TORONTO -- Bo Bichette can be a difficult player to capture. He rarely opens up much about his own success when it comes, either, but that’s not his job. His job is to hit, and business is booming. Bichette is unique, though. He could take 20 swings in a game without repeating the same load, the same shape, the same bat path. Toronto manager John Schneider sees a player who isn’t just a great hitter, but making the jump (back) to being an elite one. Bichette’s new hitting coach, David Popkins, sees something fascinating. We already know that Popkins loves mixing sports metaphors, but when he spoke with Buck Martinez and Dan Shulman on a Spring Training broadcast late in camp, he dropped this golden quote. “We’re seeing a guy who’s able to pick you apart. I’m a big UFC fan and the guy that I always liked to watch fight is Jon Jones,” Popkins said on the broadcast. “He really paralyzes guys, because you never know how he’s going to attack you. People get on their toes, and they start getting super reactive to him because he dictates the pace. You see that with Bo. He’s up there and sometimes he’s shooting the hole, sometimes he’s going to hit a ball off the batter’s eye or that 500-foot home run he hit earlier in camp.” |
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Bichette’s a UFC guy, too, so this got him rolling. “Naturally, a hitter is on the defense. We don’t have the ball first. It’s the only form of offense in sports that doesn’t have the ball,” Bichette explained. “I like to look at it like this … In any other sport, the defense’s job is to create turnovers and make it really tough on the offense. As a hitter, I like to take chances and try to turn defense into offense. I want to make it as difficult as I can on the pitcher.” He’s doing a damn good job of that so far. Bichette is batting .375 with a .903 OPS through the first seven games of the season and looks like the permanent leadoff man. Why would Schneider want to give the most potential at-bats each night to anyone else? This mentality of “creating turnovers” is what makes Bichette such an interesting fit atop the Blue Jays’ lineup. We’re used to the small, speedy leadoff hitters who try to see 10 pitches, then slap a single on the 11th. This is a team that’s batting Andrés Giménez in the cleanup spot, though. The old archetypes are out the window. Bichette understands that there’s a perfect balance, one he’s always chasing. Yes, he must always be himself as a hitter, but great hitters can bend and shape that identity to the moment. |
“It’s just about having every option to attack,” Bichette said. “That’s what I pride myself on, being able to adjust to any situation, any pitch, any pitcher, any location.” The other takeaway here is that Bichette and Popkins seem to be speaking the same language, even if there are a lot of layers to that language. Popkins has earned the trust of Toronto’s hitters, which is more important than anything else in a hitting coach’s job description. All of these hitters have an old coach, a buddy from college or a personal hitting guru in their ear already, so if they don’t trust Popkins fully to put everything together, it can get noisy. In Bichette’s case, he has his father, Dante. Popkins seems to be nailing that three-headed relationship. “His dad and him have done an incredible job with his mechanics,” Popkins said on the Sportsnet broadcast. “There were a couple of things that got off, but I think they got off because of his mentality. It’s just about freeing him up to remind him who he is and who he’s always been through his career. He fills in the rest. He’s extremely intelligent. The two best hitting coaches for Bo are probably Dante and Bo. I just help fill in the gaps.” When Bichette is happy, comfortable and clear-headed, he’s dangerous. Bichette hasn’t expanded on it much, but it’s clear that he wasn’t 3-for-3 with those things for much of 2024. It felt like only a matter of time until Bichette grabbed his share of the spotlight back. He doesn’t crave the spotlight, but when he’s playing like this, the spotlight craves him. |
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MLB MORNING LINEUP PODCAST |
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WIN JOHN SCHNEIDER'S MONEY |
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In Tuesday’s 5-3 win over the Nationals, a trio of bunts were the stars of the show. It turns out Schneider made a wise investment back in the early days of camp. “We actually had a bunting competition -- true story -- in Spring Training,” Schneider said. “We divided the guys up into teams with the winning team getting $1,000 … courtesy of me.” You can read that full story right here. |
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Now that all of Toronto’s Minor League affiliates have announced their Opening Day rosters, we have starting points for most of the Blue Jays’ Top 30 prospects. No. 1 prospect Arjun Nimmala will open with High-A Vancouver while No. 2 prospect Trey Yesavage will open with Single-A Dunedin, but he’ll surely be joining Nimmala on the other side of the border soon. Vancouver’s Nat Bailey Stadium is already one of the best experiences in the Minors, so this looks like an exciting summer on the west coast. For our friends out that way, here’s how you can catch a Canadians game. Plenty of fans from Ontario make the day trip down to Buffalo through the summer, too, and you can find details for those tickets right here. |
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