General 2020 Blue Jays Discussion Thread

[Slade]

You don't have to worry. All of Toronto is now in Wasaga Beach.

 

 

God damn people are stupid. But still better than being in Florida or Texas.

[Spanky99]

I'm glad they did the testing before getting to Toronto. I don't want anyone coming into the city unless they are cleared.

 

Isn't that normal procedure for business class, etc?

[Spanky99]

You don't have to worry. All of Toronto is now in Wasaga Beach.

 

 

What happened to the Beach? f*** I have to get out there when this s*** passes.

[Brownie19]

What happened to the Beach? f*** I have to get out there when this s*** passes.

 

Well with the high water levels (we're almost at record highs in the Great Lakes - close to 1986), there really isn't a beach right now. Notice the streetlights in the picture...storms have deposited sand over the road and they've just closed the road and left the sand on it so there's actually some sand (and room) for people to enjoy. The streetlights are about where the edge of the road is (below the sand).

 

Town has put up concrete traffic barriers to block wave uprush in front of The Dard (the main bar) as it's the low point. Before it was there, the waves/water would hit the front of the buildings during heavy storms/wind events.

 

Mother Nature's been tough on the old main end lately...

[Brownie19]

And now I just read that Wasaga is going to close the beach. Nice.

[Spanky99]

Well with the high water levels (we're almost at record highs in the Great Lakes - close to 1986), there really isn't a beach right now. Notice the streetlights in the picture...storms have deposited sand over the road and they've just closed the road and left the sand on it so there's actually some sand (and room) for people to enjoy. The streetlights are about where the edge of the road is (below the sand).

 

Town has put up concrete traffic barriers to block wave uprush in front of The Dard (the main bar) as it's the low point. Before it was there, the waves/water would hit the front of the buildings during heavy storms/wind events.

 

Mother Nature's been tough on the old main end lately...

 

Whoa neat... I hate the no beach s***... crazy my friend.

[BlueRocky]

[BlueRocky]

[Slade]

 

I totally forgot about this.

[Boxcar]

 

I totally forgot about this.

 

Since McGuire going to jail was a path to PT for El Capitan, I did not. Still got a good chuckle out of it, though.

[wamco]

He was the only one who jumped for

Joy when the covid story broke

[wamco]

And when he jumped, his dick

Fell out as

His pants were undone

[LGBJ29]

And when he jumped, his dick

Fell out as

His pants were undone

 

todd?

[Laika]

And when he jumped, his dick

Fell out as

His pants were undone

 

Is this a Haiku?

[Laika]

And when he jumped his

dick fell out as his pants were

undone; Reese McGuire

[wamco]

Typed on a phone in a hurry

[THANOS]

Would someone mind posting the below Athletic article here?

 

"Bird's Eye View: Thoughts on the Blue Jays schedule release, Austin Martin, more"

[P2F]

Would someone mind posting the below Athletic article here?

 

"Bird's Eye View: Thoughts on the Blue Jays schedule release, Austin Martin, more"

 

Here you go:

 

Like a scene out of Veep or The Thick Of It, there was MLB on Monday, announcing that the league’s schedule would be announced in a branded one-hour special on the league’s own cable network while the restart they were announcing seemed to be falling apart in real-time all across the continent.“MLB Tonight: Schedule Release, presented by Camping World” revealed what we’ve long expected it would: the Blue Jays will begin their season against the Rays, in St. Petersburg, on July 24. They’ll play three games in total at the dreaded Trop, then travel to Washington, D.C., for two against the world champion Nationals, before returning home to host the Nats for two, and the Phillies for three.

 

That’s not an easy start for the Blue Jays, but nothing about this new schedule was going to be easy, given that they’ve drawn strong NL East squads, the team currently doesn’t know whether they will be based in Toronto or elsewhere, and, perhaps you’ve heard, we’re sort of in the middle of a raging pandemic.

As usual, my colleague John Lott got it exactly right:

 

You’ll note that, except for Sundays, all of the Jays home games have a 6:37 p.m. ET first pitch, a slight change from the usual 7:07 p.m. start-times. It’s presumably due to the fact that they don’t need to give fans any extra time to get to the ballpark. It’s a small move, but one that makes a good deal of sense, seeing as most people are still mostly staying inside anyway. And if it helps make the games a little more accessible for youngsters, that can’t hurt either.

You may also note that the team has an off-day on the August 3 civic holiday here in Canada, though somehow I think the fact that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. won’t be playing that day will be less scandalous than fans tried to make it when he sat last year on Victoria Day.

