MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. — The Blue Jays hitters knew they were in a funk. They knew they hadn’t been performing up to their career norms, up to their potential, or up to the lofty standard they’d established for themselves last season, when 10-run offensive outbursts weren’t a rarity, but a weekly occurrence.
So, over the last week, several team veterans—including Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion, Josh Donaldson and Russell Martin—began brainstorming. They came up with a list of ideas for how to jumpstart the club’s offence and brought them to the Blue Jays coaching staff. At first, there was some push back. The Blue Jays coaches didn’t want to do anything rash. But after an embarrassing series against the Rays, which saw the team get absolutely spanked, 31-7, everyone knew it was time for a change.
One of those ideas, a re-juggling of the batting order, was rubber stamped Wednesday night, and that’s why you see the lineup the Blue Jays will field Thursday against the Twins, featuring Jose Bautista batting leadoff for the first time in six years.
“Hopefully it’s going to change the way that teams are attacking us,” Bautista said. “I think it’s going to play well into people’s roles and the specific skill sets on this team. I’m getting pitched tough and I’m getting walked a lot. And I’m sure Donaldson would love to hit with people on base. And Edwin would, too.”
There are a lot of ideas at play here, but they all centre around Bautista, the American League leader in walks. Firstly, Bautista will be doing everything in his power to get on base when he leads off the game, giving Donaldson and Encarnacion an opportunity to hit with a runner on.
If those two can move Bautista over, or even drive him in and get on base themselves, the idea is that Justin Smoak and Michael Saunders, two of the most consistent Blue Jays this season when it comes to making solid contact, will then come up as the No. 4 and 5 hitters with runners to drive in. Ideally, this construction will allow the Blue Jays to get out to early leads.
Then, as the first batting order rotation moves along, the hope is players near the bottom of the order like Martin, Kevin Pillar and Ryan Goins can focus more on reaching base, with the anticipated benefit of better pitches to hit with Bautista’s spot looming behind them.
Bautista, too, feels he’ll see better pitches to hit once the lineup turns over, as he’ll be batting with Donaldson and Encarnacion—who combined for 80 home runs last season—behind him.
And finally, in this lineup permutation, the Blue Jays’ biggest offensive threats—Bautista, Donaldson and Encarnacion—will be seeing the most at-bats in the game, and ideally coming to the plate in late innings to take high-leverage at-bats.
“There’s a lot of ways you can dissect it,” Blue Jays acting manager DeMarlo Hale said. “Really, it boils down to just trying to jump-start this offence. There’s some hitters with some track records that we’re trying to kick-start and maybe put them in some different situations and different mindsets and see how it works.”
For now, the lineup shuffle is a temporary experiment (“Unless we start scoring 10 runs a game, I bet we’ll stick with it then,” Bautista said). The Blue Jays coaching staff will observe the new structure in action on Thursday and decide whether they want to stick with it going forward or not.
Much of what they’ll be watching for will be how opposition pitchers react and attack the Blue Jays. It’s debatable whether lineup construction can truly affect the pitches a batter sees. But the Blue Jays are hoping it can, and that some of their hitters will get different looks during their at-bats.
“There are times where you do feel the pitchers will look at a lineup and say, ‘Hey we can go after this guy a little bit more aggressively, and be a little more cautious with that guy,’” Hale said. “But it all depends on the game situation. If we can create a situation where you can’t pitch around a guy, then they’ve gotta go at him.”
Above all else, the Blue Jays want more runners on base, and Wednesday’s 6-3 loss to the Rays was the perfect impetus for a move like this. The entirety of the Blue Jays offensive output came from three solo home runs, and the team went 0-for-6 with runners in scoring position.
“We’ll take all the home runs we can. We’d just like to have more people on base when we do that. And the 0-for-6 with runners in scoring position is something we’d like to change,” Bautista said. “We need to do something different. And I think sometimes forcing the opposition to adjust is better than you adjusting to them, and getting away from what makes you good players individually and a good team as a whole.”
The move was certainly popular around the Blue Jays clubhouse where there was a definite sense that something had to change in order for the team to start producing the way its capable of.
“I like it. I like it a lot,” said catcher Martin, who bats eighth Thursday. “The idea is that when the lineup is turning back over it’s just right off the bat: thunder, thunder, thunder, thunder.”
“Hopefully we’ll have everyone trying to get on base. I think that’s what needs to be the main goal,” added Saunders. “Baseball’s such a results-orientated game. I think you can get caught up in trying to get hits. My main mindset is always just to get on base no matter how you do it. It think if you concentrate on that and concentrate on having professional at-bats, everything else will take care of itself.”