Laika

That is pretty rich. He might approach the Patrick Corbin contract (which would not be insane, all things considered - they are comparable.) Wheeler is a 1990 birthday, Corbin is a 1989. Wheeler has 8.9 fWAR in the last two years, Corbin had 8.9 fWAR in 2017+2018 Corbin last year had a slightly longer track record. About 150 more IP and ~3 more career fWAR. Corbin was the top arm on the market though and Wheeler is not, he is the #3 arm. 5/100 is an underpayment for Wheeler relative to Corbin. 6/120 would be a decent deal for the team but I don't think it makes sense for Toronto given where they are. 6/140, the Corbin number, would be a good get for Wheeler and would be surprising but it wouldn't be completely insane.

Honestly, upon reflection Walker and Gausman kind of just slide in with Shoemaker, Anderson, and Thornton as inconsistent or unreliable rotation filler with some upside. Gausman is slightly better than the other names and both Walker and Gausman probably have more ultimate upside than the other three, but that would be a rotation with zero #1 or #2 starters, arguably no #3 starters, no horses, and everybody liable to either put up an ERA over 5.00 or barely pitch. If Gausman is part of the solution then I think that solution also needs to include a better and more reliable pitcher in front of him. Keuchel, Ryu, Wheeler. Pineda doesn't fit that bill for me even though I like him as a target. A one year veteran like Hamels could fit the role. I mean I'll take anything, don't get me wrong. If Gausman and Wade Miley is all the front office can pull off, then that's an improvement I guess but I don't think it would exactly accomplish what the team should have a mind to accomplish this offseason. I assume Gausman just wants a one year deal. If Walker needs to rehab for half of the season and will sign a two year deal then that's a different thing altogether.

Both are obvious targets and make sense in a nutshell but the question would be, is it enough? Gausman might project to be close to an average SP and Walker can't be relied on for anything. It's not exactly the inspiring, culture altering top of the rotation infusion that people want. The Blue Jays probably have enough SP depth they are just missing the 1 and the 2.

Sounds fine to me but I bet his camp will just want a one year deal so he can try to be good and cash in next year.

BTS, he was crucified though. Crucified like our lord. #LUP

Grant is Jesus

That doesn’t solve anything. Teams just don’t value below average players as much - they don’t think of $/WAR as linear anymore.

So much talent being non tendered!

you mean SG? i don't really understand basketball positions anyway. other than the obvious lumbering centres and tiny little point guards, everything seems largely meaningless in this era terence davis is the player norman powell has always wanted to be

The Padres are such a mess. They had adequate starting pitching in 2019 and maybe the best reliever in baseball. They had a couple of stars on the position side. For them to have only won 70 games is a colossal failure in roster management and player development. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy the f*** would they expose Josh Naylor as a useless NL player when they could have traded him to the AL for anything before he debuted? Why oh why.

It's amazing how well-rounded Davis is. Defense - check Threes - check Finishing at the rim - check Dribbling in traffic - check Good enough size to dunk, contribute on the glass

What can I really say? I hate black cats

If all three of them stick around I will never post here again

Someone with graphic design as a passion please make a .gif where EE grows hair and turns into Franco

f***, he even kind of LOOKS like EE!

Unless the cat has an actual injury that mommy did not mention then this is demonstrably false OR we can conclude that Samuel Dyson did not actually throw the cat across the room. It's not clear at all from mommy's post that the thing was thrown at her. For all we know, Samuel Dyson got frustrated and tried to lob the cat-in-a-box onto the sofa, and it bounced off and broke on the floor. I will submit that most normal human beings after having been physically assaulted do not take to social media and make cute anthropomorphic posts pretending to be their kitty. It seems like a dumb as s*** social media post after a dumb as s*** argument to me. Married couples get into heated arguments all the time, sometimes they get divorced - it's not always because someone is an abuser. Granted I could be wrong. Perhaps Sam Dyson went full wind up and smashed the cat-in-a-box off his wife's head, injuring both of them. I don't see the need to jump to this conclusion like everyone else seems to, based on the evidence at hand. If Sam Dyson did hurl the cat then he's a piece of s***. Maybe he did abuse his wife, but I'm not going to assume he's a criminal and this isn't evidence of that.

