As much as I’d like to hope it was a formative experience for all of us to experience a labour struggle and (hopefully) come out of it with a refreshed perspective on the need to support labour in the face of the owners’ assault on the sport, I would also very much like to never fucking do that again.
Welcome back to Jayslam, where consistent updates are more of a guideline than anything else. With the lockout coming to an end late last week, spring training is already underway for MLB teams. That, of course, includes the Toronto Blue Jays, who have begun the process of reporting to Dunedin, Florida in preparation for the slightly-delayed Opening Day on April 8. Scenes from spring training have already surfaced, which have only succeeded in getting me to incessantly refresh Reddit and Twitter for my next dopamine hit.
Bo is fucking yoked, ho-ly.
Probably the most entertaining part of the offseason before the sport nearly ate itself was the free agent signing frenzy in the days and hours leading up to the lockout that saw the likes of Marcus Semien, Corey Seager, and Max Scherzer sign massive contracts. Most, including myself, assumed that the weekend immediately following the end of the lockout would kick off a similar spree, encouraged by reports that the market was already at work mere hours after the transaction freeze lifted. And while we have gotten some activity at the time of running, most of the big names are still on the board. Mainly Freddie Freeman, Carlos Correa, and Kris Bryant, as well as potential trade targets like Matt Chapman and Luis Castillo, among others.
Needless to say, I hold the national baseball news establishment responsible for the mass of undirected adrenaline welling up inside me right now. With as much Reddit and Twitter as I’ve consumed the last weekend, I’m sure I’m eligible for some sort of financial compensation.
With all that said, while the Jays still have a hole in the infield to address, they didn’t exactly stand pat wither, signing a couple left-handed pitchers to major league deals: Relief pitcher Andrew Vasquez and, of course, starter Yusei Kikuchi.
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Andrew Vasquez
On Friday evening, Shi Davidi broke the news that the Blue Jays had signed 28-year old left-handed relief pitcher Andrew Vasquez to a Major League contract. Vasquez was drafted and signed by the Minnesota Twins in the 32nd round of the 2015 draft, eventually making his MLB debut with the Twins in 2018, appearing in 9 games.
Vasquez’s cup of coffee was fine, if inconclusive. He did well enough for the Twins to call him up again in April 2019.
It did not go so well.
Vasquez’s biggest flaw over the course of his career has been a tendency to allow a ton of walks and hit a lot of batters, and it was definitely accentuated in his one 2019 major league outing, in which he failed to get any of the three batters he faced out, walking two and hitting one.
Vasquez was demoted, later outrighted in July 2019. He spent the rest of the season in Double-A and Triple-A, and didn’t pitch at all in 2020, when the minor league season was wiped out. He spent the beginning of the 2021 season in Triple-A St. Paul, eventually getting traded to the Dodgers at the end of August, making six appearances for Triple-A Oklahoma City and two for Los Angeles, striking out three of the six batters he faced. This would be the extent of his time with the Dodgers, as he was non-tendered in November.
While we can’t really glean too, too much from all of Andrew Vasquez’s six and two-thirds innings in MLB, but last season’s Triple-A numbers are a bit more telling. Among Triple-A pitchers with at least 40 innings pitched, Vasquez’s strikeout rate of 38.0% ranked fourth overall in 2021. On the other hand, his walk rate (11.5%) is well on the higher side, though he did hold opposing hitters to a .158 batting average.
You might look at the high strikeout and low walks and presume that Vasquez is some sort of somewhat effectively wild flamethrower, but you would be incorrect. In his short major league stints, he’s actually used breaking pitches the mast majority of the time. According to Baseball Savant, for 26 of his 27 pitches with the Dodgers, Vasquez employed a sharp low-80s curveball (though Fangraphs disagrees, labelling the pitch a slider). He’ll mix in a soft sinker that lives in the low 90s and has occasionally mixed in a changeup. All presented with a janky delivery. One of the most “reliever-y” deliveries I’ve ever seen, in fact.
I think a surface level evaluation is enough to show why the Jays were interested enough in Vasquez to give him a guaranteed contract despite his virtually nonexistent MLB experience. As much as the meme of Pete Walker being a wizard who can fix any underperforming pitcher probably doesn’t have quite as much basis in reality as we might like, Vasquez is the type of pitcher that can be “worked on”, so to speak. Best-case scenario, Vasquez’s strikeout potential manifests in the major leagues and the Jays have a useful role reliever on their hands. Worst case scenario, he’s a depth reliever competing for a spot on the team with Ryan Borucki, Kirby Snead, and Tayler Saucedo. Very little risk for some sneaky potential here. We can’t really complain!
