AdamGreenwood

Not sure why the fans are crying that we're not doing anything. Thanks to the backloaded contracts Miami dumped on us, our salary is higher in 2014, than it was in 2013 even without Johnson. The increased pay to Reyes and Buehrle alone, more than account for Johnson's salary. The last thing we need is ownership to put this franchise further behind by burdening us with more big contracts, and depleting our farm system further. AA rolled the dice and lost. Now, he gets one year to prove his bad year wasn't a fluke, or he's gonna get replaced.

I'm choosing to answer RJF's question rather than jump on the bandwagon of people bashing him. The answer is: Predictability has a value. It's the same reason why many companies invest in hedge funds. They like things to be stable. In baseball, if you know you're going to have a 4 WAR player year after year (barring injury), that's preferable to someone who is a krap shoot (Brandon Morrow). That being said, teams often look at the most recent year above all else.

This doesn't make Votto smart. It makes him self-interested. Players look at their own statistical rankings, and then decide which statistic is most important based on which stats make them look the best when it comes to contract negotiation time. I'd like to see a guy with a terrible wRC+ say the same thing. Then it's legit. But nothing new here. The guys with terrible advanced stats, but lots of RBI's and home runs, say RBI's and home runs are the most important. The guys with great advanced stats, are all Sabermetric wizards.

Are you going to have a promotion/demotion system with the other dynasty league? I'm not in either league, but I think it might be beneficial. It would allow your league to cull the non-participants, and remove the temptation to intentionally tank in order to claim the first overall draft pick. I've see too many dynasty leagues, where the owners either aim for 1st or last.

1) Johnson appears to be in decline. 2) JJ only got 8 million as a free agent. He's worth what the market will pay. Spending $14 million on a player worth $8 million is not good baseball. 3) We would not have gotten the draft pick. Even if he declined, some other team would still have to pick him up (and eat the compensation pick). 4) JJ really didn't want to be here. Nothing against the Jays, but when you have an atrocious year when you come to a new club, you want out if you're a free agent. That's just how it works. He also wanted to rebuild vale by playing in a pitcher friendly park. 5) Giving JJ the QO would have kind of screwed him over if he really didn't want to play here. 6) It seems very unlikely that the extra $14 million to sign JJ is the difference between making the playoffs and not making the playoffs. Might as well save $14 million, and give the kids a chance. The trade was atrocious. AA gambled on JJ and lost. Better to accept the sunk cost than to double down and amplify the mistake. And to answer the question: would our team be better with another SP? Sure. But could we find a better way to spend $14 million dollars? Very likely.

"To be honest I'd be happy with a randomly-generated snake-draft. Don't punish success or reward failure. Of course Selig would probably rig the draft, but I like the idea." Ridiculous. You probably want a flat tax rate too. Or maybe everyone pays the exact same dollars in taxes. You and Mussolini would have been great friends. I wouldn't mind seeing a lottery for the bottom six teams though, like they have in the NBA so teams don't tank on purpose if there is a great prospect one year.

Sorry, but that's a terrible system you've concocted. Why should a team have to pay more because the team the player is coming from did poorly? That creates a disincentive for players to sign with poor teams in the first place. Are you trying to make it harder for players to leave bad teams? Instead, compensation should be taken from the general pool, rather than making the signing team pay the compensation. This way, the team losing the player gets compensated, but it does not make it harder for the players to sign with another team. You already have the luxury tax system, making the league more competitive, and punishing those teams that go crazy with the free agent signings and salary.

"Yeah sounds like 7/140 he wants and might get. That's hard to swallow for a guy who's never pitched in the majors against guys like Chris Davis and Robinson Cano. " Exactly. That Darvish signing is really biting the Rangers in the ass.

The Mobius strip theory basically tries to put as much distance between the best hitters and the worst hitters as possible. By doing this, it minimizes the chances that good hitters will get on base, only to be stranded by weak hitters, as well as the chances that good hitters will come up with two out and nobody on. With all the statistics and algorithms available, one would think that the science of batting lineups would have been evolved by now. Given a set of expected production sets from each of the players, each permutation should be run thousands of times to see which generates the most runs. Furthermore, depending on the battery, leadoff hitters should change, as putting a low SLG, average OBP, fast guy against a tandem that allows few baserunners doesn't really make sense. Even a system such as that would have some shortcomings with players getting more/less walks based on the players in front or behind them. Another factor, is the amount of pitches players take per plate appearance. If it's a team with weak middle-relievers, players able to work the pitch count, are more useful batting early in the lineup, to wear starters down, a value that is not properly measured in baseball today.

Or hopefully, he's not doing anything this year. He's decimated our farm system enough, and obligated enough money. Let's not dig the hole any deeper for the next GM to climb out of.

Sorry, to burst people's bubble, but this is great news. The last thing I want to see is the Jays trading away the last remnants of their farm to increase their chance of making the playoffs by 3%. The team was atrocious last year, and unless a whole lot of guys on the rotation turn things around, it's going to be the same thing. There's no one player that's going to magically turn this club into a post-season behemoth. Let's at least save something for the next GM to work with. The only thing I would have preferred to see would have been a firesale. I would have liked us to dump these absurd negative-value contracts for nothing, or perhaps some mid-range talent so that AA could save face with people that know nothing about baseball. AA let it ride last season, gambling the farm away in order to take a run at things, and it failed miserably. He shouldn't get a chance to repeat the same thing this year, and dig his successor an even bigger hole when he/she takes over.

