So even though Michael Kay was heavily insinuating the Jays are cheating apparently this afternoon he felt the need to publicly defend the jays against accusations of cheating.

To get ahead of any of this I wanted to point out the specifics of how our hitting was different on the road vs home.

The first thing to note is that while the Jays were better at home (120wrc+) than on the road (105wrc+), this is true of most every other team too.....and the Jays road 105wrc+ was the 5th best road mark in MLB, while their 120wrc+ was just one spot higher at 4th best home mark.

And more granularly....


HOME: 8.6bb%, 17.3k%, .300babip, .271avg, .178iso
AWAY: 8.3bb%, 18.3k%, .296babip, .260avg, .147iso

HOME: 20.1ld%, 41.0gb%, 39.0fb%, 10.8iffb%, 12.3hrfb%, 6.6ifh%
AWAY: 20.6ld%, 42.4gb%, 37.0fb%, 10.7iffb%, 10.5hrfb%, 4.6ifh%

HOME: 38.3pull%, 35.9cen%, 25.9opp%, 15.4soft%, 51.2med%, 33.5hard%
AWAY: 39.3pull%, 35.2cen%, 25.5opp%, 16.6soft%, 51.6med%, 31.7hard%


so we can see that the lines are extremely similar almost all the way through, most within a percentage point and almost all within a few percentage points difference...... except the one significant discrepancy being isolated power - 21% better at home than on the road. Which in turn seems to be the result of a slightly higher flyball% plus a slightly higher hard hit %.

Now this doesn't prove anything either way but i would expect a home cheater margin to be both bigger and more broad-based. Not almost entirely isolated in power - something I suspect might more accurately be due to home ballpark effects - something which the renovations were arguable meant to do, both in increasing HR but also other XBH in general.


I don't know if there's other data available for home/away splits - like exit velocity and the like. Or if there's somewhere we can find our opponents' overall splits between Rogers Center and everywhere else.

Michael Kay's words today (after blatantly insinuating last night that the jays were cheating):

https://x.com/ESPNNewYork/status/1975281095467016390

It all seems of a piece with our era, where if you lose, you invoke an alleged conspiracy committed by your adversary, like the departing president and his team of sore losers falsely accusing Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman of stuffing suitcases with illegal ballots.

Kay's been blatantly insinuating this for years tbh



https://x.com/KutterIsKing/status/1975302247878909971

This Mitch Bannon (The Athletic) excerpt does not sound encouraging about the potential for a Bo return for the ALCS:

Bo Bichette did not travel with the Jays to New York. He stayed behind in Toronto “still progressing” from his knee sprain he suffered on Sept. 6, Schneider said. There is “no glaring update,” according to the manager, suggesting the shortstop has still not begun running or hitting live velocity.

The ALCS, if the Jays were to advance, begins on Sunday. That gives Bichette six more days to move from progressing to progressed.