As for the Jays’ opposition, only the Mets and Pirates have a tougher schedule than they do, based on the records their opponents compiled in 2019, according to a graphic that flashed briefly during the MLB Network broadcast (which, quite maddeningly, otherwise skipped over the Jays entirely). The Jays catch one small break in that they won’t have to face the Yankees until September 7, though they will then have to play them 10 times over their final 19 games. They will close out the regular season against Baltimore, provided things get that far.

 

On with the show…

 

In brighter news, the Blue Jays have arrived in Toronto. With their intake testing in Florida apparently complete, members of the Jays boarded a Toronto-bound Air Canada charter flight on Sunday night, as evidenced by a picture shared by Vladimir Guerrero Jr. in an Instagram story. The club was spotted arriving at Pearson International Airport soon thereafter, before making its way to the Rogers Centre hotel. And in a video shared on Instagram Monday by Nate Pearson, they’ve commenced working out in preparation for the season.

According to Kaitlyn McGrath’s look at 10 questions facing the club as the season begins, there was still some uncertainty as of Saturday about whether the flight would be able to proceed as planned because as the Jays were still awaiting the results of their intake testing. But unlike the situation with the Oakland A’s, who as of Sunday night were still waiting for their tests to be shipped to the Utah lab MLB is using to process them, the Jays have been given the all-clear to proceed north and began formal workouts on Monday at the Rogers Centre.

The league’s ability to get COVID-19 tests processed efficiently is going to be critical to ensuring the season can be salvaged at this late date, and the early results aren’t exactly encouraging. The Athletic’s Britt Ghiroli reported over the weekend that in addition to the A’s, both the Red Sox and Padres organizations have faced delays with their results — an issue that will have to be sorted out if the league is going to be able to test players, coaches and trainers every other day, as mandated by the league’s operations manual covering health and safety protocols for 2020 (a document obtained and reported on by The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich two weeks ago).

In Kaitlyn’s piece on questions the Jays are now faced with, she quotes a hopeful-sounding Ross Atkins, who made the point on a conference call with reporters over the weekend that the players’ competitiveness and desire to be on the field and win is driving the seriousness with which they’re taking their response to the strict rules they’ll be working under. But it seems that even if the players do everything right, the league may yet find a way to screw this up.

It’s not hard to find detractors. Over the weekend Kaitlyn spoke to several medical experts about the Blue Jays’ plan to quarantine and train in Toronto. The group, she reported, “had mixed opinions about how robust the team’s plan was, from comprehensive to likely to fail.”

And this is all before the club has even received word from the federal government that they’ll be allowed to fly in and out of the city throughout the summer, and have clubs come in and out to visit them.

Dr. Gerald Evans, the chair of the division of infectious diseases at Queen’s University and a physician at Kingston General Hospital, was particularly blunt.

“I really admire the concept of the way they’re doing testing, but testing is not going to solve their problem. All it’s going to show them is that it’s a big problem. My best guess at this time is that as they rev up to this shortened season in Major League Baseball, I don’t expect it to last more than a few weeks.”

I guess we’re going to find out. But as fans of the sport, I think we have to be more hopeful than that, no matter what our reservations are, or how distressing it is to hear, for example, that Braves star Freddie Freeman is among four Atlanta players to have tested positive for COVID-19, that David Price is opting not to play this year, or that the incomparable Mike Trout doesn’t “feel comfortable” yet about returning to work.

At some point in the coming days, most of us will likely go through the sort of emotional roller coaster depicted in the meme below, but as the league presses on into the pandemic, such cheeriness could fade pretty quickly. Still, it feels good to think that we’ll soon be able to actually talk about baseball again. Even if it’s only for a few weeks.

 

Still no Austin Martin announcement?

 

Back on Friday afternoon it certainly seemed as though an announcement about the Blue Jays’ signing first-round draft pick Austin Martin was imminent. Sportsnet’s Hazel Mae tweeted that a deal was in place, pending a physical, according to an industry source, and MLB Network’s Jon Heyman repeated that a deal was close. As of Monday evening, however, no other details have emerged.

That’s no reason to doubt the veracity of the reports. In fact, in a piece looking at the top prospects among every team’s 60-man player pools, The Athletic’s Keith Law writes that he’d “be flabbergasted” if the Jays left Martin out of theirs, “especially since they need to figure out his ideal defensive home.”