I have issues with this being called domestic violence. Sounds like Dyson threw a cardboard box with a cat in it. You can throw a cat across a room and it will land on its feet and not get hurt, depending on how you throw it. Based on that post, I would imagine that the cat's "mommy" was being an idiot in some way. Its not illegal to break a box. #MeowToo

Not surprising but you've missed the point entirely.

Trade you to some other team’s fanbase

Okay, this is the dumbest f***ing thread ever then. Bob wants to "supplement the core" and Jim wants to target free agent SPs this offseason BUT BUT BUT both of them want to play the semantics of opinion game to somehow position themselves as having unique or more enlightened stances than the rest. In other words, nobody really disagrees but everybody wants to pretend that they are smarter than everyone else. Supplement the core but don't say that you're trying to fix the team!!! Sign Wheeler but don't say that you want to win in 2020!!! Delete this thread and Jim and Bob's accounts. f*** you all.

Uh, not really. A good number of people are advocating making a number of short and mid-term financial investments (some even argue for bigger long-term) in the team this offseason in order to accelerate the (hopefully) pending competitive window and begin the creating of a winning environment. That's wildly different than "we suck and we have to spend right now to fix it" It's also different than "signing a bunch of free agents in an effort to contend in 2020." Nobody really thinks that bringing in a bunch of free agents, even really good ones, would do much more than give the team a remote playoff chance in 2020. The effort is not to contend in 2020, it's more specifically to do the first thing I said and "accelerate the (hopefully) pending competitive window and begin the creating of a winning environment."

Said nobody on here, ever.

- ERA and FIP do not adjust for those things - ERA and FIP minus (ERA- or FIP-) do adjust for league and park factors. These are scaled to 100, so 90 is good, 125, is awful, etc. So, for example if a 4.40 ERA in the AL East equals a 4.00 in the NL East, two pitchers with those ERAs will have the same ERA-. Chase Anderson career ERA- 94; FIP- 110 Kyle Gibson 106; 102 - fWAR and bWAR do adjust for league and park (but differently, I think). - The new DRA on BP adjusts for a lot of things, I think. WHIP is interesting historically because it's kind of like the first talent descriptor outside of ERA. People used to realize that ERA was wildly random and they thought WHIP was more stable and therefore more indicative of true talent or future ERA. It's pretty crude though and there are better tools to use than WHIP in any instance. It's pretty mean to groundball pitchers who can give up lots of singles and sometimes walks but can still be good, get a lot of double plays and avoid home runs, etc.

E. Coli in the spring but then ulcerative colitis later in the year. The latter can be a chronic issue and teams might actually factor it into his projected long term value!

