Blue Jays: The difference between Socrates Brito and Chris Davis

While Chris Davis may have just set a new MLB record last week for futility at the plate, the Blue Jays have their own challenger in Socrates Brito. There’s a lot of significant differences between the two though, and one has to wonder how much longer Brito will last in Toronto.

The Blue Jays managed to pull off their second straight win in Minnesota on Tuesday night, and continued to show some life on offence after a difficult start to the 2019 campaign.

We’re starting to see guys like Justin Smoak, Teoscar Hernandez, and Randal Grichuk having much better at-bats, and others like Freddy Galvis contributing at the plate. It’s not a universal improvement, however, as Socrates Brito continues to struggle at the dish.

In fact, Brito is now the sole owner of the longest hitless streak as a Blue Jay now that his 0-4 performance on Tuesday took him to 20 at-bats without so much as a bloop single. Acquired from the Padres in a small deal on the same day that Kevin Pillar was traded to San Francisco, Brito has shown enough “tools” to make believers out of the coaching staff, but it hasn’t translated to the diamond just yet. At this point it’s getting hard to believe that it will.

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Which takes me to a comparison that is just a little too easy to make, especially because of how recently a division rival went through a “Oh-Fer” streak of his own. Chris Davis‘ rough patch got so bad that he set a new MLB record by going 0-54, which spanned plate appearances from last season, and into this year.

While both teams are in a rebuilding phase and aren’t expected to compete this season, the situations with Brito and Davis couldn’t be a whole lot different. The latter is in just the fourth of a seven year, 161 million dollar deal, which he signed before the 2016 season. You could easily argue that it was ill-advised then, but it’s pretty hard to dispute that he now owns the worst contract in baseball. Sure, the Blue Jays are paying Troy Tulowitzki a whack load of money to sit on the IL in New York right now, but at least his contract doesn’t run until the end of the 2022 season.

The Orioles owe Davis an exorbitant amount of money over the next 3+ seasons, and there are plenty of reasons for them to see if they can extract some value from him before they cut him. They don’t have an obvious prospect at first base that’s being blocked by his presence, and with expectations being at a near all-time low in Baltimore they can afford to see if Davis can hit his way out of this, even if the slump has been more than a season long.

When it comes to Brito, the Blue Jays obviously don’t have the same financial reasons to keep him around. It wouldn’t cost them much, if anything, to cut him outright, or they could probably get away with moving him to Buffalo at this point as well. The Blue Jays don’t have any outfielders knocking down the door to Toronto right at the moment either, but there’s little doubt that someone like Anthony Alford could be an improvement on what we’ve seen from Brito so far.

I’ll concede that it takes a certain amount of bad luck to go 0-54, or even 0-20, but there are also some good reasons for the struggles. The advanced data paints an even uglier picture for Brito, both this season and last, and somewhat surprisingly his situation is even bleaker than Davis’. Granted it’s a small sample size, but we’re looking at a pretty epic stretch from Brito right now, and not in the good way.

The good news is that the Blue Jays don’t owe him much, and if he can’t get things going at the plate soon then I’m sure this experiment will come to an end sooner than later. Chances are he would be long gone or never acquired at all if Dalton Pompey had been able to start the season healthy, and perhaps that’s all that would need to happen for the Blue Jays to cut him. It’s also possible that Ross Atkins and the front office continue to scour other rosters for outfield options, as veterans like Brad Miller and Blake Swihart were DFA’d this week.

I’ll admit that I can see some of the potential that the Blue Jays are talking about with Brito when it comes to his speed he’s shown off running to first and in the outfield, but eventually the numbers speak for themselves. The fact that I’m drawing any kind of comparison to Chris Davis right now, is not a good sign.