Laika

Nah, I don't agree. This is a once-in-a-career chance for a mega contract

Right. Those playoffs where Ernie started 18 of 18 games and hit .411

Ernie JUST played in 157 games and then set postseason records Maybe it's not 650 PA but he should approach 600 again if he doesn't get hurt The list of "ifs" that need to happen in order for the Blue Jays to have a roster structure wherein it makes sense to limit Ernie's playing is pretty long. A handful of these things need to happen: Infielder signed or traded for (Bo, Marte) Santander hitting well AND Springer healthy (Santander in OF) AND Barger hitting well (Barger pushed to 3rd) Gimenez hitting RHP well, at least Davis Schneider hitting well Nathan Lukes chugging along just like 2025 Ernie not performing quite like 2025

It's also conceivable that no team wanted to go 5 years on a reliever this offseason. Maybe he was only getting 3 and 4 year offers.

I am thinking he just chose the Dodgers... maybe it was the highest AAV he had on the table and he's doing some sort of "bet on myself" thing thinking he can just do this again in 3 years

this is weird did Edwin Diaz just snap accept this because he "wants to win"?

have to imagine it's a huge contract for Diaz to sign on Dec 9th

Organization also wasted how much money on Ryan Howard?

I know he hits a lot of homers and just had an elite season but 5/$150 for Schwarber at his age is f***ing lunacy He barely projects to be worth that AAV in year one

Thank you for price enforcing, Pittsburgh Edwin Diaz to LAD! Everything is happening!!!!

Yeah. Players and teams are not always honest with injuries. Also, sometimes injuries present with no pain. Like, mechanical breakdown or weakening of the strings but nothing pops and it doesn't hurt yet. And maybe injury isn't even the right word. Early decline could be. Velocity almost always just goes down from age 20 on. Some guys lose it at 24, some hang onto it into their 30s for some reason. He lost a tick of velo at age 25 and it was pretty catastrophic for him, just based on his pre-decline stuff which was fringe. Going from 94 to 93 in the year 2024 is brutal. I think 85 mph is the typical rule of thumb for "good vs bad" sliders in the modern era, so he was already below that line in the sand and playing with fire.

Everyone is thinking about who to trade Jose Berrios to, but the other side of these stories being written is that it could be a massive wakeup call for him. Yeah he was a sad boy about not being on the roster and he probably left the team because of literal depression... okay, get the message, you aren't good enough, do you want to be sad about it or do you want to get good? His Stuff+ has gone from 108 to 89 from 2020 to 2025. He got shelled in 2022, and if you look at xERA and FIP he also got shelled in 2024 and 2025. Everyone could see that he was no longer a top end guy, those problems were just masked by eating innings + getting lucky or having a good defense. You wonder what the internal conversations were like. Did he think he was fine in 2024 and 2023 because he kept the ERA down at 3.62 and made 64 starts? Were the Jays trying to get him to change in the offseasons? There has not been much in terms of strategic or mechanical changes, as far as I can see or remember. He upped his sinker usage a bit in the last few years. His changeup has never improved, despite being in the changeup loving Blue Jays org. His breaking ball has declined by advanced metrics and I don't know what he has ever done to try and modernize it. The sad part about focusing on being an innings-eater SP is that it takes about one season of looking crummy for you to be out of baseball. See Marcus Stroman. Is there a version of Jose Berrios that is a) more effective and b) no longer cares about 32 starts and 180 inning seasons? Change the mix up, do the velo work, try to miss bats more often, willingly take on more injury risk? I dunno. Can he get in the lab and do that?

Don't care much for people correlating his ego or attitude with his decline. He was good, then he very obviously got hurt and his stuff fell off considerably. It had nothing to do with his mental side. The guy was annoying from some perspectives but through 2022 you could still very much think about him as the kind of guy you would hate from other side of the field but love to have on your team. And at just 24, he had a lot of time to settle into a more normal athlete psychology.

Indeed. It makes DS's reverse splits seem even less reliable than the small sample size would indicate.

