“Power is low-hanging fruit.”
After a 2-1 loss to the New York Mets on Sunday afternoon in Flushing, the Blue Jays have five wins and five losses on the young season.
They have also hit just five home runs.
For those of you keeping score, that’s one less than the Baltimore Orioles hit against the Jays at the Rogers Centre on opening day.
Five home runs 鈥斅爐ied with the Tampa Bay Rays and Kansas City Royals for the fewest in the majors (though the Jays have played one more game than those teams) 鈥 by a total of three Jays.
The season is underway and the Blue Jays are off to their best start in over a decade
Andr茅s Gim茅nez has three, Tyler Heineman and George Springer one each. None of them came in New York, where they got swept by the Mets before heading to Boston to continue a 10-day road trip with a four-game set against the Red Sox that begins Monday night.
Especially keen-eyed readers will have noticed that none of the Jays’ top three hitters聽鈥 Bo Bichette, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Anthony Santander聽鈥 are among the team’s round-tripperers this season.
Ten games in, that’s no reason to ring any alarm bells. By the time all is said and done, those three will likely combine to hit close to 100 homers, but the fact that nobody has picked up the slack over the first week and a half hasn’t helped much.
It was a good time when Gim茅nez blasted three dingers over the first five games, becoming the first Jay to accomplish that feat to begin his tenure with the team. Heck, I even wrote a column about how the Jays felt they had unlocked the offence that had been missing from his game the last two years with the Cleveland Guardians.
Since that fifth game, though, Gim茅nez is 3-for-19, all singles.
Extended rallies are hard to come by. Home runs help a ton. And the fact that the general manager turned up his nose at the suggestion as the off-season began gets cast in an even harsher light now that the season is underway and the offence has continued to sputter.聽
Schneider brings in an unproven rookie to face Soto, and Soto comes through with an RBI double.
Schneider brings in an unproven rookie to face Soto, and Soto comes through with an RBI double.
The Jays scored a total of three runs while getting swept in New York and didn’t even earn a third of them.聽The one run they managed on Sunday came when Mets starter David Peterson, who was battling an illness, walked Guerrero and Santander to load the bases, then hit Gim茅nez with a pitch.
Over the three games, the Jays went 2-for-21 with runners in scoring position. While that’s unsustainably awful, it also shows that when you’re not hitting any home runs, it takes a bunch of timely hits to score. There were hardly any of those over the weekend.
Last season, Guerrero didn’t find his power stroke until June with only five homers going into that month. He hit eight in June and wound up with 30.聽
Santander homered in each of his first two games for the Baltimore Orioles last season, both in March, but only hit two in April. He finished with 44.
A notorious slow starter, the switch-hitter sports a career .211 average in March/April with a .360 slugging percentage. Those numbers are .251 and .485 the rest of the time.
Given that, is it time for a lineup shakeup? Might the Jays be better served by having Will Wagner (hitting .292) or Alan Roden (.318) up top as a table-setter for Bo and Vlad, with Santander in the cleanup spot, or maybe even George Springer given the way he was hitting before crashing into the right-field wall Saturday night? (He pinch-ran and stole a base on Sunday.)
There were reasonable doubts as to whether Springer could be an above-average big-league hitter again. So far, so good.
There were reasonable doubts as to whether Springer could be an above-average big-league hitter again. So far, so good.
Knee-jerk moves rarely work, and the season does deserve a chance to breathe. But at the same time, you don’t want to give away wins by waiting on a player who historically takes a while to get going at the expense of opportunities for players who already are.
The series finale was only as close as it was because of Jays starter Bowden Francis.
There was no no-hit drama聽鈥 Francis gave up a single to the first batter he faced, Francisco Lindor 鈥 but a聽rare dip in control in the third inning led to the only damage.
The right-hander walked a pair in that frame, including ninth-place hitter Hayden Senger to lead it off, and both free passes came around to score: on a Pete Alonso single and a sacrifice fly by Brandon Nimmo. They were the only two walks issued by Francis over his 5 1/3 innings.
The 28-year-old allowed six hits with the two bases on balls. He hadn’t put that many opponents on base in an outing since his first big-league start last April 1, and still only gave up two runs. That’s the good news.
But you still have to score runs to win. Home runs are good for that.
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