Despite the confidence that an agreement will be reached, Jays fans somewhat understandably get antsy about this pick-signing business —mostly due to the fact that the club failed to come to terms with second-rounder James Paxton in 2009, first-rounder Tyler Beede in 2011, first-rounder Phil Bickford in 2013, and second-rounder Brady Singer in 2015. It’s important to remember, however, that the first two of those cases happened before the 2012 collective bargaining agreement, which implemented severe restrictions on bonus payouts and has forced teams to be much more deliberate about how they plan to allocate their draft money.

It’s also important to note that all four of those unsigned Blue Jays picks were high school pitchers.

Remember how Bo Bichette ended up with the Jays by using his commitment to play college ball at Arizona State to scare other teams off?

“I actually turned down about four offers earlier in the draft because they weren’t good fits,” he told the Tampa Bay Times back in 2016. He could do that because he had leverage — something Martin, a college junior, doesn’t have nearly as much of.

It’s not unheard of for college players not to sign, but it’s much rarer.

Right-hander Drew Rasmussen was picked at No. 31 by the Rays in 2017, returned to Oregon State, then had a second Tommy John surgery that September. “A physical indicated the Tommy John surgery performed on his elbow (that) March had come undone, for lack of a better term,” wrote Tom Haudricourt of Baseball America in April 2019.

Another right-hander, Kyle Funkhouser of the University of Louisville, unexpectedly slid to the Dodgers at pick No. 35 in 2015, but he and advisor Scott Boras (who is also Martin’s advisor) tried to cash in like he was taken much higher. “On draft day, we got the 35th pick and he was the top guy on our board and we took him. That’s how the draft is supposed to work,” then-GM Farhan Zaidi told ESPN.com. “When it came time to negotiating, they felt like he was a top-10 pick and our position was, if he’s a top-10 pick, he would have been picked there.”

In that same ESPN piece, Boras is quoted as explaining that “the baseball draft is a value draft. It is not a draft where the order of the players taken means anything.”

While that statement perhaps doesn’t bode well for the Jays and Martin, the fact that his draft night tumble only took him to fifth overall makes it a very different situation. The Jays have the ability to give him an over-slot deal that gets him closer to what he would have been expecting. Plus, as Hazel has already told us, a deal in principle seems to already be in place.

The only other college first-rounders since 2009 to not sign were Barret Loux (who had an arm problem discovered when the Diamondbacks gave him a medical after taking him sixth overall in 2010) and Mark Appel, who slid to pick No. 8 in 2012 because of signability concerns, then went back to Stanford and ended up the top pick in the 2013 draft. Since we haven’t heard anything like those sorts of concerns with Martin, I think you’re safe to expect a deal will happen.

Quickly…

 

• Today in completely unsurprising news, the Rogers Centre ranked 27th out of 29 MLB stadiums (the new Rangers ballpark could not be evaluated) in The Athletic’s first-ever MLB stadium survey. The building’s location was the only real positive thing most fans could say about the place, and it’s pretty hard to argue with the assessment. Finishing above Oakland’s Coliseum and the Trop is not much of an accomplishment. (More surprising, to me at least, were some of the buildings that finished only barely ahead of the Rogers Centre, including Arizona’s Chase Field, eight-year-old Marlins Park, Angel Stadium and Nationals Park.)
  
• Another ballpark-related piece came from The Athletic’s Eno Sarris this weekend, as he looked at the best local brewery prospects for every team in the majors to potentially partner with. This is something the Blue Jays badly need to make happen — the Rogers Centre got low marks for its amenities in the just-mentioned stadium survey, and placed last in Eno’s own rankings of MLB ballparks. And I think he’s pointing them in the right direction by singling out Left Field, Bellwoods Brewery and Collective Arts in Hamilton (which is farther away than the mere half-hour drive from the dome that’s quoted in the piece, but they do make a very tasty sour).
  
• Shi Davidi of Sportsnet has a look at how the Jays are going to have to get creative during this strange preseason workout period, and in another, reports (among other things) that Reese McGuire’s legal troubles in Florida have ended with a $450 fine and the reduction of his “exposure of sexual organs” charge down to “disorderly conduct.” Now let’s never speak of this again!
  
• A very interesting episode of the Artificial Turf Wars podcast this week, as they’re joined by Dr. Mike Sonne, who is now the Chief Scientist at ProPlay AI, a company with a new product, PitchAI, that “can capture and break down pitching mechanics with the use of a cell phone,” and counts Nate Pearson among its users.
  
• How do you not love stuff like the following tweet and the responses to it?
  

The other big prospect issue…

 

It sure is going to be nice to get back to writing about actual baseball, rather than the steady dose of pandemic- and labour-related topics we’ve been forced to deal with this summer. But my guess is that we’re going to have to wait about a week into the season before we can put one issue to rest for at least another year: good old service time manipulation.

