HUSTON – Entering the season, Santiago Espinal was positioned to play part of the second base platoon with Cavan Biggio.
The 27-year-old came out of the quietly impressive 2021, in which he scored .311 / .376 / .405 over 246 appearances, establishing himself not only as a player in the major leagues, but also as a key figure on the bench. He was amassed after cultivating an extra 15 pounds of weight for a winter spent diligently lifting and eating. He came out of spring training, in which all this work began to pay dividends, as five of his 10 goals in 13 games in the Grapefruit League were for additional bases.
But if he wanted to win Toronto Blue Jace 2022 every day, Espinal would have to continue to prove himself at the highest level of the game. He would have to make the most of his part-time role. It had to be made indisputable.
It took him two weeks. Less, indeed, since Espinal started in second base for the Blue Jays in seven of the club’s last eight, while Bijo – who started the first two games in Toronto for the second season – did not play the position for a week and a half. The work is on Espinal. He manages the jewelry; he caught it. And, boy, he just did a show deep in the heart of Texas this weekend.
He was reassured by Justin Verlander on Friday by taking a 95 mph heater from the future Hall of Fame 379 feet above the center-left wall. The next night, he calmed down again, ruining a pair of 0-2 quick balls from the Astros Blake Taylor’s relay before coming down to pick up the slider and put it in Crawford’s pits. And he came out with a huge double in the seventh inning on Sunday, planting Parker Muszynski’s fast ball from the first laser double field in the left central gap of the field, covering the then start.
In the end, Espinal’s efforts were in vain, as the Astros leveled the game in the bottom half, coughed another lead in extra innings and then finally pulled the Blue Jays out of the two-run Homer fight and relegation against Jordan Romano in the bottom of 10. – Jeremy Pena turned a fast ball at 97 mph to ruin a series of 31 consecutive Blue Jace saves – to win 8-7.
Overall, the baseball weekend was extremely competitive between the two teams, as the Blue Jays took the first two games in a series before the Astros snatched one of their hands on Sunday. The two will meet again next week at the Rogers Center. And it’s a decent bet that they will play each other somewhere this fall. If you like a captivating baseball back and forth that is on its feet in April, this series is for you. And Espinal kept popping up everywhere.
“It’s funny – when it counts, Espy comes,” said Blue Jays manager Charlie Montoyo. “Defensive or offensive. This game he made in the middle was a great game to keep us in the game. He plays good baseball. He is a good player. “
Here is this play he made in the middle:
Goodness. This ball detached from Chas McCormick’s bat at 100 mph, giving Espinal precious precious time to instinctively shoot to the left of the opposite side of his base and pull it down. And even with how fast he caught up, McCormick raised the line at almost 29 feet per second, giving Espinal less than five seconds to get the ball first.
But the second baseman completed his exchange in less than a second and a half while on his knees facing the center wall of the field, initially firing an arrow at 64 mph into Biggio’s glove. Balls in play with similar exit speeds and launch angles led to strikes in two-thirds of the time in the StatCast era. But not this one.
And not the Espinal ball went and went into the third inning on Friday – a 79-mph liner from the bat of Jordan Alvarez, which carried .670 xBA.
Here are some subtle things with him, such as how Espinal coolly backhanded this crazy short hop at 50 percent ball with a chance of hitting Kyle Tucker’s bat on Friday:
Or how effectively he turned that double game on Sunday, completing a 0.63-second exchange and scoring 77 miles per hour after throwing to first to beat Juli Guriel, who climbed the first baseline in 4.34 seconds:
“He’s amazing,” Blue Jays rookie Ross Stripling said on Friday. “He’s a glove we need in the field almost every night – and that’s why you see him play every night. He obviously does it with the bat. But the glove speaks for itself.”
If there is a feeling that Espinal is everywhere in defense, it is because it is so. The Blue Jays are optimizing their defensive position more than any other baseball team, entering on Sunday after replacing 74.8% of the recordings this season. The second-ranked club, the always experienced Los Angeles Dodgers, is displaced by only 61.2%.
Draw the positioning of Toronto so far this season and it looks like a Rorschach test:
Sometimes Espinal is on the right side of the second. Sometimes he is on the left. Sometimes he is in the shallow field as part of an aggressive field change. Sometimes he is right in the field as part of the arrangement of four outfielders.
“With Chapman in third, Bo plays well in short, and then you have Espie in second place – as a pitcher you’re as confident as you can be,” Stripling said. “Put the ball on the ground, it will be out. Or even hit the laser, you can dive in and catch it, as Espy did for me. It’s a certain calm for the pitcher, for sure.”
But we knew about the coming glove, didn’t we? What we hadn’t seen so consistently at the big league level were all the little things that coaches and developers would tell you as Espinal climbed the minor league ladder. All those key elements that helped his teams win.
This is the stubborn, stubborn approach from the bottom of the lineup. The fact that he came in on Sunday after seeing 4.33 pitches on a plate is the 15th highest MLB rating this season. That’s the amount of contact he makes by placing his bat on over 83 percent of the pitches he hits, MLB’s top 30. And this is the quality of this contact – the 85th percentile of heavy blows and the 88th percentile expected average blow that he produced. This is this mean pop. The seven balls he has put into play at 102 mph or more this season, corresponding to his 2021 total in 190 fewer appearances.
It’s all coming together to make Espinal an obvious name for Montoyo to write on his Blue Jays lineup every night at second base. Entering the season, there was some question about how much time to play in a potential platoon with Biggio. As for what Espinal should do – or what should happen around him in terms of injuries or poor performance – to be raised to daily work. But now, just 16 games in the Toronto season, there really is no doubt. Santiago Espinal is the second player of the Blue Jays.
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