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Blue Jays mid-term report card: Bo Bichette

By Tom Dakers
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Tampa Bay Rays v Toronto Blue Jays - Game Two Photo by Mark Blinch/Getty Images

Bo Bichette isn’t having the season we’d like to see.

He is a streak hitter, but he hasn’t had a long good streak yet. I’m hoping it will happen soon.

Bo’s getting on base 30% of the time, so it might be time to think about moving him from the number two spot. But I do understand, they need Bo to hit, if he doesn’t things things aren’t going to go well.

He’s gotta do better.

Standard Batting
G PA AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS OPS+ TB GDP
80 360 339 44 87 20 0 12 43 5 4 21 87 .257 .300 .422 .722 103 143 7
Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 7/5/2022.

Part of the problem is he isn’t hitting lefties. He has a .216/.298/.412 line against lefties (right handers .264/.300/.424). So....comparing to Espinal, he’s hitting RHP better (.724 OPS for Bo, .647 for Santiago) but Santiago is cleaning up against LHP and Bo isn’t (1.004 OPS for Santiago, .710 for Bo).

Career Bo has done much better against lefties. I don’t know what’s the difference this year (other than maybe small sample size), but perhaps the team could switch the two against lefties. Put Santiago in the two spot and Bo further back?

The other part is Bo is playing every day. Maybe they could manage his workload a bit. Shortstop is a position you are moving all the time. Not many play short everyday (people always point at Cal Ripken but his numbers fell off at the end of each season, he, likely, would have done better with some days off too).

Defensively....well he seems to be streaky there too.

UZR really doesn’t like him at short. He’s a -33.5 UZR/150. Outs Above Average doesn’t hate him there as much, he’s a -2, which puts him 10th among AL shortstops.

He likely loses out a bit on UZR because of Matt Chapman range taking up some of Bo’s space. But I still believe we’d be better as a second baseman. I think we’d be better off with Espinal at short and Bo at second. I do understand that you would have so sell that idea to Bo. I wouldn’t do it if it pisses him off too much. And I wouldn’t do it mid-season. He would need spring training to get used to turning the double and all.

Anyway, Baseball Reference has Bo at a 0.9 WAR. FanGraph likes him more, 1.5 WAR (making him just slightly worse than Espinal at 1.8).

Poll

For the first half I’d give Bo Bichette an

This poll is closed

  • 0%
    A
    (6 votes)
  • 6%
    B+
    (46 votes)
  • 16%
    B
    (121 votes)
  • 25%
    B-
    (180 votes)
  • 23%
    C+
    (167 votes)
  • 13%
    C
    (96 votes)
  • 7%
    C-
    (56 votes)
  • 2%
    D+
    (15 votes)
  • 2%
    D
    (16 votes)
  • 0%
    D-
    (2 votes)
  • 1%
    F
    (9 votes)
714 votes total Vote Now

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