John_Havok

awesome, he's not very good. Long man to soak up meaningless innings at best i think unless he figures out how to develop any of his pitches into plus territory. He's a pure command guy with 0 margin for error.

Great catch Vomit inducing

It's rather disheartening the best FA hitter options begin and end with Jizzuki.

Hard to do that with a 14 pitcher maximum amd theyre already cartying 13. Its likely gonna be Tiedemann and Smith coming back from injury rehab unless they do something creative with the roster and send someone else down and bring up both Smith and Keys maybe

They dont get savant data from any level other than AAA or A ball. Guerra spent most of his season at A+ and AA until his last 2 appearances. Data will be limited

No team just smiles and wins through through injuries to like 8 of 11 starting pitchers.

Clement played for Cleveland when Demarlo Hale was their bench coach right before Hale came back to join the jays. Atkins was the VP of player personnel when Lukes was drafted by Cleveland in 2015, right before he was hired as Jays GM. Might not be finding diamonds in the rough as much as already being liked then by those coaches and/or execs who left cleveland and came to TO.

Yep, going to be quite the end of the season. Realistically tomorrow's game is must-win for both teams, but moreso for Seattle. Sure would be nice to sweep them at the RC and be the ones that start tapping the nail in their playoff coffin while staying alive at the same time. A decent winning streak or winning 8 of 10 or something like that is exactly what they need.

Im about as non-optimistic as the next guy that they'll make it but... lets look at the math. 25 games left, gap is 1.5, being 2 wins better than Cleveland over the last 25 and at least 1 win better than Texas and Baltimore is not a gargantuan task. The permutations and possibilities of which team gets in are insane though. Texas and Baltimore are saying the exact same thing about the Jays and each other. Thing is, Cleveland as 1 more game remaining and both Texas and Baltimore have 2 more games to play than they Jays. That's not insignificant.

the logic from most people who whine about his moves is "if it fails it was wrong and if it works it was right..." It was right.

nah, no thanks. one underachieving headcase is enough. nice they put him on waivers with enough time to get claimed for playoff eligibility tho

There's definitely some deception involved in his delivery as his stuff and location+ numbers from his first start were really... meh. We'll see how today's numbers look when they come out

Out of town scoreboard check... KC up on Cleveland 8-2 in the bottom of the 8th. Houston losing to the Mets also in the bottom of the 8th White Sox beat the Twins. All good so far, need the Athletics and Milwaukee to beat Orioles and Texas to make it a great day. Gonna need to unlock that playoff thread.

Yup. It won't be long before its "just pitch him here, and he'll ground it to here about 60% of the time, foul it off someitmes or might get a seeing eye weak hit to there maybe but who cares... Oh, and don't worry about middle-middle either, he can't hurt you." Good solid base of tools and can still be a 4th OF on most teams that gets strategically deployed but as a major league starter he needs to make some improvements this offseason in the lab. He should certainly invest some training time into bunting too as that could prevent defenses from being able to deploy in their favour a decent amount of time.

For Vlad it's very much mechanical and seems to be (at least to me) nagging injury related. It definitely can be fixed IF he a) acknowledges there is a problem, b) lets someone show him what the problem is and c) lets someone show him how to fix it. The pride factor is probably very strong with him too as a guy who's always been successful doing things his own way and he truly may not yet be capable of acknowledging the real problem.

I can almost buy Schneider's reasoning for not dropping Vlad in the lineup... but how about just to 5th before all the other garbage slap hitters?

to quote the mouthbreathers here regarding pitching injuries: "Must be a problem with the trainers"

What could have been without that toe injury this season... it really killed him.

The way I simplify it in my head is this: xwOBA (and other x stats) says what would most likely have happened on average to a ball hit that hard at that launch angle. It's commonly criticized limitation is that it doesn't take spray angle into account, but when you look at babip alongside it... you can basically put the picture together. Right now Bateman is getting very lucky with ground balls finding holes that aren't hit that particularly well. The next obvious question from people that don't like that it doesn't take spray angle into account is actually quite simple. Defensive players are allowed to move where they setup defensively (within limits) and therefore using spray angle introduces defense to the equation, which is not a constant.

Even not using xwOBA... use babip. Sure, it takes like 800 batted balls for babip to stabilize but you're never going to see a guy run it at .421 for that long. He's a slap hitter than will likely run a babip that's higher than normal due to his footspeed, but we're talking about a guy with an ISO of .068 which is right in line with his projections. His fallback is supposed to be a good eye at the plate and takes a bunch of walks. Well, that works in the minors where there are semi-wild arms in every team's starting 5 or 6 and bullpen. His MLB 5.1% BB rate is so much lower than his minor league career average BB rate of around 17.5%. K rate is 21% up here so far and career 16% in the minors. The 5% jump in K rate makes total sense as it happens to virtually every hitter coming up. But a massive drop in walk rate means his batting eye skill probably isn't going to translate since MLB pitchers see a noodle bat and realize they don't have to waste pitches outside the zone and he can't hurt them. His closest comparable right now is Chandler Simpson, except Simpson is another tier faster, strikes out less than half as much and squares up more baseballs. Simpson's babip is .335 (this is probably slightly higher than Bateman's would be right now) and is better than Bateman as a base stealer and overall baserunner, but Bateman is definitely better defensively. So... to get all they can out of Bateman, they have 2 options. Lean into the slappy slap slap and try to get more solidly hit balls to find holes at roughly .330 babip and teach him how to steal bases better so they have Chandler Simpson with elite CF D... or try to get him some pop.

All true. Sucked as a play-by-play guy and his voice actually drove me crazy, not to mention his "old guy yelling at clouds" routine about anything other than batting average, but back in the day as a colour commentator he was very very good and really excelled as the 3rd guy in the booth in the playoffs for US networks

Yeah, I don't think they'll be making room on the 40 man for new guys. Need to fit Mantiply in too at some point as his rehab is pretty much done unless they just keep him down the full 30 days they can and he's on the 60 day IL Taillon too, except he's just on the 15 day Josh Smith is in rehab games... 15 day.

Wild game in Vancouver last night... Canadians went up 8-0 after the 2nd and were up 13 - 4 after 4, but had to walk off Spokane in the 10th to win 15-14. Bottom of the 10th started off with a throwing error from Spokane's 2b which allowed the ghost runner to score and the hitter to get to 2b. Sac bunt to get him to 3rd, then a weak grounder that the runner on 3rd couldnt advance on. Then Spokane's pitcher balked in the winning run with 2 outs. Barriera's debut outing did not go so well, came out of the pen and threw 1.1 IP, gave up 3 hits, 3 BB, struck out 2 and gave up 5 ERs. Worth noting Dameurys Pena's (the 3rd guy we got in the Hoffman trade) has been on fire since joining the Canadians with 6 hits (2 doubles) and a walk against only 1 K in the 3 games since arriving.

Yeah, and we all know how thats going to go with the playoff and NY bias. It's not that Schlittler isn't deserving, but he's clearly not deserving of the likely landslide win he will get unless he completely Schlitts the bed or Cease throws 3 perfect games in a row. This should be near 50/50 1st place votes and it'll probably end up being 80/20

Maybe... but its hard to say without him standing next to someone else that isnt crouched. Pure violence in that swing though. I like it