TORONTO – With the Toronto Blue Jays needing a lift after getting throttled by the Boston Red Sox in the opener of their four-game series, they gave the ball to James Anthony Happ, finishing off their first trip through the rotation after the all-star break.
Happ might just personify that all-time great Joaquin Andujar quote more than anyone else in the game right now. Andujar, a flighty righty who made his name with the St. Louis Cardinals in the mid-‘80s, once said “There is one word in baseball that says it all, and that one word is: You never know.”
For Happ, the only consistency he’s had this season has been in his complete and utter inconsistency. The veteran lefty has been a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, tied up with a question mark.
It was the good Happ who was on display against the Red Sox on Tuesday night. He delivered six shutout innings in the Jays’ series-evening win, but to say “the good Happ” is a bit of a misnomer. There really hasn’t been a good Happ and an evil Happ this season. It’s been more like Incredible Happ or Terrible Happ, with hardly any middle ground.
The lefty has made 14 starts for the Blue Jays this year, and in six of them, he’s given up one run or none. In those six awesome starts, Happ is an unsurprising 6-0, with a ridiculous 0.48 ERA and 1.142 WHIP. He’s thrown 37.2 innings in those six starts, an average of about 6.1 per outing.
In Happ’s other eight starts, well, you may want to move small children and the squeamish away from your screen, I’ll give you a second.
OK, here we go. In Happ’s other eight starts, he’s pitched to a 7.84 ERA and a WHIP of 1.766, averaging barely five innings per start.
For a while there, Happ’s inconsistency seemed to be predictable. The great performances all came in his odd-numbered outings, so he was basically going great start/awful start all through the season, but he snuck in a rare mediocre one in Detroit in what was his seventh start of the year, giving up three runs on seven hits in 6.1 innings. Then he had back-to-back rough outings against the Brewers and Angels in his last two starts before the break.
This last one, the six shutout innings against the Red Sox, was his 14th start of the season, so he’s even started to become inconsistent about his consistent inconsistency.
BAUTISTA HEATING UP
The Blue Jays’ six-week slide has coincided with a pretty deep slump by slugger Jose Bautista. He homered in the third inning of a 3-1 win over the St. Louis Cardinals on June 6, a victory that lifted the Jays to 38-24 on the season, their high-water mark.
Since then, the Jays have barely won one-third of their games (going 14-25) and while injuries have claimed the middle of their lineup, their best hitter has experienced a power outage as well.
Bautista was not spared the injury bug. He managed to avoid the disabled list, but did miss a week after feeling tightness in his hamstring running out a ground ball in Cincinnati on June 22. There’s no question that injury has had an effect on his performance, but it seems to have almost completely sapped his power.
Bautista has hit just two home runs since that June 6 game, after belting 15 to that point. Coming into Tuesday night’s win over Boston, he’d hit just .220/.320/.339 over that span, that slugging percentage the most concerning of all.
But Bautista had a couple of hits Tuesday night, just his second multi-hit game of July, and while they were both singles they were both line drives to left field that were absolutely crushed – the hardest-hit balls off his bat in a long while, and maybe that means he’s starting to feel it again.
Despite the six weeks of struggles, Bautista is still leading the American League with a .406 on-base percentage. We all know what he can do when his bat gets hot, and maybe his return to right field (Tuesday was only the third time he’d played the outfield since hurting his hamstring) is another indication that he’s starting to feel a lot better.
Of course, Bautista also hit into a triple play two plate appearances after that June 6 home run, so maybe that’s what messed him up. Yeah, that’s it.