By the end of the weekend, after the Jays took two of three from Boston, he was hitting .256 with a BABIP of .268.

"In baseball, you need a little luck on your side," Donaldson was telling me before Friday's game. "Last year, I think we scored five runs in an inning 30-plus times. (Note: It was 28.) In order to do that, you're going to have to get a chink hit, a blooper. Some of it is luck. Some of it, in Lee Trevino's words, is, 'the more I practice, the luckier I get.' We've got guys who are really good in this clubhouse. It's a matter of letting the numbers kind of even out."

It takes more than letting, as Donaldson will hasten to remind you. It takes hard work, both mentally and physically, and constant adjustments.

Even with all that, sometimes there is no ready explanation for a funk. Athletes at all levels know that vaguely vulnerable feeling, that sense of being slightly "off," and the frustration that comes with trying to find an old groove, or a new one.

That's how Donaldson was feeling until the Jays visited New York last week.

"I know how my body's moving when it's right," he said after his big night Friday. "And honestly, the entire year, I haven't felt right. I've been kind of grinding, trying to get there, maybe at some points maybe trying to do a little too much.

"A couple of days ago I was starting to feel it, and I was kind of getting excited about it. It's just one of those things where you've got to keep trusting the process of what's going on. My instant reaction is to kind of get excited whenever I'm starting to feel pretty good. That can work as a negative against you as well."

Given his uneasiness at the plate, it's remarkable that Donaldson's hard contact rate is 42.1 percent, nearly five points better than last year when he was the league's MVP.

In Sunday's game, he hit a line drive off David Price that left his bat at 111 mph. That, for the unversed, is indeed hard contact. But shortstop Xander Bogaerts caught it for an out.

When you hit a ball that hard, you'll very likely get a hit. But according to Baseball Savant it hasn't worked out that way for Donaldson and Jose Bautista.

On balls leaving the bat at 105 mph, Donaldson is 11-for 24 (.458) and Bautista 9-for-24 (.375). That's bad luck. Meanwhile, Houston's George Springer is 14-for-19 (.737) and Baltimore's Mark Trumbo is 19-for-26 (.731) when they hit balls that hard.

The increasing sophistication of the data governing defensive shifts certainly fuels a batter's frustration. But for Donaldson and his teammates, some of it is plain bad luck.

"I've seen many a ball that's been hit on the screws right at somebody, just waiting there," says manager John Gibbons.

For Russell Martin, it started with the hands. The head followed. Then the hits started to come.

It is a minuscule sample size, but Martin will take it. In his past five games, he is 6-for-19 with three home runs—his only three of a so-far miserable season at the plate.

On Saturday, he hit a homer, double and single and scored the deciding run in the Jays' 10-9 walkoff win over Boston. Earlier in the week, I heard Sportsnet commentator Kevin Barker observe on a radio show that Martin had changed his stance so that his head was squarely facing the pitcher. After Saturday's game, I asked Martin about that adjustment.

"I had my hands kind of right by my ear, and now I have them all the way back," he said. "By doing that, it allows me to get my head at a better angle. It just feels more comfortable. It's almost like I'm resting my chin on my shoulder."

He said the new view gives him "a clearer picture" as he picks up the ball out of the pitcher's hand.

For several weeks earlier in the season, Martin battled severe neck stiffness. That made it impossible to turn his head toward the pitcher the way he does now, he said. But his first priority was to move his hands back to keep his bat in the zone longer against the offspeed pitches that tormented him earlier this year. With his previous setup, his swing was often spent by the time a breaking ball arrived.

"Even if I get fooled a little bit, when your hands are back you can still generate more power," he said. "That's helped me a lot."

It helped Saturday, when he homered on a fastball to the opposite field in right, then singled on an offspeed pitch, also to right field, then hit a 96-mph fastball into the left-centre field gap for a double. Each time, he connected with two strikes.

To say Martin has struggled this season is an understatement. He is batting .191. His strikeout rate of 32 percent is almost double his career average, and his .526 OPS is more than 200 points below his career mark.

"What Russ did the last eight or 10 years is not an apparition," Donaldson said. "It's just a matter of time before a guy like that gets feeling good at the plate and starts getting the ball to fall his way and helps his confidence."

The next day, Martin asked me not to make a big deal of what he called "a subtle adjustment." Players make those kinds of adjustments all the time, he said. Sometimes they stick, and sometimes they don't. There are no guarantees.

But, Martin said, "I'm starting to see the ball better."

Opponents are pitching the Blue Jays—especially their most notable hitters—a little differently this year, serving up more sliders and curveballs. Early on, their batters were striking out at an alarming rate, often missing or fouling off hittable fastballs and sometimes taking fastballs that were obvious strikes.

That isn't happening as often, but one demon remains: they are batting .223 with runners in scoring position. Only three teams in the majors are worse in that department. I asked hitting coach Brook Jacoby whether his batters are pressing.

"I think it's more frustration, and the losing takes its toll," he said. "I don't think that it's necessarily pressing. If we get a lead, we've got to tack on and add on. It's as simple as that."

But in the next breath, he acknowledged that it isn't so simple and that hitters occasionally try to do too much when the whole offence is scuffling.

"I think that's natural in this game," Jacoby said. "Everybody wants to be the guy to do it, but if you don't get the pitch to do it with, you've got to pass the torch to the next guy. Let him do it. If we think in terms of getting on for the next guy, we'll be all right."

Donaldson agrees.

"The fact of the matter is, as a player, you can't be short-sighted, as difficult as it is," he said. "You can't think that every individual at-bat means so much. Whether you go 4-for-4 or 0-for-4, you have to turn the page and come back the next day with a clear slate."

Over the past two weeks, Donaldson says he has encouraging signs. As examples, he cited the consecutive opposite-field singles by Justin Smoak, Kevin Pillar and Devon Travis that added an insurance run against Yankees closer Aroldis Chapman, whose fastball was hitting 103 mph on Thursday. And the two homers Martin hit the previous day. And, of course, the two weekend wins against Boston, in which the Blue Jays amassed 24 hits and 17 runs.

As they prepare to meet the Yankees at home, the Jays have won seven of 10 but they're still a .500 team. Even when they do hit, they're stranding too many runners (11 in Sunday's 5-3 loss). Donaldson says it's important for players to remind each other—and themselves—to remain confident in their track record. Their luck is bound to change, he believes.

"Our offence hasn't even begun to heat up yet and we're still in the thick of things," he said. "I feel like over the last two weeks our approach at the plate has been pretty solid and I feel like it's going to start to turn in our favour."

Maybe so. After scalding that line drive to short for an out on Sunday, Donaldson hit a hump-back liner to right field for a single late in the game. The ball left the bat at a measly 67 mph.