TORONTO -- It's the type of slump that could happen to a guy surrounded by a team of .300 hitters, although maybe it wouldn't be so life and death. Something you see regularly. Ugly numbers that vary only in their ugliness. In Alex Rios's case, a .165 average over the past 18 games, no home runs and 23 strikeouts.
"He's scuffling, no question," Toronto Blue Jays manager John Gibbons said last night. "You got to stay aggressive. You have to swing your way out of it."
Perhaps what we're witnessing is the greening of Major League Baseball. A move away from gas guzzlers to compacts - a new hitting Al Gore rhythm.
If you're J.P. Ricciardi, you can't just attribute it to the Mitchell report or anything like that, because you're an employee of Major League Baseball and, well, he just can't go there, you know?
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But there's a lot of bad baseball being played in the American League these days. Awful stuff. A drop in offence that Ricciardi, the Blue Jays' general manager, says is "flat-out alarming."
The decline causes him to admit that when he sits in his office and contemplates trading for another hitter, he is looking at players "from a different vantage point" than he has in the past and that, well, that it wouldn't surprise him if a lot of his peers are looking around and wondering whether maybe the wisest thing to do is hold off from trying to evaluate some of the slumping sluggers until the end of the year. For whatever reason.
"The game is changing," Ricciardi said last night before the Blue Jays were 1-for-10 with runners in scoring position. He was watching as Rios took a called third strike with the bases loaded to end the game.
"The game you see now is the game you'll see in the next few years," Ricciardi added. "Less balls hit into the seats."
Baseball Prospectus studied the offence in both the American League and National League through May 10 and found what it described as "a massive disparity between the leagues in the direction of change." Offence in the AL was down 13 per cent over the past two years. Offence in the National League is up.
Now the NL is threatening to do something it hasn't done since 1974, the year after the designated hitter was instituted: score more runs a game than the AL. Enhanced testing for drugs isn't the only reason - what, are NL hitters getting a new type of drug you can't buy in the AL cities? - but don't sell it short.
As he sat in the stands during a Grapefruit League game this spring, one agent predicted a spate of long-term contracts doled out by clubs to their homegrown young players this year, in no small part because it was easier to do due diligence on a player from within your own organization than from outside. Yes, he was talking about steroids and other performance-enhancing substances. He was also talking about a new way of business. "It's almost like a guy should have been vetted by the time you're ready to sign him long-term," the agent said.
Rios was one of the young players to profit from that emphasis, and with good reason. He's an all-star calibre, multitooled player on a club that has precious little of that commodity. There are many offensive facets to his game that suggest he's the closest thing the Blue Jays have to one of those Tampa Bay Rays, the first-to-third-in-the-blink-of-an-eye kind of player everybody's suddenly in love with. That last pitch from Francisco Rodriguez that sent Rios back to the dugout in the ninth inning last night? Rios thought the pitch would be thrown away - "for some reason," he said - and it wasn't.
That's the betwixt and between of a slump. That's all it is. Happened before. Going to happen again.
"What's been tough for him and us is that we've been in a tough stretch that kept us below .500 for a while," Gibbons said. "When you're a couple of games below .500, everything is looked at differently."
Except for a slump, which still ought to be viewed as a slump.
