Better Know Your Blue Jays 40-man: Randal Grichuk

You know the story, we picked up Randal Grichuk in trade from the Cardinals, a bit more than a year ago. Conner Greene and Dominic Leone went over to St. Louis. Since then Greene as DFAed and picked up by the Royals. Leone missed a large portion of the season with an arm injury. When he pitched he wasn’t great.

At the time of the trade 70% of us liked or loved the trade, 22% were neutral and 8% disliked or hated the trade. I’m guessing closer to 100% of us would say the loved the trade now.

Randal had a rough start to the season, he was hitting .106/.208/.227 at the end of April when he went on the DL. While on the DL he figured out what was going wrong. He came back at the start of June and hit .271/.319/.553 the rest of the way, with 23 home runs. If he could have hit like that all season......

Before last season I asked “Who would finish 2018 with more walks, Grichuk or Pillar?” 69% of us were right, picking Grichuk. And I asked “If the over/under on Grichuk’s WAR was 1.9 I’d take the.....”. 80% of us were right taking the over. He had a 2.2 bWAR.

This year? PECOTA says he’ll hit .245/.304/.459, 22 home runs and a 1.8 WAR.

I’m hoping they are low across the board. It would be hard to for a prediction system to come up with numbers for him. Is he the player we saw from June on

It would really help us out if Randal took a little step forward from last year and became a star. We could use someone giving us good production in the outfield. If we aren’t going to sign Bryce Harper, Grichuk is the mostly likely choice.

Beyond that, I’d be ok if the team decided to trade Pillar and put Randal in center. I thought he played well there. I’d imagine the team has tried to trade Pillar, but just haven’t found a deal.

It is an important season for Grichuk (and I all the Blue Jays players), he has to show that he belongs with the team after the rebuild is over.