ARLINGTON, Texas — Chris Woodward was a gifted athlete playing at Northview High School in Covina, Calif., when the Toronto Blue Jays selected him in the 54th round of the 1994 draft. They didn’t sign him right away, with scout Bill Moore keeping an eye on him for a year under the old draft-and-follow system before handing him a contract May 17, 1995. Immediately afterwards, the introverted teenager found himself in Medicine Hat, Alta., playing rookie ball in the Pioneer League, unsure where his baseball adventure was going to take him.
“I look back at that year sometimes and think, ‘Wow, this came from that,’” says Woodward, the rookie manager of the Texas Rangers who became a rising coaching star with the Seattle Mariners and Los Angeles Dodgers after an 18-year pro career that included parts of 12 seasons in the majors, seven of them with the Blue Jays. “I had no expectations of anything at that point. I was just trying to survive.
“I felt like I wasn’t even close to being the best player on my team, let alone a big-leaguer. People thought of me differently, but I didn’t think that of myself and it took me a while to gain confidence because I didn’t have a whole lot of success. The skill level was there to the people who were watching me, but there were a lot of things that needed to happen.”
Woodward, now 42, worked relentlessly to beat the incredibly long odds he faced entering pro ball to simply survive a few seasons in the minors, let alone appear in 659 games in the majors. He debuted as a 22-year-old in 1999, but didn’t stick until 2002, when he batted .276/.330/.468 in 90 games with the Blue Jays. The next year he appeared in a career-best 104 games but gave way to Chris Gomez in 2004, hit free agency and began an odyssey that took him to the Mets, Braves, Mariners, Red Sox and back to the Blue Jays before he started coaching in 2013 in the Seattle system.
Along the way, Woodward wrung everything he could out of his natural abilities.
“I’ve always been fascinated by why people are successful,” he says. “I’ve learned that the incremental gains I was making on a daily basis to survive, that set me apart from everyone else, and it’s what sets apart a lot of other guys from others. People weed themselves out in life general, and this game is a battle of attrition. People just don’t want to do what it takes on a daily basis. They’d rather do other things.
“In this game, it’s so hard. Being resilient is probably your biggest asset because you’re going to fail if you’re not Mike Trout, you’re going to have get through those times somehow. I failed a lot. I thought I finally figured it out in the minor-leagues, and then I failed again.”
That resilience and determination will come in handy as he guides a Rangers clubhouse through its current rebuild. It’s a marked transition after spending the past three seasons as the third base and infield coach with the Los Angeles Dodgers, although one he embraced.
Woodward’s work there helped shape him into a leading managerial candidate, as he interviewed with the New York Yankees after the 2017 season before landing the Rangers gig. He was on the Blue Jays’ list of candidates when they sought to replace John Gibbons in the fall, but their search went in a different direction, ultimately landing on Charlie Montoyo.
The thought of his career coming full circle with the Blue Jays had crossed his mind, but things worked out well with the Rangers. “We’ve got great leadership from the top down and I couldn’t be happier here,” he says.
Still, Woodward’s time with the Blue Jays “provided every bit of the base” from which his approach as a manager is rooted, with former managers Jim Fregosi and Gibbons and coaches like Brian Butterfield, in particular, and Don Wakamatsu, now on his staff with the Rangers, among those to have influenced him.
“Butterfield was the first coach that really made me think on a higher level and made me feel like a big-leaguer,” says Woodward.
His Canadian connection extends deeper than baseball, too, as his wife Erin is from the Greater Toronto Area. Woodward even made a brief appearance on Degrassi: The Next Generation, becoming a member of the Screen Actors Guild in the process while meeting, but not appearing with, a young actor named Aubrey Graham.
“He wasn’t Drake then,” laughs Woodward. “I just remember him being a cool dude. Everyone else on the set, they were typical actors, I guess, I come around and they’re like, ‘Who’s this guy?’ He was the one guy you could tell was a sports fan and went out of his way to say hi to me.”
Put all together, it’s easy to see why Woodward says his time with the Blue Jays “set the table for where I’m at now. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that organization. I wouldn’t have my family — there are so many things. The good times, the bad times, the struggles, everything has led to this point and to the understanding of who I am.”
[relatedlinks]
ALL ABOUT THAT BUNT
The Blue Jays have made sacrifice bunting a regular part of their work in the batting cage to be prepared for any number of different scenarios, such as the one that presented itself in the 12th inning of Friday night’s 1-0 win over the Rangers.
Danny Jansen had all of three sacrifice bunts in his professional baseball career when Charlie Montoyo asked him to square up after the first two batters of the inning reached. He whiffed at his first attempt, took Strike 2 and then, contrary to baseball orthodoxy, made a third attempt and got it down. “I see it that you have three chances to get the bunt down,” says Montoyo. “When you tell somebody they’ve got three chances to do it, it makes it easier.”
