Blue Jays call-up Tim Mayza not Teoscar Hernandez

With Kendrys Morales officially placed on the 10-day disabled list, the Toronto Blue Jays had a roster move to make. Many thought it would be Teoscar Hernandez getting the call. Myself included. However, it was the big, hard-throwing left-hander Tim Mayza got the call to join the bullpen.

For the time being, the Blue Jays will go with an 8 man bullpen and 3 man bench. That is why many wondered why it ended being Mayza instead of Teoscar Hernandez to keep hard-throwing bullpen and 4 on the bench. When you look at the schedule after the Thursday off day, the Blue Jays play 3 games in Cleveland, 3 games at the Rogers Centre against the Kansas City Royals, and back on the road for 4 games at Yankee Stadium. The next off day is April 23rd.

The injury to Kendrys Morales isn’t classified as anything overly serious. It’s a Grade 1 hamstring strain that the Blue Jays believe will take the minimum or at max two weeks to get over. For the time being, given all the games and lack of off days coming up, going with an 8 man bullpen makes sense. It also is going to be helpful to have that extra arm while the Blue Jays don’t have an arm in the pen that can log multiple innings if need be. Right now, that’s Danny Barnes who could give two max.

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Mayza is a very intriguing bullpen arm for John Gibbons and the Blue Jays to make use of during his stint here. It is extremely valuable that he will be the second left-hander in the bullpen along with Aaron Loup, who’s looked good at times but with a few rocky outings mixed in to start the season.

Mayza appeared in 19 games and 17.0 innings in 2017. Look past his inflated 6.88 ERA in the small sample size, however, there is lots of potential for Mayza to be quite effective. His FIP was 2.98. Use xFIP to bring that 21.4% HR/FB rate to 10.5% and it’s an even better 2.15. He racks up the strikeouts with 14.29 k/9 and 34.2% K%. Mayza can get it up there velocity wise with an average fastball velocity of 94.2 and a hard slider at 86.5.

It’s likely that we’ll see quite a bit of Tim Mayza as the season goes along. He likely will be the first reliever called upon whenever a reliever is needed for the bullpen. Teoscar Hernandez will get his shot. He will be up here at some point in 2018.

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For this roster move, the call-up of Tim Mayza makes a lot of sense to add that extra arm for the slew of games upcoming after the Thursday off-day.