Laika

You just KNOW that getting Varsho from Arizona was like pulling teeth, too. If I was them, I would have been dead set on dumping Alek Thomas and his noodle bat on someone else.

It's continuously funny to me that national baseball writers will just remain ignorant of the fact that you can park adjust pitching value. Like who f***ing cares what Bassitt's ERA was at home. Do you think Toronto expects him to pitch to a 2.75 ERA at home, in Toronto? His WAR was his WAR.

I'm not a huge fan of this offseason. In raw WAR totals from 2022, the Blue Jays upgraded from 9.9 to 11.0 -- or about one win. But that undersells Moreno's long-term value, so it mostly feels like the Jays are just kind of spinning their wheels here. I also have some concerns about the new players. Over the past two seasons, Bassitt had a 2.74 ERA at home pitching in good pitcher's parks with the A's and Mets and 3.85 on the road. Now he moves to a tougher division in a tough park for pitchers. Varsho struggled against left-handed pitchers in 2022, so he has to show he's more than a platoon bat. Kiermaier is coming off labrum surgery, while Belt is coming off the worst season of his career and will be 35, so those are two bets on older players. It could all work and push the Jays to a division title: Varsho and Kiermaier are both plus defenders and Belt was terrific as recently as 2021 (.274/.378/.597). I know they had the catching depth, but the best long-term option might have been to keep Moreno, let Alejandro Kirk serve as a DH and ride out Hernandez's final season. Grade: C

Clarke Schmidt is good. They have a handful of other interesting SP candidates, most of them just touched AA for the first time in 2022 so I don't know how ready they are. A bunch of guys who would be 3rd to 6th round picks in the LOD NPD. Deivi Garcia is still alive. Their depth is good, better than Toronto's I guess, but quite young.

When they started mandating cheesy calls, like every horizontal stick = hooking and every little one handed chop = slashing. The trapezoid for goalies is lame IMO. And yeah, I liked it when there were huge open ice hits all the time. But I understand the need to change some of that. Fighting was cool.

They didn't make the bases bigger or ban the shift to shorten the games, you f***ing brick.

Anyway, they made fundamental rule changes to the way the sport is played, to begin this year (the base changes, shift banning, the clock) but IMO roster constraints such as I've suggested are perhaps a less-intrusive way to increase offense. I dunno. weird sport when they started tinkering with the rules in hockey too much, I lost a lot of interest.

Capping the # of pitchers teams can use would also mean: - SP going deeper into games - "getting to their bullpen" becomes a positive thing again for offenses I think people like balls in play and offense a little bit more than seeing every reliever throw 98. Velo is cool but it's super cool when it's DeGrom or Verlander throwing 100 in the 5th inning. Or an elite closer pumping 102. Nobody really gives a s*** about the middle reliever touching 98.

Those are separate issues. Both can matter.

I don't care about the extra inning rules. I think they are fine. I just generally agree with Dickhead that the relief pitcher assembly line is pretty boring for the game. There are literally 200 RH relievers who throw 95 with a good slider sitting in AAA or AA, waiting for their chance to spend one week in the big leagues and throw 3 innings. It's boring. If teams were limited in how much they could dip into that well you'd see more guys like Cimber hold permanent jobs. Guys who don't rely on max effort / velo and get it done in different, less stressful ways.

Could implement a fantasy baseball style transaction or player limit, but with a soft cap and penalties like luxury tax. Ex: - you can only use ~25 pitchers in a season. any more and you start to suffer draft pick or international signing room penalties. - you can only send down a healthy pitcher to call up a new pitcher X amount of times in a season. any more and you start to suffer draft pick or international signing room penalties. you'd need some type of wiggle room or exemption for injury replacements but they could figure that out. like, if you place a P on the 60 day DL and call up a P that called up P is exempt from both calculations. And trade exemptions I guess.

League is wide open this year. The West sucks and any playoff team could win it. The East is pretty flat 1-6 IMO; despite Boston's record I don't think they are significantly better than anyone 2-5.

lmao, got em

Should just kill the MLB All Star game and replace it with the official, MLB sanctioned WBC All Star tournament break. Shrink the WBC so it is only these teams: Puerto Rico DR Venezuela Mexico Cuba USA Japan Korea Commonwealth Conglomerate (Canada + GBR + Australia + certain other commonwealths) Asian Conglomerate (China, Chinese Taipei, etc.) European Conglomerate (Netherlands, Italy, Israel, Germany, Czech, etc.) American Conglomerate (Panama, Colombia, Nicaragua, etc.) Nobody wants to see f***ing Nicaragua or the Czech Republic competing on their own. Do some type of very compressed tournament that would resolve in like, one week. You could still elect MLB All Stars and do your Home Run Derby. The All Stars get to represent their countries in the WBC tournament during All Star week, if they want (optional). The countries fill in the remaining players at their discretion.

Most of R2 = clearly better than him or equal to him. Could have gone end of the 2nd I guess.

He doesn't have a great approach. People in OBP leagues tend to like hitters with good approaches. We've seen a lot of these "good tools weak approach" guys go sideways in value in the last few years. Mauricio, Luciano, Luis Matos... But the main reason he fell ~10 picks (at the most) is that he has a generic name and he's easy to miss lmao.

Blah blah blah 54 is up

finally we rattled off some picks

I think what happened is Toronto placed him on Release Waivers. This is actually weird. Normally when a player like Gage is waived it's for the purpose of removing him from the 40 man roster and if he isn't claimed he can go to the minors. Or, removing a player without options from the 26 man roster to demote them. But Release Waivers also exists. Normally you only see this when a player has a contract the organization is trying to shed. Or when a player has kicked around the league a lot without getting an extended opportunity. I guess Gage is thirty years old so this makes sense. I bet Gage did have an offer from a foreign club and he indicated that he would prefer to take it than go to AAA. Toronto obliged. But they can't just outright release him, they have to use Release Waivers. Gage would have had the right to reject the Astros claim and be a free agent instead, if he wanted. Houston convinced him to stick with them. Maybe they talked up his MLB path to playing time. So, just some semantics on the announcement. From Toronto's perspective they did "release" him.

well then.

i wonder who greenwood wants and traded up for...

Eze takes Norbs safe pick but honestly not even a bad pick at 1-5

Glad you're not dead. Honestly, still a few names left that are basically the same as many of the players taken so far so maybe you'll end up losing nothing.

decades?

He said "I’m working the tournament " RE: the waste management golf tournament?