Late Valentine’s Day Heartbreak for Blue Jays Fans: What Are We Without Vlad?

I'm sorry Megan, but this is a bunch of nonsense.  It looks like it's meant for Facebook to feed the clickbait casuals.

Why give a blank cheque to Soto, but not Vlad?  C'mon - that's obvious.

2 minutes ago, Brownie19 said:

I'm sorry Megan, but this is a bunch of nonsense.  It looks like it's meant for Facebook to feed the clickbait casuals.

Why give a blank cheque to Soto, but not Vlad?  C'mon - that's obvious.

This mirrored my thoughts on this article, no bueno amigo. 

Don't mind seeing Vladdy sign elsewhere but seeing him in a Red Sox uniform would really sting. 

This is a bit dramatic. Vlad isn’t gone yet lol.

5 hours ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

Remember that we don't take a single approach to coverage. While I personally lean hard toward analytics, we also post pieces that are more opinion and less stats.

And Megan's pieces do really well with readers who aren't a bunch of basement-dwelling nerds like us.

There's plenty of space for everybody and their own flavor of fandom.

Maaaaan you don’t need to be a basement dwelling SABR nerd to understand Vlad isn’t worth 500 million.

I appreciate these kinds of articles but this one is super dramatic. Its like we fed the Jays fecebook page comments into chat gpt and this is what came out.

4 hours ago, John_Havok said:

Sure, just move the articles out of the forum section. They already appear on the front landing page and have their own subheading. They don't need to be in the forum section too. 

 

Yeah - I'd support this.  I know he's trying to grow the site, but there's A LOT of articles.

4 hours ago, BTS said:

There are currently 243 replies to Tuesday's Vlad article, when there might not have even been 10 if it wasn't added to the forum. 

I'm not sure that's true.  If that article didn't exist, we would have had the same conversation in one of the other Vlad related threads (Baerga - Vladdy Signing an Extension, Wait Will Soon Be Over, etc.).  

Now if moving our conversations to the 'articles' helps the board, then OK - I can get on board with that.  But to date, there have been like 70 articles posted and like 48 of them have less than 5 replies.

Personally (and I mean this with no disrespect to the writers), most of them seem written towards casuals.  I assume that's by design and likely a requirement if you're going to be pumping out several articles a day (across many different platforms, for many different teams).  That said, a few have caught my attention and at times, they have created new conversation.

I had no idea how many articles would be published.  It's WAYYY more than I thought, but that's probably just my ignorance.  If this is what's best for the website, than carry on.

I think we may just have to accept that "growing the board" means having way more people that agree with this type of article compared to the old board. Which in turn might end up with the old users deciding to create their own board again lol.

On 2/19/2025 at 2:49 PM, Brock Beauchamp said:

Remember that we don't take a single approach to coverage. While I personally lean hard toward analytics, we also post pieces that are more opinion and less stats.

And Megan's pieces do really well with readers who aren't a bunch of basement-dwelling nerds like us.

There's plenty of space for everybody and their own flavor of fandom.

That's fair, I've liked Megan's articles in the past, but I should be able to opine this article is terrible, I can break it down, but the synopsis of "Toronto, you had one job: don’t break our hearts. And yet, here we are." Is ludicrous, period. 

Lets just drop 13/585M, just cause of our emotions. Please... the fWAR he's accrued at 1B with bad base running decisions and defense do not warrant his asking price. Toronto knew he wanted 10/400 in November and was waiting on both Alonso's contract and Soto's, if his number jumped that high, you pass and match his best offer in FA at worst. You have a ball team as seen fit to run. It's that simple.

1 hour ago, Spanky99 said:

That's fair, I've liked Megan's articles in the past, but I should be able to opine this article is terrible, I can break it down, but the synopsis of "Toronto, you had one job: don’t break our hearts. And yet, here we are." Is ludicrous, period. 