Sonny Gray lied about wanting to play for Yankees before 2017 trade, Brian Cashman says ORLANDO, Fla. — It all started with a little Gray lie? Sonny Gray made waves last week after he was traded from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Boston Red Sox, saying that he “never” wanted to play for the New York Yankees in the first place and that he was excited to join Boston, “where it’s easy to hate the Yankees.” But Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said Gray lied behind the scenes about wanting to play for the team before the club acquired him in 2017 in what wound up as a failed marriage. Speaking to reporters at the Winter Meetings on Sunday night, Cashman said Gray — then pitching for the Oakland Athletics — was telling people at the time that he wanted to play for the Yankees and that Gray later admitted he was fibbing the whole time. “When he was with the A’s, he was telling our minor-league video coordinator, ‘You got to get me over to the Yankees,’” Cashman said. “‘Tell Cash, get me over to the Yankees. I want out of Oakland. I want a championship.’” Cashman said Gray was “communicating that to a number of different people … that he wants to be a Yankee.” But in his second season in the Bronx, after Gray told Cashman he was surprised the Yankees didn’t trade him at the 2018 deadline, he came clean to the general manager. “That’s when he told me he never wanted to be here,” Cashman said. “He hates New York. ‘This is the worst place.’ He just sits in his hotel room.” Cashman said when he reminded Gray he had told people he wanted to be traded to the Yankees, Gray laid the blame on his agent, Bo McKinnis. “(McKinnis) told me to do that,” Gray said, according to Cashman. Cashman said Gray told him McKinnis “told me to lie” because “it wouldn’t be good for my free agency to say there’s certain places that I don’t want to go to.” “In 2017, Sonny did not have no-trade rights with the Oakland Athletics, so he had no legal right to have input as to where he would be traded or if he would be traded,” McKinnis told The Athletic when reached for comment Sunday night. “As such, he made no statement that he did or did not want to be traded to any specific team, and thus, there was no statement that could have included a lie. “The Athletics had no obligation to inform Sonny of any trade communications they had with other clubs, so they never told him they were potentially trading him to any particular team. As an aside, if a player does not want to play for a particular club — thus potentially not performing at their best if they were with that team — it does not help their career and future free agency to lie their way into a trade to that club.” A short while later, McKinnis sent another message to The Athletic: “So, Brian is trying to make people believe I told Sonny to, in Cashman’s words, ‘lie’ to the minor-league video guy to try to get Sonny to the Yankees — even though, per Cashman, Sonny did not want to be with the Yankees — to subsequently somehow help Sonny’s free agency. This makes zero sense. … Further, the words, ‘I want out of Oakland,’ have never been said by Sonny. He loved his time with the A’s.” Cashman said he told Gray the Yankees might not have traded for him if they had known how much he didn’t want to play for them. “‘I wish you would have told me well beforehand,’” Cashman recalled saying to Gray. “‘I wish we knew this before we even tried to acquire you, that you never wanted to come here.’ We tried to do our homework.” At his introductory news conference at Yankee Stadium in 2017, Gray appeared thrilled to join the team. “I couldn’t be happier with how it all played out,” he said at the time, “and I couldn’t be happier to be here.” Then Gray spent a miserable 538 days with the club, going 15-16 with a 4.51 ERA in 41 games (34 starts). He was frequently booed before the Yankees traded him to the Cincinnati Reds in January 2019. When the Yankees acquired Gray for Dustin Fowler, James Kaprielian and Jorge Mateo, he had already been an All-Star with Oakland in 2015. He has since made All-Star teams as a member of the Reds and Minnesota Twins. Gray immediately struggled when he joined the Yankees midseason in 2017, going 4-7 with a 3.72 ERA in 11 starts and never seeming to be on the same page with then-pitching coach Larry Rothschild. Then, in 2018, he went 8-7 with a 5.08 ERA in 20 starts before the trade deadline. Cashman said Gray thought the Yankees would trade him before the deadline. When it didn’t happen, the pair spoke in an office at Yankee Stadium. That was when Gray revealed to Cashman that he never wanted to be a Yankee in the first place. Cashman replied that in the offseason, he’d do his best to trade him. “I told him, ‘Nothing I can do about it now,’” Cashman said. — Ken Rosenthal contributed to this report.

Hardware and contextual impact I guess 6 time AS + 9 time GG + MVP + MVP candidate by voting a few times vs 2 time AS + 3 time GG + topped out as 3rd in MVP voting and never got serious consideration outside of that year Have to think that Olerud continues to get discussed and might eventually get in one year via Veteran's Committee. Similar case as Alan Trammell, just a bit less career WAR. ??? I don't remember how the Eras / Veteran's Committee works. Can players just stay on it forever?

Lawlar + Mayer is a fun infield combo. Arizona can collect all of the pre-bust fake shortstop prospects.

Nope.

From The Athletic this morning. It really seems like this is the best chance to find a fit for Berrios. Severino is owed $25M and $22M (player option) Berrios is owed $18.7M, $24.7M, and $24.7M Very similar post-trade CBT AAVs Severino projects better so it makes no sense on paper but there are personnel factors - it seemed like both SP had relationship issues in 2025 with their current organization. Perhaps the As want someone more reliable and steady. Maybe a C prospect or some $$$ is involved bridges the gaps. Severino is more viable as a relief option, if everyone is healthy and he is outperformed by Ponce.

Clement Schneider Career Split (%) 8.04% -3.10% PA career v LHP 462 320 Regressed platoon split 6.44% 4.94% Proj wOBA 0.311 0.319 Proj split v LHP 0.324 0.330 Proj split v RHP 0.304 0.314 Mint defender vs statue so you would never pick DS over EC because of splits.

Yeah huge upgrade on Turnbull etc. He could go either way. Do they stretch him out and just have him as SP8 on the depth chart or do they adjust his stuff or mix and try the RP route again?

He's more useful in Buffalo. It allows them to potentially carry an additional asset into the season. The contract being bad has this one upside of nobody else wanting him so they could force him down lol

This isn't an optioning though

This might be wrong