DUNEDIN, Fla. – Some short hops from around spring training with the Toronto Blue Jays:
• A common misconception about Randy Wolf is that he’s experienced a drop in velocity over the course of his career. He hasn’t. His career fastball average is 88.2 mph and every season he’s pitched he’s been right around that mark. “When I was young I was considered a crafty lefty, always compared to Tom Glavine, and I threw 88-91,” says Wolf. “Now that I’m older, people look back at when I was young and think I was a flamethrower. My stuff is exactly the same.” He’s back in that range at minor-league camp with the Blue Jays.
• Here’s an outstanding anecdote illustrating that misconception from a few years back, when Randy Wolf was with the Milwaukee Brewers and pitching coach Rick Kranitz took in his side session. “I was working on a back-door cutter and he said, ‘Yeah, you’ve got to get creative, you’re not that flamethrower you used to be.’ And I was like, ‘Wait, what?’
“‘Didn’t you used to throw mid-90s?’
“‘I don’t know which Wolf you’re talking about.’ I actually brought in old tapes from 2002 when I was 25 and there’s a radar gun there, and it’s 87, 86, 88, 90. He’s like, ‘No!’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ It’s just that assumption that as you get older you lose it.”
• One more thing on Wolf. During our conversation, he stopped in mid-sentence to correct a grammatical error in his speech and then continued. Respect. Read about him here.
• During SABR’s recent Analytics Conference in Phoenix, Biola University mathematics professor Jason Wilson and former college pitcher Jarvis Geiner unveiled the intriguing Quality of Pitch metric. (Baseball America’s Matt Eddy has some details on it here.) One of its potential uses is to identify when, in the absence of obvious signs, pitchers are tiring. When I spoke to Alex Anthopoulos recently about removing inning caps from the team’s pitchers, I asked him if the Blue Jays have a similar proprietary measure: “Like every team, everyone uses all kinds of stuff,” he replied vaguely. “Look, everybody, us included, nobody has solved it yet. We continue to have injuries as an industry. I’m sure everyone would say the same thing, everyone continues to try and get better and that’s all we’re doing. We continue to study it and try to look at things.”
• As Blue Jays pitchers head into their final starts of the spring, their workload will be pulled back to get them ready for the regular season. The principle is similar to a runner cutting back in a final prep run just before a marathon to conserve energy. “That’s a fair analogy,” says pitching coach Pete Walker. “I think at this stage of spring training, they’ve been doing everything they’ve been asked to do and after that first start of the season, you don’t want them to feel like we pushed them too much. So there’s a fine line and I think they’re all responding well. We talk to the training staff and talk with them individually and there’s a plan in place.”
• Walker is very happy overall with his staff’s camp. “This spring training is much different than most, and last,” he says. “I definitely think we pushed the guys a little bit, we’ve gotten their pitch counts and innings up to where we wanted them to be. Last year worked out pretty well for some guys coming out of spring training, Mark Buehrle especially, so we stick with the same plan for him. But during the season we definitely found times for certain guys to give them an extra day or two, or potentially miss a start. Any way we can keep these guys strong and healthy through the course of the season, we’re going to find ways to do it. Each individual is a little different, so there’s constant communication with the player, with the training staff, with the strength coach and I think we’re monitoring it as best as we can.”
• Where are the Blue Jays better defensively, manager John Gibbons? “We’re going to be real good in the outfield, and that’s even without (Michael) Saunders being here to start the season. (Josh) Donaldson is really good at third base but Brett Lawrie was too. Second base, Go-Go (Ryan Goins) is a great player, (Devon) Travis, if he’s on the team, he’s showed us something when everything we’ve heard is an area we need to work on. Look at Russell Martin behind the plate, one of the big reasons Russell was brought over here was what he’s able to accomplish with young pitching staffs in his career. We’ve always had really good defensive players, now there’re just more of them.”
• An example of how defence at first base matters: “You watch the game we played here (Saturday) against that Atlanta team, I guarantee you they had at least four tough picks at first base and they made every one of them,” says Gibbons. “If they miss a couple of them, that game probably gets out of hand a little bit. People take that for granted but they save you, they may save you more than anybody.”