Lets just drop 13/585M, just cause of our emotions. Please... the fWAR he's accrued at 1B with bad base running decisions and defense do not warrant his asking price. Toronto knew he wanted 10/400 in November and was waiting on both Alonso's contract and Soto's, if his number jumped that high, you pass and match his best offer in FA at worst. You have a ball team as seen fit to run. It's that simple.

See Brock, you'll see the unhinged behaviour by, iloverossatkins
vladdywagon, ie deanmike is cray, cray...

1 hour ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

That's entirely fair, obviously criticism is welcome. Personally, while I may not have put it quite as hyperbolically as Megan, I agree that not getting a deal done with Vlad is a massive fail by the front office. Whether that deal happened two days or two years ago, I don't really care. At the end of the day, the job was not done and someone has to be the fall guy for it.

And I'm fully aware and accept Vlad's flaws. I don't think he's going to be a player who ages gracefully. Still I believe he should retire in a Jays jersey, wearing only a Jays jersey for his career.

Emotional thinking. Im glad the front office has more restraint.

I can't be the only one that thinks Vlad, after signing a mega deal, loses all interest in physical fitness and becomes a bloated 350 lb blob in a relatively short period of time.

4 minutes ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

It's a spectator sport that involves fans and increasing competition for their eyeballs and their willingness to invest their personal emotion into the product. Ignoring the human element is a bad long-term plan and perhaps one of the biggest flaws of the early sabr movement.

Though it's entirely reasonable to not believe Vladdy is worth an overpay. I happen to disagree.

If the reporting is to be believed, the Jays did make an overpay offer.  Vlad simply priced himself more than is reasonable.

6 minutes ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

And if that's true, the Jays made the right decision. As I said several days ago, it's going to be in someone's best interest the leak the number. Whose interest that is depends on the numbers exchanged but I think we'll find out at some point.

Then why do you hold the opinion that not getting a deal done with Vlad is "a massive fail by the front office" ?

It takes 2 to tango and its fairly obvious that Vlad is the main reason a deal didn't get done.

Even the fact that we are talking about it in past tense is all because Vlad made some arbitrary deadline for an extension.

They'll sign him in the winter at market value, if his word is true on staying a Jay for life, simple.

23 hours ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

That's entirely fair, obviously criticism is welcome. Personally, while I may not have put it quite as hyperbolically as Megan, I agree that not getting a deal done with Vlad is a massive fail by the front office. Whether that deal happened two days or two years ago, I don't really care. At the end of the day, the job was not done and someone has to be the fall guy for it.

And I'm fully aware and accept Vlad's flaws. I don't think he's going to be a player who ages gracefully. Still I believe he should retire in a Jays jersey, wearing only a Jays jersey for his career.

If anytime it was to be done, I'd think it was after the '21 season but Vlad said they offered 175M not sure of term, but they should've certainly got it done then. After '22 and '23 I don't fault either side for matching a number, and now I believe he's outpriced himself, obviously. I legit think he signs next winter with the Jays at market value, chin-up Brock, lol.

On 2/19/2025 at 7:17 AM, Eat My Shatkins said:

I disagree with the ongoing and growing narrative that the Jays have messed the Vlad/Bo situation up.

Truth is these are good players but they are not superstars and they have been very inconsistent throughout their careers, and giving them the superstar level contracts they want in order to keep them here could end up being a far worse move long term than just letting them play out the string and see where the chips fall.

It's been a struggle for the FO to build a winning team around these two when they're young and relatively cheap, imagine trying to build around them when they are 30+ and carrying superstar price tags.

I agree about the inconsistencies of Vlad in many different ways from his weight issues that came up early in his career and the inconsistencies with the bat, but there is a superstar bat in there. Bo just had a bad season last year for the first time and dealt with injuries, he only played 13 games in the 2nd half. He's been far more consistent than Vladito, he's a star, not a superstar. Bo will bounce back this season to his normal 4-5 fWAR numbers.  It'd be sweet to get 10 wins from them like '21, lets go!