General Blue Jays Discussion Thread (2023)

[Terminator]

0 chance KK comes back

 

Wow just as I predicted I'm getting attacked.

 

It's not 0. There are limited outfielders on the market and we need one.

 

Everyone is bent out of shape about the offense but I think you take the production however you can get it. Signing some turd who is considered more of an offensive player like Tommy Pham isn't going to do us any better than it would just bringing back KK.

 

It's probably like a 10 percent chance which I think is the highest chance of any of our free agents returning.

[Terminator]

Joey Votto has one last hurrah in him I can feel it

[Grant77]

I see Votto putting up numbers like this year's Brandon Belt. I'm open to it if the roster situation works out that way, but wouldn't make it a priority by any means.

[Ehjays]

[Ehjays]

[Ehjays]

Even for someone with the talent, it is crazy how millions of dollars isn't enough motivation to stay in shape and put in the extra work.

 

agreed!

[Ehjays]

https://www.sportsnet.ca/mlb/article/blue-jays-descend-into-blame-game-as-atkins-misses-chance-to-protect-schneider/

 

The offence, as Atkins mentioned, is in need of fixing and work is underway in digging into this year’s shortcomings.

 

Atkins spoke of his pending free agents as if they were already gone, saying that “we’ll miss Matt Chapman and Brandon Belt and Kevin Kiermaier and we'll see opportunities to work to fill those holes from within and externally,” only to describe them as “alternatives” when later asked to clarify.

 

Their imminent departures, as well as those of Hyun Jin Ryu (he “could also be an alternative for us”) and Whit Merrifield open up a significant chunk of payroll, although internal salary growth will eat up some of that.

 

Nonetheless, freed-up money will give the Blue Jays a chance to shop where they want in a thin free-agent class in which Chapman and two players they traded last winter, Teoscar Hernandez and Lourdes Gurriel Jr., are among the best hitters available.

The biggest prize, of course, is Shohei Ohtani and some industry chatter in recent weeks suggested he’d be more open to an East Coast club this time around, had taken notice of the Blue Jays’ player-development resources and that the idea of adding a third country, Canada, to his prime fanbase carried some appeal for him.

 

Whether that’s more than just the usual grist for the mill is a fair question, but it also underlines the current stakes for the Blue Jays.

[Ehjays]

https://www.sportsnet.ca/mlb/article/blue-jays-descend-into-blame-game-as-atkins-misses-chance-to-protect-schneider/

 

The offence, as Atkins mentioned, is in need of fixing and work is underway in digging into this year’s shortcomings.

 

Atkins spoke of his pending free agents as if they were already gone, saying that “we’ll miss Matt Chapman and Brandon Belt and Kevin Kiermaier and we'll see opportunities to work to fill those holes from within and externally,” only to describe them as “alternatives” when later asked to clarify.

 

Their imminent departures, as well as those of Hyun Jin Ryu (he “could also be an alternative for us”) and Whit Merrifield open up a significant chunk of payroll, although internal salary growth will eat up some of that.

 

Nonetheless, freed-up money will give the Blue Jays a chance to shop where they want in a thin free-agent class in which Chapman and two players they traded last winter, Teoscar Hernandez and Lourdes Gurriel Jr., are among the best hitters available.

The biggest prize, of course, is Shohei Ohtani and some industry chatter in recent weeks suggested he’d be more open to an East Coast club this time around, had taken notice of the Blue Jays’ player-development resources and that the idea of adding a third country, Canada, to his prime fanbase carried some appeal for him.

 

Whether that’s more than just the usual grist for the mill is a fair question, but it also underlines the current stakes for the Blue Jays.

 

I didnt realize Ohtani was impressed with our PD resources, Thats cool!!

[John_Havok]

I didnt realize Ohtani was impressed with our PD resources, Thats cool!!

 

Who knows for sure? Could just be orchestrated chatter from his camp designed to create a sense of more competition than there really is.

 

That said, there are 0 teams in MLB that wouldn’t benefit from an Ohtani signing. Except the Angels.

[hanton]

Even for someone with the talent, it is crazy how millions of dollars isn't enough motivation to stay in shape and put in the extra work.

 

Yes and no....don't forget he was essentially on top of the baseball world for a couple of seasons so he had no reason to change, similar to Kirk - all star, silver slugger

 

The early success got to Manoah and I guess he thought that would last forever.

[hanton]

I didnt realize Ohtani was impressed with our PD resources, Thats cool!!

 

crazy if true, get him signed

[Spanky99]

I didnt realize Ohtani was impressed with our PD resources, Thats cool!!

 

Good to know, that was a good article by Shi, thanks.

 

Shi Davidi

@shidavidi

October 7, 2023, 8:52 PM

240

TORONTO – Well, that was gross.

