Blue Jays Mailbag: Why the Dickey-Syndergaard Trade Was Defensible

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 are staying afloat as they await the return of Josh Donaldson and Troy Tulowitzki, so it won’t be all doom and gloom as we open up this week’s edition of the mailbag.

Videos by VICE

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…

Question: what genius schedules a #bluejays off day on Victoria Day?

Shawn G

Honestly, I’d like to give the schedule-makers a break on this one, but… right???

There is only one team that plays in a country with an almost completely different holiday calendar than everyone else, and it’s hard to fathom that simple economics wouldn’t have made home Blue Jays games on Canadian holidays staples years ago. The Red Sox always manage to get a home game on Patriots’ Day, and while the league has been better in recent years in terms of making sure the Jays are always at home on Canada Day, I’m not sure why it’s been so hard for them to accommodate other holidays as well. I get that teams can’t make too many demands on the schedule, but surely they could figure this out. Assuming the Jays even want to play at home on those days.

—

Hi Stoeten
Based on the trends in the first quarter of the season, which of the following events would you rate as most likely and least likely to happen by season’s end (assuming relatively good health):

Kevin Pillar > 50 walks
Justin Smoak > .850 OPS
Francisco Liriano BB/9 < 4.8
Luke Maile OPS+ > Josh Thole’s 2016 mark

Thanks!
Joshua

Whoa. Great question. I think you could make an argument for basically any of these going in any order. So… I guess what we’ll do here is list each possibility from what I think is least to most likely to happen, and in doing so discuss why.

Maile bringing his OPS+ up to a number greater than Thole’s 2016 mark is probably the least likely of these possibilities. He’s already 60 points behind, sitting on a horrendous -31, compared to Thole’s still-awful mark of 30 in 2016. While a handful of extra-base hits could swing it in Maile’s favour in a hurry, I’m just not sure he has it in him. And if he does, I’m not sure he has enough plate appearances left to make it happen. The Jays obviously like his defence and how he calls a game, but as long as they have designs of contending, they’re probably going to be looking for an upgrade on him. And if they fall clearly out of contention, you might see someone like Mike Ohlman or Reese McGuire get some opportunities, rather than Maile. Thole had 20 hits in 118 PA last season, Maile so far has just three in 46. Though Maile did post a 66 OPS+ in 119 PA last season, if that’s his true talent at the big league level, time is not his friend.
When I started this exercise I definitely didn’t think this would be where I end up, but here we are: Francisco Liriano getting his BB/9 below 4.8 is, I think, the next least likely of these possibilities. True, last year’s 4.7 mark was one of the worst of his career, so it stands to reason that he probably won’t end up quite as bad again—especially considering how well he ended last season and how good he looked in spring training this year. But working against him is time, and the fact that he’s already in a pretty big hole. Liriano has already walked 23 in 28.1 innings. Let’s say he comes back and pitches exactly as well as he did in his final 11 starts of 2016: if we add the numbers from those starts to what he’s already done this year, his BB/9 goes all the way down to 4.5. But can we really expect him to pitch that well again this year? I don’t think anybody could. And if he’s even a little bit worse than that, getting to 4.8 gets tough. Add just four free passes to our “combined” total and his BB/9 jumps to 4.9. I’d like to believe he’ll make more than 11 more starts before this season is through, and that he’ll pitch much closer to the way he did at the end of last year than he has at the start of this one, but he’ll have to pitch preeeeeetty well to bring his BB/9 down to 4.8, and he’s volatile enough that I’m not buying.