Kyle Gibson, Chase Anderson, and FIP Dogmatism Long gone is the initial, romantic promise of defense independent pitching statistics (DIPS); the notion that we can cleanly separate pitcher skill from the messy results on the field is dead. Sure, FIP correlates better to future ERA than ERA does, and every subsequent evolution of DIPS (xFIP, SIERA, DRA, and whatever comes next) purports to offer additional accuracy or applications, but by now we have seen enough pitchers for which DIPS is more misleading than helpful that it makes sense within any individual pitcher analysis to at least turn our minds to whether or not the truth lies within the DIPS. Blue Jays fans will always fondly remember Marco Estrada’s prime, when his unique pitching style lead to such an inordinate number of easy flyouts and made it really seem that he was controlling batter contact quality in a way that FIP could not appreciate. Ask Baseball Reference, which uses runs surrendered in its pitcher WAR calculation, how many wins Estrada was worth in 2015 and 2016 and it will say 7.5. Ask Fangraphs the same question and the answer is 4.5. The price of a win in baseball has been estimated at close to $10M; the disagreement over Marco Estrada’s true talent in 2015 and 2016 was a $30M question. Kyle Gibson was another $30M question. He’s a Ranger now for that amount of guaranteed money and if the baseball media is real news Toronto was interested and could probably have had him for a little bit more than that. Gibson is an interesting projection. His career ERA is 0.23 runs higher than his FIP. He was not all that good by any measure in 2016 and 2017, with ERAs over 5.00 and FIPs of 4.70 and 4.85. Then in 2018 a slight uptick in velocity helped him drop the ERA all the way down to 3.62 and the FIP sank with it to 4.13. 2019 was a puzzler: his strikeout rate and velocity stayed up, his FIP stayed near his 2018 mark, but his ERA shot back up to nearly 5.00 again. The 2020 Steamer projection for Gibson is 3.0 fWAR. Ask Fangraphs how good he has been in the last two years and it says 2.6 wins in each season. Ask about his career and it says 13 WAR. Baseball Reference thinks Gibson has been much worse - a 9.6 WAR pitcher in his career, and it thinks three of his six full season have been so bad that he was not worth even one WAR. With 1087 career innings pitched, at what point do we start looking at ERA and not FIP? Someone knows this answer. Do we take the increased strikeout rate as a new beginning and throw everything before 2018 out the window? The pitcher that the Blue Jays did land this offseason has essentially the opposite trend. Chase Anderson, a flyball pitcher, has a 3.94 ERA in his career but a 4.54 FIP. Ask Fangraphs and he’s been worth 7.5 WAR in his 857 career innings; ask Baseball Reference and the answer is 9.9 wins. The third big baseball site, Baseball Prospectus, has the most modern and advanced ERA estimator in its newfangled DRA. BP says Chase Anderson was worth 1.4 WARP in 2019 with a 4.84 DRA, while Gibson was worth 0.3 WARP with a chunky 5.60 DRA. In 2018 DRA thinks Gibson was worth 2.5 WARP with a 4.21 skill level and Anderson was worth negative 0.4 WARP with a 5.52 DRA (Chase Anderson had a 3.93 ERA in 158 innings that year so this disparity is immense). Steamer thinks Chase Anderson will have an ERA and FIP of 5.49 in 2020 – a seemingly absurd position for the stupid computer to take, given Anderson’s career marks. All of this is supposed to confuse you. Pitcher value analysis and projection using publicly available statistics and ERA estimators is more confusing than ever. Don’t make the mistake of eyeballing Kyle Gibson’s FIP or his Steamer projection and thinking that his talent level is easily ascertainable. The teams aren’t doing that because they certainly have more sophisticated information at their disposal. The popularity of Fangraphs (which is great) and their decision to use FIP as the single input for pitching WAR should not give us tunnel vision. As simple-minded members of the public we are forced to concede that we can really have no idea how good players like this are; we have no idea how Anderson or Gibson will perform in 2020 because we don’t even have much of a clue how good they actually were in 2019! Kyle Gibson’s realistic outcome range goes from a productive and resurgent veteran who will fit in great with Lance Lynn and Mike Minor to the frustratingly ineffective and hittable Kyle from 2016, 2017, and 2019. It’s fair to find it a bit more likely that he will fall towards the positive end of that range given the increase in velocity and strikeouts (keep in mind however that the strikeout rate league-wide has gone up in this timeframe.) Chase Anderson’s realistic outcome range is just as wide. Based on runs prevented Chase has had the best single season and the best career between the two of them and it’s not even close. He has exhibited a positive velocity trend too. The Anderson acquisition inspired little fanfare while Kyle Gibson was a common free agent target for Blue Jays fans. I’ll be watching these two enigmatic pitchers closely in 2020. This article was meant to meander and reach no conclusion, just like my mind when I try to figure out how good these two will be.