 

Litigate and parse Ross Atkins’ words Saturday any way you’d like – this is article of faith stuff deserving of scrutiny – but far more important than anything he said in wrapping up the Toronto Blue Jays’ season and gutting wild-card sweep to the Minnesota Twins is what he didn’t say.

 

 

Two things in particular would have gone a long way in healing his fractured and factionalized club, statements along the lines of, “whatever decisions John Schneider makes, he has my unequivocal support,” and “we didn’t lose because Jose Berrios was pulled from the game, win or lose, we do it as a collective group and all bear equal responsibility.”

 

 

Even better, after confirming that Schneider will return as manager next year, he would have added something like, “I don’t want John to feel any pressure about his decisions and if he did, I’ll make sure that he doesn’t feel any shred of doubt about his autonomy going forward.”

 

Instead, the eighth-year GM engaged in what felt like 47 minutes of butt-covering – 27 minutes before broadcast cameras, then 20 more in a separate session with writers. Rather than taking an opportunity to show leadership by protecting his manager and coaching staff, while unifying his players after a hard season and gutting loss, Atkins went all Shaggy singing, “It Wasn’t Me.”

 

“I have 100 per cent confidence that it's not front-office pressure,” Atkins replied when asked if he believed his manager would have replaced Berrios with Yusei Kikuchi if he didn’t feel any sense of pressure or expectation from above. “I would love for you to talk to John Schneider about that (the Blue Jays have no plans to make him available to media).

 

“What I can share with you that I feel, and I'm trying not to speak for him but I've obviously spoken to him a lot in the last 24 hours, but I feel based on some of the things that he said, the fact that the plan was somewhat in place, Yusei (Kikuchi) had been warming, there was this opportunity to get the right-handed hitters into the game early, which would set us up great late, trumped what he was feeling on the field,” Atkins continued.

 

“And he was feeling it, too, how well Jose was pitching. There was not an influence from the (front) office that factored into that, other than maybe that it was an organizational strategy that had been communicated to players. When I say organizational, I'm including players, many players, over the course of the days prior to that strategy. In our view, the strategy ended up getting us to a point where we deployed the right-handed relievers in an effective way against a more right-handed hitting lineup that led us to an outcome where we allowed two runs in a playoff game. We see that from a run-prevention standpoint as a solid outcome and a good chance to win a game.”

 

Who came up with strategy? It wasn’t me.

 

Who presented it to the coaching staff? It wasn’t me.

 

Who was in the pre-game planning meeting? It wasn’t me.

 

Who’s responsible for locking in reliever scenarios? It wasn’t me.

 

Atkins did detail the thought-process behind the strategy – which has merit if Berrios was grinding, not shoving – and described the team’s pre-game planning meetings, which he said are attended by Schneider, the coaching staff and Theron Simpson, the club’s game-planning co-ordinator. Omitted is that there’s always someone from the front office there, too.

 

And while he purposely recuses himself from those meetings so no one feels influenced by his presence, any front office member present could, by proxy, have that effect.

 

Atkins said he was “surprised” when Berrios was pulled for Kikuchi, but refused to answer multiple times when asked if he thought the move was a mistake. “I'm not going to go into revisionist and second-guessing,” he said. “The outcome of us getting to the end of the game and only allowing two runs is a good one and put us in a position to win. We didn't score runs.”

 

That’s not wrong. But among the many, many words said, not one was accountability, which would be expected from a leader at a time of crisis, and none expressed full support for the manager and his decision-making regardless of outcome, which would help Schneider with players next season.

 

In that way, that micro details Atkins entered into the public discourse were both distracting from and reflective of the wider issues the Blue Jays must resolve.

 

Asked about some of the post-game comments from players, he said, “we’ve all got to get better. I have to get better. We have to make this organization better,” but stressing that the decision was Schneider’s and not his won’t help the club’s cohesion.

 

'I was surprised': Blue Jays' Atkins details the decision to pull Berrios in Game 2.

 

 

As much as Atkins was speaking to the public, he was also speaking to everyone in the organization Saturday. You can be certain that voices that matter weren’t exactly sitting there thinking, he’ll have my back if things go bad, or I’d run through a wall for him.

 

To be fair, Atkins was facing the nearly impossible task of making sense of a bad decision at the end of a beneath-expectations season and a missed-opportunity wild-card series in which the Blue Jays got bounced by an inferior opponent.

 

Really, given all the bile everywhere, there’s probably nothing he could have said to make things OK.

 

But there might have been a win in circling the wagons, in being as open as he at points was while avoiding the litigation, in saying repeatedly something like, “we are one team, we weren’t good enough this year and we’ll collectively make sure we’ll be better next year.”