 

There isn’t a whole lot for me to say here without completely sounding like a broken record, but it still sucks that the Blue Jays might pass up even one Nate Pearson start because of anything to do with his service time. And while I understand that there’s a large segment of fans who are unbothered by this because it’s not explicitly against the rules, I submit to you that when teams are so wary of a potential grievance from the union that they take great care to never mention the possibility of service time being a factor in decisions like these, then maybe it sort of is against the rules.

It is, at best, a loophole. And one that’s being used to take a potentially very lucrative free-agent year away from a player and give it to a team worth a billion dollars or more. Seems worth calling out, to me, even if we all probably feel we’ve heard enough about it by now.

There is also, as Arden Zwelling points out in a piece at Sportsnet, not much of a case that Pearson’s development is bettered by having him “working out at Sahlen Field against depth players and prospects well younger than he is.”

Despite that, if the Jays are thinking about having Pearson break camp with the team, they’re not tipping their hand about it.

“Throwing someone into the major leagues on opening day just because it seems like they’re the hottest, they’re looking the best, we always want to factor in the body of work, what it means to be there on an opening day, what it means to be breaking with a team or for the first time in your debut,” GM Ross Atkins explained to reporters on Saturday, as quoted by Shi Davidi in another piece at Sportsnet. “The transitions are a huge part of success, and our view on ensuring that a player gets into the highest level at the optimal form and in the circumstances possible, while balancing your desire to win every single day, is what we’ll be thinking about.”

[THANOS]

Here you go:

 

Thanks P2F!

[BlueRocky]

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/26720033/the-new-greg-maddux-healthy-hyun-jin-ryu-comes-close

 

LOS ANGELES -- It took Hyun-Jin Ryu 93 pitches to complete a shutout against the Atlanta Braves on Tuesday night.

 

On 58 of those pitches, his catcher, Russell Martin, barely moved his glove.

 

Martin is a veteran of 14 major league seasons. His career has taken him through two stints in Los Angeles, one with the New York Yankees, one in Pittsburgh and another in Toronto, a winding path that has consisted of more than 13,000 innings behind the plate. He was asked if he had ever encountered the type of precision being executed by Ryu, the Los Angeles Dodgers left-hander who consistently gets overlooked.

 

Martin nodded.

 

"Greg Maddux," he said, name-dropping the Hall of Fame right-hander he teamed with briefly on Dodgers teams in 2006 and 2008.

 

So, that good?

 

"Yeah," Martin said. "I mean, Maddux might have him by like a smidgen."

 

It makes sense.

 

Maddux excelled through an era dominated by offense largely because he exhibited pinpoint control of all his pitches. Ryu is doing the same, while on pace to set a record for strikeout-to-walk ratio. He doesn't possess a pitch as devastating as Maddux's two-seam fastball, but he commands five of them like few others can. And these days, he isn't missing spots, as evidenced by the two walks he has issued through seven starts this season.

 

"I definitely try to stay on top of it," Ryu said through an interpreter, "because ever since I started playing baseball, that was the one point of emphasis growing up -- to not give up walks."

 

Ryu carries a preposterous 22.50 strikeout-to-walk ratio heading into his Sunday start against the Washington Nationals, a mark that would set a record -- beating the 20.50 rate attained by a man named Candy Cummings back in 1875 -- if it were to somehow hold. It's early enough for the mere mention of such a possibility to sound ridiculous.

 

This, however, is not: When healthy, few, if any, have been better than Ryu over these past two years.

 

His ERA since the start of 2018, 1.99, is the lowest among those who have thrown at least 120 innings in that time. His strikeout-to-walk ratio in that time, 7.88, is the highest by a wide margin. His WHIP, 0.94, ranks third, trailing only Chris Sale and Justin Verlander.

 

"Very underrated," said Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner, who has often made the point that Ryu might have won the National League Cy Young Award last season had he not spent 15 weeks recovering from a severe groin injury. "I think he likes it that way."

 

The 32-year-old Ryu speaks a different language and carries himself nonchalantly. He resides in a rotation with one of baseball's most accomplished pitchers (Clayton Kershaw) and one of its most exhilarating (Walker Buehler). And he doesn't possess the wipeout, showstopping stuff to place him in the pantheon of baseball's greatest starters.

 

Ryu's success is a product of expertly sequencing five pitches -- fastball, cutter, sinker, curveball, changeup -- and throwing them to all four quadrants of the strike zone, a quality Dodgers catcher Austin Barnes considers "pretty unique." Ryu creates deception with his delivery, pinpoint control and near unpredictability in his pitch selection.

