Ezequiel Carrera's injury will be quietly impactful for Blue Jays

Ezequiel Carrera is far from the prototypical “impact player.” The 30-year-old has been consistently below-average at the dish in his career and a touch shaky in the field.

What he has generally done well is play a capable brand of small ball, run the bases effectively, and provide a left-handed bat off the bench. So when the Toronto Blue Jays lost him to the 10-day disabled list on Wednesday, it seemed more like taking a jab than serious body blow.

However, Carrera’s absence looks to be more damaging than it appears on the surface. That’s largely because the outfielder has been a significantly better player in 2017 than he has historically.

Carrera is tied for third among Blue Jays position players with 0.8 Wins Above Replacement, behind just Justin Smoak and Josh Donaldson. His .297/.366/.412 line is good for a significantly above-average 112 wRC+. He’s been a primary driver of the offence in June, hitting .348/.500/.609 with a pair of home runs and a steal.

To buy that the Blue Jays will have trouble replacing Carerra, you have to believe he would have kept up this pace or something like it. After all, we saw the speedy outfielder explode out of the gate last year as well. His first-half OPS was a very solid .777, but he followed it with a .515 mark in the season’s second stanza.

So what’s different this year? A rather astounding new approach at the plate. Carrera has never been known as a particularly advanced hitter, but this year he’s shown some of the best patience in all of baseball. Carrera has been so good at waiting for his pitch that he’s besting the legendarily patient Jose Bautista at it this season.

You can have a few extra balls fall in or run into more meatballs than expected fairly easily, but being one of the most disciplined hitters in the game, even in just a 165 PA burst, is seriously impressive.

Not only that, but Carrera had been cutting down on those swings outside the zone all season, to the point they were at a comically low eight percent in June.

In Carrera’s case this discipline didn’t translate to a mammoth walk rate — although his current 9.1 percent would be a career-best — because pitchers have too many incentives to attack him right in the zone when they fall behind. Putting his wheels on the base paths for free isn’t advisable and when he isn’t much of a power threat you can use the heart of the dish.

Instead of racking up the walks, Carrera has been using his ability to force pitchers to come to him to make better contact on pitches in the zone. A seemingly-bloated .358 BABIP is backed by a line-drive rate well above his career average and an excellent pop-up rate of just 3.1 percent.

It’s hard to say exactly how far Carrera would have been able to take these trends, but the Blue Jays certainly would have loved to find out.

Instead, their current options to handle some left field for the stretch to come are the following:

Dwight Smith Jr.: The 24-year-old left-handed hitter is hitting a strong .303/.363/.443 at Triple-A, but is a completely unknown quantity at this level and a bit on the old side to be a prospect that excites. He’s probably the best option though, which the Blue Jays recognized by bringing him up and putting him in the lineup Wednesday. He certainly responded with a 3-for-4 day, but they will need to see a lot more to feel comfortable going to him every day.

Steve Pearce: Returned from the DL Friday, but putting him in the outfield regularly might not be the best thing considering he’s coming off a calf injury. Not a great fielder there at the best of times.

Darwin Barney/Ryan Goins: Both can take the odd day in left, but their bats barely play in the middle infield and they are needed more at second thanks to the injury to Devon Travis.

At the end of the day, the Blue Jays are looking at a hole bigger than most realized being filled by a series of candidates that it’s hard to project a great deal of success from. That’s not a great situation.

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