Bird’s Eye View: Can Randal Grichuk become more than Kevin Pillar 2.0?

Spring training is in full swing down in Dunedin, Florida, but what sort of other Jays-related chatter is going on in the baseball world? What are some of the stories out there that don’t quite fit into regular coverage? Those are precisely the sorts of things we’ll always be monitoring in this space.

Here is the latest Bird’s Eye View …

Grichuk sounding reminiscent of his centre field predecessor

Randal Grichuk is primarily going to play centre field for the Blue Jays in 2020. This makes sense not just because he’s likely the most passable defender among their current options at the position, but also because in 2019 he batted like a centre fielder. In fact, with a wRC+ of 90 and a slash line of .232/.280/.457, his numbers looked an awful lot like Kevin Pillar’s 2018 season of 89 wRC+ and a line of .252/.282/.426.

Grichuk can’t match Pillar defensively, so the offensive similarity is somewhat of a problem. They need him to be better than that.

According to a piece this week from Rob Longley of the Toronto Sun, Grichuk is at least trying to get his mindset right to start the season. He also says he feels as good coming into camp, physically, as he has in five years. Yet a reader who remembers the Pillar era will have a hard time not noticing how similar some of the messaging about Grichuk here is to what we’d hear each season about Pillar trying to add some dimension to his offensive game that would never materialize.

Grichuk, who has forged a good relationship this spring with guest instructor Dante Bichette, is trying to work on his two-strike approach. And, in Longley’s words, “trying to launch moon shots into orbit, drive the ball instead of lifting it, and learn to slap a curve ball or two for a base hit.”

Bichette — who is, of course, the father of Jays shortstop Bo Bichette — seems to genuinely believe in Grichuk’s talent. It would be pretty uplifting if not for the fact that we’ve heard that kind of stuff before.

Or if Grichuk hadn’t had such a terrible 2019.

On the surface, Grichuk’s 2019 may not appear so bad. He managed career highs in home runs (31) and RBIs (80), and he posted the lowest strikeout rate of his career (26.0 percent). He also had, by far, the lowest batting average on balls in play of his career (.266), which suggests that it’s possible a little better luck could be coming his way.

However, in 2019 Grichuk also posted his lowest walk rate since his rookie season in 2014 (5.6 percent). Grichuk saved his season with a power surge in August and September, but his second-half walk rate was just 3.6 percent and only 1.1 percent in September alone.

That last month of the season for him produced some pretty incredible numbers, but more in an alarming way than a particularly positive one. Grichuk hit eight homers in the month of September, yet still managed to grade out as about a league-average hitter by wRC+, producing a mark of just 101. There were 22 batters with seven or more home runs that month, and the next lowest wRC+ among them was 131!

What Grichuk did in September was really hard to do. He slashed an absurd .220/.234/.582 for the month. And while it’s commendable that he managed to harness his power to keep the .197 BABIP he produced that month from being totally disastrous, it doesn’t give one a lot of confidence that this improved two-strike approach that’s being talked about is actually going to materialize. In fact, his eight September home runs and the six more he hit in August mostly serve to mask just how abysmal things were for him last year.

Even in August — his best month of the year, in which he produced a 112 wRC+ — he couldn’t muster an on-base percentage above .300. He definitely managed to cut down on his strikeouts in the second half of the season, while increasing his power numbers, but turn a few of those homers into long flyouts (as they may have been if the baseballs being used last season weren’t “juiced”) and his season might have looked historically ugly instead of merely really bad.

That doesn’t mean there’s no hope. We’ve certainly seen a better version of him before, particularly over the final four months of 2018. He’ll always have a bit of boom-or-bust to his offensive profile, and the fact that he’s identified holes in his game and is trying to fix them is only commendable. One can’t help but hope that the work he’s doing this spring, and the advice he’s getting from the elder Bichette, pays off.

The Jays, in particular, having signed him last spring to a 5-year, $52 million extension that is already looking like a mistake, are sure hoping so.

But one also can’t help but be reminded of Pillar’s annual attempts to improve his approach at the plate — trying to get better with two strikes one year, trying to bunt more the next — and feel like we’ve seen this movie with a Blue Jays centre fielder before.

Quickly

• Jeff Blair of Sportsnet gives us a too-relevant blast from the past, as he takes a look at how the Blue Jays handled the Toronto SARS outbreak in 2003, and what lessons can be learned from that as the world tries to deal with COVID-19.

• Elsewhere at Sportsnet, Arden Zwelling tells us the story of Kapri Dove Davis, the newborn daughter of Jays outfielder Jonathan Davis, who is thankfully healthy now, but had a difficult early few days in this world after a complicated birth.

• Andrew Zuber of Yahoo! Sports takes a look at reports last week that the Jays have some interest in former Astros right-hander Collin McHugh (as originally reported by Scott Mitchell of TSN.ca). McHugh moved to the bullpen in mid-May of 2019, and produced a 2.67 ERA over 33 2/3 innings while striking out 40. While he may be better known as a starter — he was a 19 game-winner in 2015 — he also had an excellent season out of the ‘pen in 2018. He’d be a great addition to the Jays, but they’re certainly not the only team interested.