Justin Smoak posting an OPS greater than .850 is the next least likely. His doing that may, in fact, be the actual least likely, but there’s obviously a small part of me that wants to believe it’s not true, and that he can totally keep this up. Thing is, he didn’t even reach .850 OPS in April, and it wasn’t particularly close—his mark was .811. He’s also never been close to this good hitting from the right side against left-handers, and is producing a contact rate unlike anything we’ve seen from him before. While it would be great if all those things held up over the course of season—the Jays have said they always liked ol’ Smoaky from the right side, and it’s not impossible that he’s figured something out—the season is long, and I think we require more evidence before we consider believing. Let’s not forget, Smoak was pretty good in the first half of last year, too (though it was almost all based on a great stretch in May), as was Michael Saunders. Baseball can come at you fast. And while the fact that both guys struggled in the second half of last year certainly doesn’t mean that the same thing is bound to happen again to Smoak this time around, it shows you that we need to see a pretty big body of work before we buy in. Smoak has an 86 wRC+ in over 900 plate appearances against left-handers in his career, and a 230 mark in 39 PA this year. Against right-handers he’s been pretty close to expectations—105 wRC+, .768 OPS. I’m still buying the 900 PA over the 39.
I’m not saying that it’s a slam dunk that Pillar has 50 walks in him, but I think I believe enough in the changes he’s made to his approach at the plate to think that getting from 14—where he is now—to that number by the end of the season isn’t so crazy. Eight walks per month is all it will take, and while that’s obviously an astronomical number for a guy who had just 52 walks in over 1,100 plate appearances over the last two seasons, there are reasons to believe. For one, Pillar’s glove will assure him a place on the field even if the hitting ability he’s demonstrated over the first two months of this season dips. For two, the stabilization point for a hitter’s walk rate is fairly low—120 plate appearances, according to FanGraphs—and Pillar has already crossed it, while walking at a 7.3-percent clip. I’m more comfortable believing that this genuinely is a new, repeatable skill for him, and that it might even get better. It might not be, but cutting down on his number of swings on pitches outside the zone is part of a pattern that’s gone on for years, as are his improvements in terms of swinging strike rate. That said, eight walks per month is a lot for Pillar. He only had five in April. He only has nine so far in May. And if his walk rate stays at exactly 7.3 percent he’d need to get to 685 plate appearances on the season to get to 50—which is kind of a lot!

So… there’s really no good answer to this question. FUN SEASON WE’RE HAVING, ISN’T IT???

—

Just wondering why all of a sudden the Jays think they can bunt. Well they can’t.
What’s going on?
Lloyd and Muriel

The beautiful thing about the Jays just now seeming to have realized that their players can’t bunt is that it took them this long. And the problem isn’t that they can’t bunt, it’s that they’re even being asked to.

In defence of John Gibbons, I get why he might have been a little too hell bent on “manufacturing runs” recently. The Jays have been so beat up that they had a game last week where their clean-up hitter was Darrell Cecili-fucking-ani. But… yeah. Bunts have a hard time being justifiable at the best of times and with the best of bunters. With Jays players who clearly aren’t comfortable trying to lay one down? I’m with you: it’s an awful idea.

—

Hello Stoeten!
Long time listener, first time caller.

The Jays (horrific) stretch of games against Atlanta sorta reconnected us with Robert Allen Dickey. The Dickey for Syndegaard/d’Arnaud trade is one that you’ll often hear classified by some Jays fans in the “wish we could get that one back” category. Even given d’Arnaud’s chronic fragility and Thor’s increasingly worrisome arm issues—and certainly both are still young and talented enough that they can make the deal look more lopsided in the future—should we feel that way?

True, we didn’t get the “Cy Young” R.A. that we were hoping for. And yes, the capital of Syndergaard and d’Arnaud could have been used to pick up another player. But Dickey tallied over 800 innings for the Jays, with a decent WHIP, and all in all was a solid and durable 3-4 starter and was an above-average contributor to two pretty entertaining Jays seasons. It was a classic future vs. now kind of deal, and while we can dream of Thor hurling mighty bolts in a Jays uniform, I thought the “now” the Jays got in return makes the deal more than defensible.

Regards,
Teddy Ballgame

I’m with you on this one, Teddy. Sort of. And I suspect that a few more Jays fans are starting to lean that way now that Syndergaard is on the shelf.

That isn’t to say that it was a good trade, or one that the club wouldn’t like to have back. But you’re absolutely right that Dickey was underappreciated here, and I think you’ve hit on the key thing that makes the deal a whole lot more defensible than it maybe has felt at times, and that’s the fact that Dickey fit the timeline so much better than Syndergaard did.

The Jays were getting so much production out of Jose Bautista for so much less money than he was worth, and I think it’s completely understandable that the club felt it would have been an awful waste of that great situation if they’d simply waited for the guys they were drafting and developing to mature. There were a number of ways they could have played it, and obviously the path they chose didn’t really work out—it wasn’t until they started undoing the mistakes of 2013 that they really started to see success—but I can’t fault them for trying to instantly transform themselves into a contender the way that they did. And who knows—if Josh Johnson hadn’t been all but finished, and if Jose Reyes hadn’t almost immediately gotten hurt, and if Syndergaard”s arm troubles had cropped up before he had a chance to take the league by storm, most fans would probably have quite a different view of it by now.

Again, that’s not to say that Dickey was the right guy—and one hopes that the club took a long look at how they allowed themselves to be so sure that he was—but given that he ended up giving them so many innings, it certainly could have worked out even worse.