TORONTO-Troy Tulowitzki isn’t interested in numbers, not right now, and neither is he interested in baring his hitting soul to the public.
He is not one to wear his emotions on his sleeve; not even on an afternoon like Wednesday’s when his manager, teammates, and many of the 46,967 at the Rogers Centre wore parrot feathers on their right sleeves.
It was ‘Edwing’ t-shirt giveaway day, and Edwin Encarnacion did it up right with his 19th home run. Russell Martin came through, too, with a three-run blast in the first inning and Tulowitzki added a solo shot two batters after Encarnacion’s blast.
It was Tulowitzki’s second home run since returning from a stint on the 15-day disabled list with a strained right quadriceps. He’d like you to keep the balloons and streamers in the drawer, if that’s OK.
“It’s only four games back, but I feel good – I put a lot of work in,” Tulowitzki said, wearing a Dunedin Blue Jays cap. “It’s not like I just took treatment down there (at the Blue Jays Dunedin minor league complex); I put a lot of work in on my swing. I came back, probably a little more relaxed and it’s paid dividends. But again, it’s only four games.
“I’m just trying to get back to my successful ways, be that hitter that I was: a very confident guy, someone not afraid to fail. Let it go, and I think I’ve been doing that lately and getting better results.”
If I’m Tulowitzki, from this point on all I want to do is play good defence and grip and rip. All I want to do is hit home runs – to hell with batting average, strikeouts, all that stuff.
Because don’t look now, but as Tom Verducci of SI.com detailed in this piece there is a whole lot of that going on in the Majors this season. It’s like we’re on steroids all over again: the home run is making a comeback, and is almost solely responsible for a slight offensive uptick in the game.
More homers were hit last September than in any month except May, 2000, and homers jumped 17.3 per-cent per game. This season? Homers are up 12 per-cent from last year and according to Verducci’s research, the percentage of fly balls that are homers is the highest it’s been in the 16 years that statistic has been kept. That’s good, because base stealing and all that athletic stuff everybody thought was making a comeback? Gone once again.
Blue Jays pitching coach Pete Walker was not aware of the numbers. But those homers? That trend? Yes, they’re talking about it in the dugout and, it’s safe to presume, so are other teams. As Verducci points out – and as Walker remembers all too well – it was just two years ago that the games deep-thinkers were concerned the game had skewed too much to pitching and defence. Hey, it’s baseball: this stuff intrigues us and leads us to suspect things.
“We’ve seen a lot of balls – I want to say in the past three to four weeks – that you think are fly balls when they leave the bat and they just keep on carrying,” Walker said Wednesday.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if the fact there’s so much pitching velocity in the game has something to do with it, and you would think that would mean added velocity off the bat. But I also wonder whether it isn’t because in the past five or six years we’ve all started to talk more about elevating pitches.
“I know it’s something we’re conscious of as a team. There is a little different philosophy out there now; there’s still a lot of down and away and we talk about that, too. But you’re seeing more pitchers going upstairs more often.”
Tulowitzki is hitting .303 in his last 18 games with six doubles and five homers among his 20 hits. He is 5-for-14 since returning and has nudged his average up to .215 from .204 at the time of his injury. But there are concerning trends, such as the fact he has yet to record an extra-base hit against a left-handed pitcher this season – indeed, he’s barely above .200 against southpaws – and there are whispers that he can no longer turn on those elevated fastballs that are once again in vogue.
So as he embarks on a road trip that will mark his first return to Colorado since last year’s trade from the Rockies, Tulowitzki has continued to wonder if what he’s looking at are the green shoots of a recovery, or just more weeds.