Blue Jays fan favorite Kevin Pillar redirects blame for recent bullpen meltdowns

The Toronto Blue Jays pitching staff has been perfectly league average over the first few weeks of the season. Sure there's been some bumps along the way, but that's what you'll get when three of your expected starters didn't make the Opening Day roster, and a fourth, who did, lasted only three innings before going down with season ending ACL surgery.

Regardless, the Blue Jays as a team have 240 strikeouts, good enough for third in the league but some of their other numbers look a little bit bloated thanks to those blips, indicated in their 106 earned runs against which sits 19th in the league.

By the eye test though, the starters seem to be in a relative groove - however, former Blue Jays fan favourite Kevin Pillar says, the team actually needs more out of this group. Pillar spoke on the Blue Bird Territory podcast recently and said that the lack of being able to go deep in the game for starting pitchers is what's causing some issues for the bullpen.

"Without getting deeper into the game, the bullpen is having to cover four or five innings sometimes and then guys roles are being put into different innings. These guys are still human beings, they're not robots. They can't go out and pitch three or four days in a row," says Pillar.

Blue Jays starters need to be more efficient

Pillar has a fair point here. Toronto' starting group has pitched a combined 107 innings, which is the third least in the league behind only Colorado and the Chicago White Sox. Meantime, their relief pitchers have already covered 106.2 innings pitched which is the fifth most of any bullpen in the league thus far (going into Friday, Apr. 24 games).

Pillar says a perfect example of how this has hurt the Blue Jays this season was in Wednesday's 7-3 loss to the LA Angels. He says, "The Blue Jays had a big
seventh inning (to tie the game 3-3) and that's where you saw (Tommy) Nance have to be extended too. They only had so many guys available in the bullpen. You're asking him to do something that he's not comfortable doing, going multiple innings and then you've got to bring in (Braydon) Fisher in a situation that is probably not the ideal situation for him either."

Pillar is pointing to Nance getting through a clean sixth inning, but after getting the first batter in the seventh inning out, he walked Mike Trout and gave up a line drive single to Jo Adell which put runners on the corners. That's when Fisher entered the game, and after he struck out Jorge Soler, he walked Yoán Moncada to load the bases and then gave up a bases clearing double to Nolan Schanuel.

"That's what happens when the starters don't go deep into games," says Pillar, as the Blue Jays' starter in this game, Eric Lauer, went five innings and allowed three earned runs on seven hits, with two walks and three strikeouts. He also gave up two home runs. But that hasn't been an anomaly for the Blue Jays this season.

Kevin Gausman leads the starters in innings pitched with 28.1 in five starts. That ranks 40th among qualified starters in terms of innings pitched. Dylan Cease ranks 66th with 25.2 innings under his belt in five innings. Lauer (17.2), Patrick Corbin (14.2) and Max Scherzer (16.1) haven't pitched enough innings to qualify.

Pillar says this weekend against the Cleveland Guardians is a chance for the starters to reverse this trend. "There hasn't been a Blue Jays pitcher this year who has pitched into the seventh inning. So hopefully that's something we will see in this series."

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