Yusei Kikuchi
On Saturday afternoon, Jon Heyman reported that the Blue Jays had (probably) filled out their starting rotation, signing 30-year-old left-handed pitcher Yusei Kikuchi to a three-year deal totalling $36 million, with $16M owed in 2022 and $10M in both 2023 and 2024.
Kikuchi was a heralded pitching prospect out of Hanamaki Higashi High School in Iwate Prefecture, Japan, the same school as Shohei Ohtani. He courted controversy in October 2009 when he announced his intention to bypass Nippon Professional Baseball and sign with a Major League Baseball team, and would have been the first Japanese player to do so. Ultimately, he entered the NPB draft, where he was selected and signed by the Saitama Seibu Lions.
Kikuchi debuted with the Lions in 2011, and never really let up. From 2011 to 2018, he was among the best pitchers in NPB, posting a 2.77 ERA for his Japanese career, during which he led the Pacific League in ERA in 2017 and was named to three All-Star Games. The Lions would post Kikuchi after his stellar 2017 season, and he would eventually sign with the Seattle Mariners, with whom he would debut on March 21, 2019 in front of a packed house in the Tokyo Dome. The same game in which Ichiro Suzuki made his last hurrah before retirement. This was treated as a sort of “passing of the torch moment”, with Ichiro leaving the mantle of “Seattle Mariners’ Japanese Star” to Kikuchi. No word on what Hisashi Iwakuma thought about all that.
Unfortunately, Yusei Kikuchi’s three seasons with the Mariners would prove to be underwhelming. Over 365 and two-thirds innings, Kikuchi posted a 4.97 ERA, 4.93 FIP, 4.89 DRA, with xFIP and SIERA being slightly kinder at 4.43 and 4.62, respectively. His 20.6% strikeout rate was only slightly below the league average and his 8.3% walk rate was just about average. Where he would get burned would tend to be hard contact (8.5% barrel rate, 41.9% hard hit rate) and home runs (1.62 HR/9).
So why are we getting so excited about a guy who’s, by pretty much any all-encompassing metric, had average-at-best results in MLB? I can answer that in one screenshot from Baseball Savant.
Ah, that FIP-defying, tight pants-ass, grunting sunovabitch, I miss him.
There’s a reason that projection systems consistently have Kikuchi with an ERA in the lower 4s, well below his career numbers. Results aside: He’s just got good stuff. Kikuchi will mainly alternate between a mid-90s four-seamer and a low-90s cutter (which replaced his curveball after the 2019 season), each of which he’ll use just over a third of the time. He’ll mix in a slider (low-to-mid 80s) and a nasty changeup (mid-to-high 80s).
Kikuchi gets great whiff rates on both his four-seamer (30.3%) and slider (31.2%), but his changeup has been his most lethal weapon in that regard (39.6%). What my crackpot analysis leads me to believe is that Kikuchi gets in the most trouble when he begins leaving his pitches over the heart of the plate and getting hit hard. He’s got good stuff, but when he leaves too much of it where good hitters can do some damage, bad things tend to happen.
He had an above-average chase rate in 2021, so maybe getting Kikuchi to be a bit more fine around the edges and corners of the zone becomes part of the plan of attack for Pete Walker? As if I would know. But make no mistake, as much room for optimism as there is for Kikuchi, this will still be a project for Walker and the Blue Jays over the next three years. But best-case scenario, it pays off some solid dividends and we have another Steven Matz (or, dare we say it, Robbie Ray) on our hands. Worst-case: He’s the fifth starter and adds to the starting pitching depth.
Beyond the starting five of José Berríos, Kevin Gausman, Hyun-Jin Ryu, Alek Manoah, and Kikuchi, the Jays have Ross Stripling in a swingman role, as well as Nate Pearson, Thomas Hatch, Anthony Kay, Zach Logue, Bowden Francis, and Old Friend Joe Biagini. Depth is likely going to be extremely important with a shorter spring training, and both Ryu and Kikuchi tend to pitch better with five days’ rest. With fewer rest days this season, having a pitcher outside of the top five on hand is going to be crucial.
Overall, an extremely solid job was done by the front office replacing Robbie Ray and Steven Matz this offseason. Only one José Ramírez-sized void is yet to be filled. Hopefully soon so I can stop looking at Jon Heyman and Bob Nightengale tweets until July at the absolute earliest.
Great job!