Laika

Weird contact. He was on time and hit a line drive but it wasn't on the barrel. Must have been off the end of the bat a bit

Jays have like seven hard hit balls tonight and scored all their runs on... none of them?

MLB civil war The Manfred Apologists vs the Selig Conservatives

Blue Jays off to a horrendous marketing start. Get destroyed at home opener. Security kicks out a patriot. Second game isn't even on TV.

And Ross Atkins is probably in his jammies right now. Half asleep. Rewatching Grey's Anatomy.

Jokes aside Jose Berrios is dogshit as far as "opening day starters" go Eflin was always the heavy favourite. Sigh. Why not Gausman? Kind of disrespectful to give the OD nod to the guy who is your 4th or 5th best SP.

Going to be a long season, boys.

Jack Zepplin is shutting us out

I see we are going straight to zero on the 2025 Vibes graph

Jackson Kelenic

That's on Vlad. Should have been an easy play for the 2B.

Berrios swiftly reminding everybody that he sucks now

whiffs on breaking ball in the dirt whiffs on a hanging breaking ball middle middle $585m please!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NOT THE START WE WANTED but probably the start we deserve

Vlad in his own head already Pressureeeee

Why does KK get a jumbotron tribute? lmao Yeah dude nice career for the Rays

Now that it is opening day, the Toronto Blue Jays roster seems almost perfect. Hard to see any flaws at all.

Prediction: Zach Eflin goes 2+ IP giving up 7 ER and 3 HR. He hits the 60 day IL after the game with a torn ego and goes under the knife in April for a butt deflation procedure

I approve of this lineup. Nice to see Wagner, Roden, Clement all in there. I agree with Springer in CF most of the time until Varsho is back. This boosts the offense since Roden gets in the lineup. I am sure old George can catch most of them for a couple of weeks. I don't mind Gimenez 4th. After Tony Taters homers, he's a fun "leadoff hitter" to come up. Also can "lead off" the second inning if the Jays go 0-3 to begin a game. And he can probably be an old school RBI guy put the ball in play etc. when needed. I am sure the lineup from 4th to 9th is very fluid. Great to see they are already slotting Springer 6th. Guys like Roden and Wagner can shoot up to 4th if they earn it.

Nance, Pop, and Robertson all being DFA'd in one go. Potentially could lose a lot of decent RP depth here. Of course, it's that time of year where all teams are crunched so perhaps they can just be slid down to AAA.

I'll f***ing puke if Ross/Mark/Ed give in to him

Why are the Padres the model? Are the Astros a really dumb org for letting Cole, Bregman, Correa, Springer, all walk? Loser teams are the ones who need to desperately trade players before they become free agents. Remember when Boston HAD to "manage their asset" and trade Mookie Betts before he walked and they ended up with Verdugo and Jeter Downs? lol.

Good.

Stuff+ is mostly each pitch in a vacuum. It does use the main fastball as the basis of the model and measures everybody's other stuff off of that pitch. There are other metrics that try to measure how a pitcher's entire arsenal interacts, each pitch with the others, but they are newer. It would fail to take into account a lot of things. I don't think it captures "tunneling" at all for example, so someone like Pop could have a good sinker and a nasty slider but if that slider is recognizable immediately out of the hand, hitters just won't even try to hit it and/or they can destroy any mistake sliders. Something like that probably explains Zach Pop entirely, since his career run values are positive on the sinker but negative on the 112 Stuff+ slider. Also important to note that not every pitch has a 100 as the average Stuff+. The typical Slider is a 110 pitch, so Pop's is closer to average. And his 105 sinker is actually a full standard deviation above the typical sinker, which carries a 92.5 mark. So he's more of a one pitch dude, with a boring slider, and not really a guy with two plus pitches at all. Stuff+ is pretty good at telling how good a player is in small sample sizes. Again, similar to velocity. Just think of it like a better, scientific version of scouting grades. It can be pretty dang useful in small samples but becomes less useful over time unless you are thinking about changes a certain pitcher is going through.