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.