 

Dodgers hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc spent the 2018 season as a strategist with the division-rival Arizona Diamondbacks and found it almost impossible to craft game plans for Ryu.

 

"He doesn't have any consistent tendencies," Van Scoyoc said. "He knows how to pitch, he knows how to change speeds, and I think he reads the hitters very well. Even if he has a plan, he'll deviate from it. There's just not anything consistent about how he attacks each guy."

 

Ryu's fastball tops out at 93 mph, but, as Braves utility player Charlie Culberson pointed out, it appears much faster to an opposing hitter. Culberson teamed with Ryu in L.A. from 2016 to 2017 and made a pinch-hit appearance against him in the sixth inning Tuesday. Right-handed hitters like Culberson always have an advantage against lefties like Ryu because they have more time -- even if only a millisecond -- to read pitches.

 

Ryu began the at-bat by flipping a curveball Culberson took for a strike. The next offering was an inside fastball at 90 mph, a very hittable pitch in a time when so many pitchers approach 100 mph. Culberson didn't come close to getting his hands around in time. He was jammed badly and grounded into an inning-ending double play.

 

"A lot of times people might not know how good he is," Culberson said. "Yeah, he doesn't throw 95 miles an hour. But you don't have to. If you can spot up, can mix all your pitches and throw them all for strikes, you're going to be tough to hit."

 

Injuries have kept Ryu in the shadows. He pitched well in his first two seasons after coming over from South Korea, winning 28 games, compiling 344 innings and posting a 3.17 ERA from 2013 to 2014. But he spent the entire 2015 season recovering from shoulder surgery, returned in July 2016, made one start, got hurt again and underwent an arthroscopic procedure to remove damaged tissue from his elbow.

 

Ryu stayed healthy for most of the 2017 season. He was good -- 3.77 ERA, 1.37 WHIP, 2.58 strikeout-to-walk ratio -- but not great. What followed was his first healthy offseason in years, which led to a spectacular showing in 2018. This, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said, is simply the continuation.

 

The only goal now, Ryu said, is "staying healthy."

 

"I want to be a pitcher that my teammates can depend on every fifth day."

 

Ryu's Tuesday start was fittingly deemed a "Maddux," a term for nine scoreless innings with less than 100 pitches. (It was also, fittingly, forgotten after Mike Fiers completed a no-hitter minutes later.) Ryu retired the first 15 batters in order, required no more than 11 pitches to get through all but one inning and fired first-pitch strikes to 24 of the 30 batters he faced.

 

Roberts called it "complete domination."

 

But there was one pitch Ryu wanted back. It came at the start of the second inning, on a 1-2 count to Ronald Acuna Jr., when Martin asked for a fastball up and away. Ryu left it out over the plate and was fortunate Acuna flied out to the center-field warning track.

 

"Bad pitch," Ryu told Turner as he received the ball again, inducing a smile.

 

When Acuna came up again, to lead off the fifth, Martin called for a full-count cutter low and inside, a difficult pitch for a left-handed pitcher to execute against a right-handed hitter. Ryu spotted it perfectly to strike out the reigning NL Rookie of the Year. For the game's final pitch, against the left-handed-hitting Freddie Freeman, Martin asked for an 0-2 fastball above the strike zone, and Freeman awkwardly swung through it as if it were thrown 200 mph.

 

It dropped Ryu's 2019 ERA to 2.03, made him one of only seven pitchers to throw a shutout this season, and gave him 24 consecutive innings without a walk.

 

"He has a great feel for just throwing to the glove and putting the ball where he wants it," Barnes said. "And he does it with five different pitches."

[saskjayfan]

Vlad looks like his summer camp weight might be heavier than his spring training camp weight. Rowdy looks like he might have lost some man boobs though.

[Ryu In My House]

todd?

 

Yeah, same typing style. Interesting.

[jerb]

[Orgfiller]

 

Man we cannot get a break with our start or end dates for either of these two years. Start out with Yankees @ Yankee Stadium and then finish out the last month with a shitload of Yankees, TB and Minnesota games half of which are on the road.

[BlueRocky]

Man we cannot get a break with our start or end dates for either of these two years. Start out with Yankees @ Yankee Stadium and then finish out the last month with a shitload of Yankees, TB and Minnesota games half of which are on the road.

We just talked about this on the freshly recorded podcast. I think it’ll be out sometime later this week.

[Captain Adama]

[glory]

[Orgfiller]

 

Air the game you bastards.

[Bobthe4th]

[Bobthe4th]