The Blue Jays got lucky on the play, as Jansen bunted the ball right to Ariel Jurado, who fielded a ball made slick by rain and lost an easy out at third base when his throw sailed wide into the stands, allowing the winning run to cross.
But the way the situation manifested highlighted the ongoing debate on the merits of the sacrifice bunt.
Data from run-expectancy models consistently show that surrendering an out for 90 feet rarely makes sense. For example in 2018, as calculated by Baseball Prospectus, teams scored 1.4525 runs with men on first and second and none out, as compared to 1.3067 with men on second and third with one out.
In that same Friday game, the Blue Jays also sacrificed in the 10th inning after a Billy McKinney leadoff walk, with Eric Sogard, the club’s most productive hitter the past two weeks, dropping a bunt at his own discretion. That cut the Blue Jays’ run expectancy from 0.8721 with a man at first and none out to 0.6673 with a man on second and one out.
Montoyo’s appreciation of the sacrifice — “I like bunting,” he says — surely played into the decision, and the contrast from last year, when the Blue Jays sacrificed a major-league record low five times all season, is jarring, especially for an analytically-driven organization.
“So much is dependent on pitcher/hitter matchup, who is coming up behind,” says GM Ross Atkins. “I think there are a lot of scenarios where it doesn’t make sense. But if you’re using track records and using the information to make the decision, not in isolation of sacrifice bunt or not, but using all of the pieces to the equation … who’s available to pitch in the next inning, there is so much more to it than just deciding to sacrifice bunt or not, as a philosophy.”
So the Blue Jays — who lead the American League with eight sacrifice bunts — will continue to make it a part of their tool-kit, devoting some practice time “because I believe if you work at it, it’s kind of easy,” says Montoyo. “If you don’t work at it, it’s not that easy.”
And players who rarely have been called on to bunt may find themselves in the same spot as Jansen did Friday.
“It’s fun, man,” Jansen says of playing more small-ball. “We’re a gritty team, we’re going to fight ‘til the last out. So, anyway we can find a way to win, we’re going to do it.”
SOGARD SO GOOD
Eric Sogard has long taken the field in a pair of bookish prescription glasses stylish enough for a trendy office, eschewing contact lenses or the kind of sport-oriented wraparound frames Danny Jansen wears.
Why?
“I have an astigmatism so I can’t wear contacts,” says the hot-hitting Blue Jays second baseman whose Twitter avatar is a baseball with glasses and bio includes the hashtag #NerdPower. “And I see 20-10 with these so LASIK, 20-20 would be a downgrade.”
Certainly there’s no arguing with how he’s been seeing the ball since his April 16 promotion from triple-A Buffalo, as he carries a .375/.470/.696 slash line in 15 games into Monday’s series opener against the Minnesota Twins.
His homer Sunday was his career-high fourth of the season and with an average of 4.29 pitches-seen per at-bat, he’s been a boon atop the Blue Jays lineup.
“I love seeing a lot of pitches and working the counts, the more pitches I see the more comfortable I get, so that’s something that’s been putting me in a good position,” says Sogard.
“Especially in that leadoff spot, you get a guy that can see more pitches, (it) relays to the rest of the team kind of what he’s working with.”
Already this season he’s surpassed his production during a difficult 2018 with the Brewers, when he batted just .134/.165/.241 in 55 games. He credits being in a better place mentally along with a slight mechanical change at the plate for that.
“I’m really focused on being in my legs throughout my swing which is keeping me behind the ball and allowing me to have more time to react,” he explains. “I see the ball longer.”
BURNING QUESTION
A common question I see from Blue Jays fans on social media is why the club continues to carry struggling outfielder Socrates Brito when prospects like Cavan Biggio, Lourdes Gurriel Jr., and Jonathan Davis are tearing it up at triple-A.
Here’s the response from GM Ross Atkins: “I think there are two things that are factoring in there. The first one is, just making sure when they are transitioned that we’ve maximized their opportunities in the minor-leagues and they are in a position to hopefully never go back. So a lot of that is just track record and historic information. How long they’ve done something and what that means for predicting success here, and then all of the subjective opinions of that.
“But the more important piece to the equation is making sure, once they do come, they’re playing every day, or (get) the bulk of the playing time. As you’ve seen with Socartes Brito, he has had very limited playing time. Alen Hanson had limited playing time and was pinch-running often. When we bring a player to the big-leagues for the first time and we want them to play on a regular basis. … Having all three of those guys performing well in triple-A is very encouraging. Would like to see it a little bit longer from Jonathan Davis and want to ensure we have the playing time for Cavan, Lourdes or JD when they do come.”
IN TRANSITION
Jesus Lopez, the minor-leaguer acquired by the Blue Jays from Oakland in the Kendrys Morales deal, is being converted from an infielder to a catcher. He’s currently at extended spring training working on the transition, which should create more opportunities for him in a system stocked with higher priority middle-infield prospects.
