Blue Jays: Don’t blame Charlie Montoyo for this early mess

The Blue Jays’ season has gotten off to a rocky 3-8 start so far, but I don’t think it would be fair to put much, if any of the blame on Charlie Montoyo.

It’s been a disastrous start to the 2019 season for the Toronto Blue Jays so far, even if the team was expected to struggle a bit this year.

They’ve started out just 3-8, but the record actually doesn’t really paint the picture of how bad some areas of the team’s performance have been. The pitching staff and starting rotation in particular have been fantastic, but the offence has been dreadful, and that’s putting it lightly.

They’re now slashing just .183/.261/.318 as as team, with their OBP being second from the bottom in all of baseball, besting only the Cincinnati Reds who have a staggeringly low mark of .233. What’s even worse for the Blue Jays right now is their 111 strikeouts as a club through just 11 games, giving them an average of a little more than 10 per contest.

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For what it’s worth, I have a lot of faith that most of this roster can contribute at the big league level, but there’s no disputing that things are pretty ugly right now, even in a small sample size. Truthfully, I didn’t even get a chance to watch yesterday’s game, but when I checked in on social media part of the way through, it wasn’t hard to tell how things were going.

You can’t blame Blue Jays fans for their early frustration with this team, especially because of all of the drastic changes it underwent. We saw the front office trade or cut veterans like Kevin Pillar, Kendrys Morales, Russell Martin, Troy Tulowitzki, and even Aledmys Diaz, and these days it’s hard for the average baseball fan to know many players on the blue team. However, for as much as I can’t fault the fan base for being at their wit’s end just 11 games into the season, I hope they’re not blaming the new skipper for what’s going on out there.

It’s hard not to long for the not so distant memories of a winning Blue Jay team with John Gibbons at the helm, but Charlie Montoyo is in a much different position than the last bench boss in Toronto. You can question decisions like putting someone like the new addition of Socrates Brito at the top of the lineup, and I wouldn’t blame you. However, if you have a look at the performance of the rest of the roster so far, I can’t say I blame Montoyo for giving it a shot.

As I mentioned yesterday, other than Freddy Galvis and Richard Urena, the entire roster has struggled on the offensive side of the ball. Randal Grichuk is hitting .162, Justin Smoak has battled neck issues and is hitting just .200, Teoscar Hernandez .193, and the new additions of Britto and Alen Hanson have combined to go 1-18 in their first handful of games. There is only so much shaking up of the lineup that the skipper can do when everyone is ice cold at the same time.

An 11 game sample size isn’t really big enough to judge much of anything, but it most certainly shouldn’t cause many fingers to be pointing in Montoyo’s direction. He can only work with the roster that he’s been handed, and while there is a lot of young talent that should develop into above-average big league contributors, it’s pretty clear that right now this team is anything but that. I’m confident that veterans like Smoak, Grichuk, Hernandez, and even Brandon Drury are better hitters than they’ve shown so far, and things will even out in time, but it doesn’t help that none of them have produced yet either.

With the kids things are less certain, and not because I’ve lost any long-term faith in anyone, but because sometimes big league development can be a rocky road. Even the late Hall of Famer Roy Halladay had to refine his game before he stuck at the highest level and began his storied career, and the same could happen for struggling youngsters like Danny Jansen, Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and Billy McKinney. I’m not suggesting any are imminent Hall of Famers, but it’s an example that even the best sometimes go through an up and down path to a big league career. I wouldn’t blame Montoyo for any of that if happens either.

Right now all the new manager can do is encourage his team to stay positive, work with the coaching staff to look for any big flaws in anyone’s hitting approach, and look forward to better days in this gig. It might not feel like it right now, but this young club is going to go through hot and cold streaks this season, and they’re due to snap out of this sooner than later.

It’s entirely possible that we don’t see a .500 record again this year, but I think if we’re being honest that should have been the expectation from the get go. The front office made it clear that the 2019 season was about rebuilding, and with a focus on giving the inexperienced playing time over keeping veterans around, we knew it was going to come with it’s lumps. I’m not saying that Montoyo takes zero fault in any of this, or that we won’t be able to judge his work this season at all, but for now it’s pretty much a case of everything that could go wrong doing just that. There’s only so much he can do about this early mess, unfortunately.