 

Because if he thinks that he told his organization what it needed to hear, well this was akin to watching Jerry Dipoto’s season-ending news conference and telling his Seattle Mariners counterpart, Mr. Doing-Fans-a-Favour himself, to hold his beer.

 

Where the Blue Jays go from here is unclear, but it’s imperative they get things right, fast.

 

The offence, as Atkins mentioned, is in need of fixing and work is underway in digging into this year’s shortcomings.

 

Atkins spoke of his pending free agents as if they were already gone, saying that “we’ll miss Matt Chapman and Brandon Belt and Kevin Kiermaier and we'll see opportunities to work to fill those holes from within and externally,” only to describe them as “alternatives” when later asked to clarify.

 

Their imminent departures, as well as those of Hyun Jin Ryu (he “could also be an alternative for us”) and Whit Merrifield open up a significant chunk of payroll, although internal salary growth will eat up some of that.

 

Nonetheless, freed-up money will give the Blue Jays a chance to shop where they want in a thin free-agent class in which Chapman and two players they traded last winter, Teoscar Hernandez and Lourdes Gurriel Jr., are among the best hitters available.

 

The biggest prize, of course, is Shohei Ohtani and some industry chatter in recent weeks suggested he’d be more open to an East Coast club this time around, had taken notice of the Blue Jays’ player-development resources and that the idea of adding a third country, Canada, to his prime fanbase carried some appeal for him.

 

Whether that’s more than just the usual grist for the mill is a fair question, but it also underlines the current stakes for the Blue Jays.

 

They’ve done really strong work in establishing themselves as a player-driven franchise. Prior to Game 2, when asked about his pending free agency and his interest level in returning, Chapman said “the thing that I enjoy the most besides my teammates and being here in the city is just how well the organization takes care of their players.”

 

“They really care about their players, and there's nothing that they wouldn't do for you,” he added. “So I have a lot of respect for everybody in this organization and definitely open to coming back.”

 

He’s not alone.

 

After hitting the 200-inning mark for the first time in his career, Chris Bassitt, signed as a free agent last winter, noted that, “you have to have so many people to trust you” to reach the plateau. “To have this organization believe in me like they do, it means the world to me.”

 

Those are powerful endorsements and offer market credibility that’s being eroded at the moment by the Game 2 mess and the fallout since.

 

The Blue Jays have five days to figure something out as president and CEO Mark Shapiro is scheduled to meet with media Thursday, his first time taking questions publicly since the first phase of the Rogers Centre’s renovations were unveiled before the season.

 

What he says and does will carry weight for a baseball side that underperformed and is ununified, a public that’s being canvassed for buyers of the new premium experiences being created during this winter’s renovation, and free agents that will want to know what, exactly, they’re signing up for.

 

And it better be good after a Saturday that really wasn’t. Atkins may have had good intentions in trying to be transparent, in trying to illuminate how the franchise’s most controversial pitching change went down. But he could have also better defended the manager he hired just a year ago from wearing this alone, while telling his people, in every department from the clubhouse to the analytics group, that fingers don’t get pointed, that everything the Blue Jays do is done as a team.

 

That he didn’t is a real problem, one far deeper than a negative news cycle, one that the passing of time won’t make go away.

 

Edited October 8, 2023 by Spanky99

[hanton]

[Brownie19]

Aaron Rose (@aaronbenrose) • Instagram reel

WWW.INSTAGRAM.COM

---

7,347 likes, 290 comments - aaronbenrose on August 23, 2023: "Here is #MLB’s BEST defensive first baseman compared to the WORST 👀 #ChristianWalker is low pro a stud at first whereas #VladimirGuerreroJr just hasn’t been good enough this year 😩 #Baseball #BlueJays".

 

Not surprised

[Spanky99]

Aaron Rose (@aaronbenrose) • Instagram reel

WWW.INSTAGRAM.COM

---

7,347 likes, 290 comments - aaronbenrose on August 23, 2023: "Here is #MLB’s BEST defensive first baseman compared to the WORST 👀 #ChristianWalker is low pro a stud at first whereas #VladimirGuerreroJr just hasn’t been good enough this year 😩 #Baseball #BlueJays".

 

Not surprised

 

He's won the American League 1st Base Gold Glove last season bro. Not the worst man...come on!!!

[Laika]

Vlad is performing at his 1st percentile possibilities in basically every way

 

Mans could have been an 8 win 3B who slowly became a 1B then DH over an 18 year career

 

Instead he's a 1 WAR DH already

[Laika]

Yes and no....don't forget he was essentially on top of the baseball world for a couple of seasons so he had no reason to change, similar to Kirk - all star, silver slugger

 

The early success got to Manoah and I guess he thought that would last forever.

