Triples are fairly rare in Toronto
DUNEDIN, Fla. — Of course, Kevin Pillar remembers his triple last season. How could he forget? Pillar, the Toronto Blue Jays’ center fielder, smoked a deep drive into the right-field corner at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. The St. Louis Cardinals’ Stephen Piscotty leapt and smashed into the fence, never touching the ball, which caromed hard off the padding and skipped far away.
Pillar pulled into third with the triple — but that wasn’t what made the play memorable. The runner ahead of him, Chris Coghlan, vaulted his way into an eternal video highlight, launching his body over catcher Yadier Molina to score. The oddity of Pillar’s feat, alas, was an afterthought.
“It’s definitely a huge thrill to hit a triple,” Pillar said. “But that’s usually one of the only times you’ll see a triple now, when a guy leaves his feet and the ball gets by him. To hit a ball in the gap and just flat out outrun the defender and the ball to third base is something you don’t see very often.”
Last season, the Blue Jays did it less often than any other team in major league history. They hit five triples in 2017 — yes, five, a record low by a team in a season, including strike years. The Blue Jays’ hitters were in no hurry to see Luis Rivera, their third-base coach, unless they were slapping his hand on a home run trot. At least Rivera didn’t take it personally.
“Only five?” Rivera said recently, before a Blue Jays workout here. “You know, our ballpark is not good for triples, I think. It seems like now they play deep against us, and balls in the gaps that probably in the past would be doubles or maybe triples, now they’re outs.”
Rogers Centre, with its symmetrical dimensions and artificial surface, was only partly to blame for the lack of triples. The Blue Jays hit three at home, but their opponents managed 12 there. Two ballparks — Camden Yards and Angel Stadium — featured fewer triples than Rogers Centre last season, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, and three other parks had just as many.
The Blue Jays’ aversion to triples did not cause them to stumble to a 76-86 record last season. But after they had reached the American League Championship Series the previous two years, that shortcoming symbolized a season gone awry.
“It’s definitely not our philosophy; John Gibbons is not that way at all,” general manager Ross Atkins said, referring to the Blue Jays’ manager. “He wants guys to succeed by pushing the envelope and trying, not being afraid of failure. There’s a lot of variables there — the home run-hitting approach; the ballparks we’re playing in are smaller; the age of our position-player roster was the oldest. But we’re obviously cognizant of it, and not happy about it.”
The Blue Jays’ window to win seems to be closing, with their star third baseman, Josh Donaldson, facing free agency after this season. The team has tried diligently to rebuild its prospect inventory and made only minor, low-risk changes over the winter, adding complementary parts like infielders Aledmys Diaz and Yangervis Solarte, starter Jaime Garcia and outfielders Curtis Granderson and Randal Grichuk.
Granderson, 36, is an expert in the Blue Jays’ most feeble category.
With the Detroit Tigers in 2007, he hit 23 triples, the most by any player since 1950.