Blue Jays: Troy Tulowitzki out for the season, but so what?
Toronto Blue Jays shortstop Troy Tulowitzki is seemingly out for the remainder of the season with an injury. Yet, is the damage a tragedy or a blessing?
Nobody would wish an injury on any player, especially one who has earned the respect of MLB fans like Troy Tulowitzki for 12 seasons. However, the way the Toronto Blue Jays have tried to build an offense over the last few seasons has been flawed to a degree, making the Tulowitzki injury unfortunate but not too fatal.
As Ben Nicholson-Smith of Rogers Sportsnet reported on Twitter, Tulowitzki was moved to the 60-day DL, putting the rest of his season in serious doubt.
The five-time All Star, two-time Gold Glove winner and two-time Silver Slugger winner was brought to Toronto through a trade with the Colorado Rockies, when the Blue Jays realized their shortstop at the time, Jose Reyes, could not play the position well enough for the team to make a playoff run. The Rockies had a youngster coming through the ranks to fill in for Tulowitzki, so he and his remaining contract of $129 million became expendable.
The Blue Jays saw it as a great investment, as Tulo was playing shortstop like a vacuum that could suck up any ground ball and fire it to first base from anywhere on the field in time to get the out. His bat in Colorado was not too bad, either. At the time of the trade, Tulowitzki was hitting .300 with 12 home runs and 53 RBI. His average was never below .280 since 2008, so the thought was that the Rogers Centre would act as a launching pad for Tulowitzki, almost as good as the park in Colorado.
Instead, Tulowitzki’s batting average dipped to .250 for the two and a half seasons he has been with the Blue Jays. He had only five home runs and 17 RBI to finish off the 2015 regular season. While he collected 16 RBI in the last two Blue Jays playoff runs, many of those runs came from his three home runs while he struck out 18 times and had a pitiful batting average throughout.
There lies the problem: The Blue Jays are on the hook until 2021 for a 32-year-old who is looking at his best hitting years in the rear-view mirror.
Tulowitzki was hitting .249 with seven homers and 26 RBI before the injury. So far, the Blue Jays have had to put Tulo on the shelf due to injury three times: a right quad strain in 2016, a strained right hamstring in April and the current sprained right ankle.
While Tulo fans ponder why he keeps injuring his right leg in some fashion, critics would turn to a few numbers this season to suggest that his loss is not a huge one. Tulowitzki’s 17 walks to 40 strikeouts has not helped his .300 on-base percentage much. According to FanGraphs, he pulled the ball 41.6 percent of the time while grounding out at a rate of 52.5 percent. The majority of his swings have been at pitches inside the strike zone (62.4 percent) and he makes contact with those pitches almost every time (90.4 percent), suggesting it’s not so much his eye for strikes as it is getting crossed up on which pitches that he should hit.
And it’s not just Tulo: The Blue Jays have had a history of overemphasizing the long ball to their detriment.
Currently, the Blue Jays are seventh in the American League in hitting home runs as a team. In 2016, they were third. In 2015, they led the league with 232 home runs. However, while the Blue also led the league in runs scored that year, they have fallen to 14th out of 15 teams in runs scored this season. They are dead last in the A.L. East division this year because of the run drought, as well as from injuries and poor pitching.
Even in 2015, when they won the division by six games, the Blue Jays still did not finish as the best team in the league. The Kansas City Royals won two more games in the regular season and seemingly cruised over the Jays in the A.L. Championship Series, even though the Royals only hit 139 home runs, good enough for 14th place that year.
Tulowitzki’s .190 batting average with runners in scoring position this season says it all: Home runs can win games, but they are not consistent enough to win championships.
The Blue Jays have Ryan Goins, an amazing infielder at both shortstop and second base, who is hitting .221 with five homers and 41 RBI this year. Tulo may have the experience and the All-Star Games and the multiple awards under his belt, but Goins has a .323 batting average with runners in scoring position staring everyone in Toronto in the face. However, while Tulowitzki’s presence at shortstop seemed never in question, unless due to injury, Goins has been kicked around the diamond, the bench and even frequently back to the minors in 2016.
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Is Goins the future? Likely no, especially the way the Blue Jays have utilized him, but Tulowitzki’s injury raises more questions. The Blue Jays lineup is getting much older, which calls into question their philosophy on hitting.
Whether they are trying to kill the ball and go yard in every at-bat, nobody will know the answer except the Blue Jays themselves; however, catcher Russell Martin and Jose Bautista are sinking into the abyss in age and batting average. Tulowitzki seems to be joining them. Third baseman Josh Donaldson is only hitting .253, a far cry from his A.L. MVP award-winning performance, and could be gone through arbitration issues in 2018 or as a free agent in 2019.
With the lay of the land in the lineup, the only big bat from those playoff runs still hitting decently is Edwin Encarnacion, smacking 22 homers and 64 RBI this season. The problem is that he’s doing it for the Cleveland Indians, as he already left the Blue Jays through free agency.
Where does that leave the Blue Jays? Right where they already were before the news of Tulo’s injury: 11.5 games out of the A.L. East division lead and five games out of a Wild Card spot, with seven teams in front of them. It wasn’t like Tulowitzki’s bat was helping the Blue Jays win many games; if anything, it was hindering them. An explosive bat in the lineup only works if it actually explodes, not implodes. Tulowitzki’s injury takes away the potential for a home run to help tie or win a ball game but it also takes away a possible, and more likely, ground out to lose a game.
The issue now becomes seeing what else the Blue Jays have in store for the infield. Will a bat come through the minors or the bench? Or will it come from free agency after the season concludes, likely without a playoff berth? In any case, the idea that Tulowitzki will find a way to resurrect his Rockies days in Toronto is as far-fetched as him finding the Fountain of Youth. If the Blue Jays want to score more runs, they will either have to buy or trade for another big bat or raise one from the minors.
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They may also need to think that their shortstop position doesn’t have to be a big bat in the first place. After all, does anyone remember Tony Fernandez being a home run machine for the Blue Jays?