There are three scenarios: A) The catcher doesn't have the ball, and blocks the incoming runner. The runner has a clear unobstructed path to home plate, but slams into the catcher, so that he can't catch the ball and make a sweeping tag. C) The catcher has the ball and blocks home plate. Instance A should be ruled an obstruction. Instance B should be illegal and result in a multi-game suspension. Instance C should be the only case where home plate collisions continue to occur.

Zaun doesn't seem to understand why you can't just inject steroids up your ass and head back on the field two weeks later.

Cooper's gonna make it back and become an every day player.

I heard he's getting $12 million for the one day contract.

Generally, when your GM announces that they need to upgrade your position to the press, and then non-tenders, you aren't looking to do the club any favors at that point. One positive thing about JP is that he loved Toronto, and really made an effort to engage with the fans. I can pretty much guarantee he's going to be trash-talking Toronto management next year. Besides which, we weren't going to get too much in trade value for him.

Let's consider what Alex has accomplished so far. For the first three years, he made some decent trades to acquire young cheap talent, for not very much. This is easier to do when you aren't planning on contending and can wait a couple years for players to mature. The Happ trade was the first sign of change. He packaged a number of young prospects mainly for JA Happ, a below-average starter. Then came the 'disastrous 2013' campaign where he traded away three of our four top prospects, plus several others, as well as cheap, controllable talent (Escobar), mainly in order to obtain older players that likely could have been acquired through free agency for similar money. The exceptions to this were Josh Johnson and RA Dickey who had disappointing seasons, but reasonable contracts. At this point, with a complete void in starting pitching, it seems extremely unlikely that we are going to contend in 2014. But, if you are AA, what are you thinking? Are you thinking of admitting that all your trade moves were mistakes, and start building from the ground up? Or are you thinking that your job is in jeopardy, and you might as well double down in an attempt to grasp at a Hail Mary, while further damaging the farm team and committing the Jays to long contracts that expire long after AA's probable tenure? AA is in a position where he must win at all costs, and that is a very dangerous thing for the future of this team. Ownership needs to ensure that he does not dig such a deep hole, that it takes ten years to climb out.

This will just make it easier for Cubans to defect. Spending seven months of the year making millions of dollars and living it up in the West isn't going to give much incentive to return home. The difference now, is that they won't have the risk. No swim or tractor-tire ride through shark-infested waters. No chance of being caught and returned by the US coast guard or a Cuban patrol. They only need to decide whether they want to pay the taxes to Cuba, and play in the winter leagues, in exchange for the right to return to Cuba and see their family. I think a better way to do things would just garnish their wage 20% of what they make in the pros, and use it to help the Cuban people. I think most of the athletes would accept that althogh it would wreak havoc with the US trading with the enemy act.

"To me, the only possible definition for the award is "player who creates the most wins for his team". That player, undoubtedly, is Mike Trout. " Do you really think that? Or do you think it should be the player who created/saved the most runs for his team (adjusted by park factors)? They aren't the same thing, because one is contextual, and one is not.

Ahh, I thought it included baserunning. The descriptions are pretty vague.

A lot of the sheep believe that WAR should be the sole determinant of who wins the MVP. There are of course, other factors. 1) Situational hitting. Racking up 4 HR's in a game against the Astros in a 23-0 blowout, is not as valuable as four clutch game-winning home runs. The best way to capture that, that I'm aware of is Baseball Reference's WPA. Offensively for the AL, it suggests the five biggest offensive contributors have been: 1) Davis 2) Cabrera 3) Donaldson 4) Cano 5) Trout One can argue that having teammates on base, or knocking you in increases the chance that your hit will contribute to a win, but if the score is 13-0 because you have awesome teammates, your 8th inning HR doesn't mean anything. 2) Team Contributor Bunts don't do much for your WAR. Better to just refuse to bunt. Playing a position (such as 3rd base) that you are not great at, to make room for a teammate doesn't help your WAR. Better to refuse and just stick at 1st base. Attempting to steal a base in the 9th inning, when you're down five runs is just as valuable to WAR as stealing a base when the score is tied 2-2 in the seventh. So, stealing when they're not expecting is a great way to boost WAR at the expense of your chance of winning the game. You can argue all you want that clutch isn't repeatable, but a clutch hit is still more VALUABLE than a non-clutch hit. Based on that, a strong argument could be made for Donaldson as MVP.

It's only the Marlins. I started Freddy Garcia, and it was fine.

If a winning team is one of the necessary ingredients for success, you've got problems.

"I don't think it takes a math genius to tell you the odds of all 7 collapsing, especially to the degree that they did in the same year is pretty low." The problem with your premise here, is that you've taken the lowest seven performing players, as opposed to seven players that are a natural subset of the Jays. In other words, you're asking the wrong question. You're asking what are the odds of Izturis, Lawrie, Reyes, Morrow,Johnson, Dickey and Cabrera underperforming? But you have only arrived at this question, because you are cherry-picking the worst performers after the data is in. A more honest and accurate question would be, what are the odds of seven players with good projections greatly underperforming. So, you're no longer finding the odds of 7/7 occurring, but rather 7/16 occurring which is astronomically lower.

While I agree that these particular seven players collapsing is hardly outside of normal standard deviation, I don't like the BP way either. A 'collapse' isn't exactly a binary function. There are varying degrees of regression, injury, and just plain bad years. It's not really all or nothing.