 

 

Everybody could be fit healthy and happy with a great six figure job if they buckled down and worked hard

 

Most people are fine being fat and tired and making $50k as an HVAC tech or whatever

 

These "problems" are basically universal

[hanton]

Everybody could be fit healthy and happy with a great six figure job if they buckled down and worked hard

 

Most people are fine being fat and tired and making $50k as an HVAC tech or whatever

 

These "problems" are basically universal

 

Except the average pro baseball career is around 6 years (I forget the exact number but it's surprisingly small) - so a very short window for them to make life savings

[Carlos Danger]

I saw this somewhere else but LOL.

 

Atkins- Manoah is very motivated

 

Poster- Wish he was motivated to report to Buffalo.

 

True!

[BatFlip]

Except the average pro baseball career is around 6 years (I forget the exact number but it's surprisingly small) - so a very short window for them to make life savings

 

And pro athletes are typically the individuals who got where they are due to a rare combination of talent and extreme dedication to improving at their sport.

 

The most common outcome for prospective major leaguers is to see a ball player work hard all their life to get drafted/signed, work their way through multiple levels of the game and then make the pros to then find out that they don't 'have it' in terms of raw tools, can't make the adjustments necessary, or struggle at the mental aspect of the game.

 

Definitely not as typical to see someone make it all the way to pros, dominate, and then let themselves become sloppy f***s at 23/24 and fizzle out. Clearly it happens though. Just makes me cry inside when we have it happen to no less than three players... at the same time... at almost the same age.

[Jimcanuck]

Even if Manoah rebounds next season, Jays should look to trade him. He's always going to battle his weight.

[Krylian]

Manoah is a massive mystery (pun intended).

 

I honestly have no idea what his future holds. I can see him buckling down and putting in yoemans work this offseason and come into 2024 looking to prove that 2023 was an aberation. On the other hand, I can also see him being a suck, not getting in shape, getting destroyed, and when he doesn't make the club, not reporting to the minors again and demanding a trade.

 

We'll know in 6 months what kind of pro athlete he is.

[BatFlip]

Manoah is a massive mystery (pun intended).

 

I honestly have no idea what his future holds. I can see him buckling down and putting in yoemans work this offseason and come into 2024 looking to prove that 2023 was an aberation. On the other hand, I can also see him being a suck, not getting in shape, getting destroyed, and when he doesn't make the club, not reporting to the minors again and demanding a trade.

 

We'll know in 6 months what kind of pro athlete he is.

 

Yup, I wouldn't be surprised by any of those outcomes.

[Laika]

Manoah is a massive mystery (pun intended).

 

I honestly have no idea what his future holds. I can see him buckling down and putting in yoemans work this offseason and come into 2024 looking to prove that 2023 was an aberation. On the other hand, I can also see him being a suck, not getting in shape, getting destroyed, and when he doesn't make the club, not reporting to the minors again and demanding a trade.

 

We'll know in 6 months what kind of pro athlete he is.

 

Yeah

 

He probably thought his size was an asset before 2023. Like the traditional fat pitcher.

 

Of course we've also seen players work hard and get in shape then lose it over future seasons. Like Vlad!

[hanton]

And pro athletes are typically the individuals who got where they are due to a rare combination of talent and extreme dedication to improving at their sport.

 

The most common outcome for prospective major leaguers is to see a ball player work hard all their life to get drafted/signed, work their way through multiple levels of the game and then make the pros to then find out that they don't 'have it' in terms of raw tools, can't make the adjustments necessary, or struggle at the mental aspect of the game.

 

Definitely not as typical to see someone make it all the way to pros, dominate, and then let themselves become sloppy f***s at 23/24 and fizzle out. Clearly it happens though. Just makes me cry inside when we have it happen to no less than three players... at the same time... at almost the same age.

 

That's correct. The window for Manoah to get himself in shape is right now, this off season.

 

Corey Seager was always on the chunky side although it didn't really effect him in his first few seasons with the Dodgers until he got hurt - then during his recovery he decided to also start eating well and improved his nutrition. Look at him now

 

I wonder what they do in that high performance department.

[Laika]

I don't remember Seager being fluffy

 

Bo Bichette was kinda fat as a teenager haha

[hanton]

I don't remember Seager being fluffy

 

Bo Bichette was kinda fat as a teenager haha

 

he lost about 25 lbs, I remember the season (I think it was 2019) players would joke they couldn't recognize him. It really showed on his face - looked like a different person

[Laika]

He was never fat though

 

I think he just gained weight while recovering from surgery and had to change his diet to cut back down

[L54]

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/sports/no-dairy-diet-dodgers/162333/?amp=1

 

I remember this now, a bunch of Dodgers went dairy free citing better recovery and reduced inflammation as the reason why

[Dick_Pole]

I guess Victor Yu found his way to this board.