• In case you missed it, we’ve already had some great Blue Jays content up here at The Athletic this week, including John Lott’s fascinating, in-depth look at some of the organization’s new coaching hires and the way the team’s thinking about coaching has evolved over the last few years. Also outstanding was Kaitlyn McGrath’s follow-up to last week’s rundown of 10 things we’ve learned at Blue Jays spring training (so far), with the addition of five more things.

• The Athletic’s Eno Sarris has an incredible look into some hard data in order to try to answer what he calls “a backfield, barstool argument that has gone on for years: What’s more important, stuff or command?” (Sarris, by the way, was in Dunedin this week, and will hopefully have something specific to the Jays for us to read in the very near future!)

• Jason Mastrodonato of the Boston Herald tweets that Red Sox manager Ron Roenicke said on Wednesday morning that his club’s ace, Chris Sale, is waiting on another opinion regarding his ailing left arm, after getting an MRI earlier in the week. The Red Sox already essentially raised the white flag on 2020 by trading Mookie Betts and David Price to the Dodgers, but a bad prognosis for Sale would be a huge blow to whatever hopes they have left (though it could only potentially help a plucky team like the Blue Jays outpace their expectations). “We need to get this right. We want as many opinions as we can,” Roenicke said. “Dr. Andrews saw it and read the MRI. I don’t want to comment on it until we get one more opinion.”

• Lastly, a non-baseball item that may be of interest only to me. Did you know that the lists we use in this section of Bird’s Eye View are typed out in point form? If you’re Canadian, you almost certainly do. But much to the surprise of every Canadian who saw the following tweet, if you’re not Canadian you probably have no idea what “point form” means. (It means it’s a bulleted list!)

Here, a poll for science: Do you know what "point form" means?

— Kate Heartfield (@kateheartfield) March 2, 2020

Passan on Pearson

Top pitching prospect Nate Pearson has been the hot topic at Blue Jays camp so far this spring, and that conversation blazed on like a 100 mph fastball again on Tuesday, thanks in no small part to Jeff Passan of ESPN.com, who called him “the most impressive player in baseball this spring.”

That’s a hell of a label to put on anybody with just three innings of Grapefruit League action under his belt. Even ones as impressive as Pearson’s have been.

In his Tuesday column, Passan not only sings the praises of the young right-hander, he also raises the spectre of service time manipulation for all to see.

“Ross Atkins said Monday the team is ‘entirely focused on his development,’ which is code for: We are going to manipulate his service time,’” he writes. “Which is what pretty much every other team in baseball would do too.”

Now, I can hardly bemoan anyone else for bringing up this issue, because I’ve certainly done it myself — too often already this spring, probably. But while I’ve made it clear that I’m with Passan in the belief that the Jays should do the fun thing and call him up from Day 1 if he continues to excel this spring, I think it’s OK to acknowledge that there are legitimate reasons to not rush him to the majors, too.

This isn’t a Vladimir Guerrero Jr. situation. Vlad had made it abundantly clear by the middle of 2018 that the minor leagues were no longer a challenge for him, so when it looked last spring like the Blue Jays were going to hold him down even longer to start the season, it seemed absurd. Pearson was dominant in High A and Double A in 2019, and more than held his own in three Triple A starts. He could very likely do well in the big leagues right now. This isn’t a “he needed to be up eight months ago” kind of situation.

Passan elaborated on his feelings about Pearson in response to someone who had replied to me on Twitter.

I agree. But Pearson is a 23-year-old who throws 102 mph. The maturity is there, mental and physical. The 102 makes me want to get him up ASAP because his elbow is forever at risk. I just have trouble seeing how a month is going to contribute demonstrably to his "development."

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) March 3, 2020

Like I say, I’m with him on that stuff. Or, at least, I will be provided Pearson continues to look the part. But it’s OK if the Jays want to see him turn over a Triple-A lineup a couple more times, or face the same Triple A team more than just once before throwing him into the big-league fire. It certainly looks as though he’d be able to handle the majors without ever looking back, and there are many reasons (some of which I wrote about last week) why that might even be best for him. But I don’t think we need to be scolding the Blue Jays for their plans with him just yet. At least not until we’ve seen a whole lot more of what we’ve seen so far this spring.

At Baseball-Reference.com they have a column for “opponent quality” score from 1 to 10 that goes along with a player’s current spring training stats. A 10 means that the player has faced only big leaguers, eight is more like Triple A, seven is Double A, five is High A, and so on. The nine batters Pearson has faced so far this spring have produced an “OppQual” score of 6.3.

It’s really OK if we pump the brakes a bit here. And I certainly wouldn’t complain if this was the last time I mentioned “service time manipulation” and Pearson until at least a couple more starts down the line.

(Top photo: Mark Brown/Getty Images)