KevinGregg

Oh wow, I thought for sure he was out of options. He was in the minors in 2015 and 2017 for rehab assignments only. We only used options in 2016 and 2018. So next year is his last kick at the can. I get to keep my avatar for a bit longer

Sadly I agree with you. Time to start looking for a new avatar maybe. Looks like Doc's legacy ends with a Devon Travis DFA

Gibby looks so happy

Lgj suuuuxxxx

David paulino looks absolutely filthy. First I've seen of him. That's a plus curve and change, and with that frame, it looks like the fastball should get back up above 95mph next year when hes healed up.

I'm super intrigued. Do you think the offer from the Dodgers only came because of the experience he got from the internship? What kind of work does he do with apple? How long has he been in the industry? Do you think you need to show some sort of innovation on your own time before you will be offered a job? I remember jfas used to post here, he invented TIPS then all of a sudden his account was scraped from the site and all posts were deleted. So he obviously got a job somewhere, but I don't know if I could ever hope to come up with something that clever

Fair enough, maybe I am wearing the rose colored glasses. But I just think it would be so cool to work in a front office and be a small part of a team's success. To have the chance to make some contacts and maybe, just maybe, work your way into a prominent front office role with a track to a GM job, I don't know if I could turn down that chance. But.... One way of looking at it is that you are essentially paying 105k per year for the privilege of working for an MLB team instead of apple, since you should be earning 225k but instead chose 120k. When I look at it like that I feel like I would be obligated to take the 225k on principle.

obviously no one does anything single-handedly in sports, but there must be a way to quantify relative contributions from each member of a team, and I am fairly certain that Lebron and Brady would be shown to be responsible for a much greater % of their team's success than Trout (Though I would be super interested in seeing the results). As for Gretzky I was thinking more about his season with the Kings where he basically pulled a 2017/2018 Lebron and took a team of bums to the finals than his run with the Oilers.

Seems like he's really got 2 above average tools - raw power and speed. The defense is above average now because of the speed but if that declines by his early 30s all he has left is the power. The power plays down dramatically because he has no real hit tool. I'm not a huge fan of that profile. It's not like it can't work and I certainly wouldn't give up on him, but relatively speaking he's definitely not one of the prospects I am excited for. I feel like our outfield in general could use some more intriguing prospects. Someone with an 80 grade arm and a bat that can stick in RF, that would be killer

I thought they already re-named the MVP to the Annual 2nd Best Player in the League award?

" you only really appreciate how much better he is than everyone else when looking at a spreadsheet" Nailed it. Lebron, Brady, Gretzky all made everyone else look terrible by comparison, especially when it mattered most. Trout has also never single handedly carried his team to a championship like those guys. (You cant in baseball, but who cares right) Trout just gets like 1 extra base hit a week for the entire season so you don't really notice much but it ends up being obscenely valuable

Hes "athletic"

Bo is rated higher than 20 other team's #1 prospects. That's so awesome

Who got these offers, you? It depends how much you really need the money. Give me the job with the Dodgers every day of the week

20 grade arm rowdy tellez

I honestly only feel happiness. I hope they win it all this year.

All this talk about speed getting you runs, and slow guys clogging the bases has also been quantified. Ben Revere had the 4th most base-running runs in the league in 2015. He was worth 7.8 runs on the bases. The best player in the league was Billy Hamilton for 13.3 runs. That's almost a win worth of production from Revere's Baserunning, but for some context Bryce Harper's bat was the best in the league that year and it was worth 77 runs. Josh Donaldson's bat was worth 48 runs for us. Ben Revere was a valuable player and no doubt a good acquisition, but he didn't put the team over the top or anything. Those few extra runs from Revere's base running were just a drop in the bucket

Ben Revere was definitely not one of the 3 best hitters on that team. It's been extremely well established that leadoff should be one of the 3 best hitters. Maybe on a different team Revere should have led off, but not on that 2015 Jays team. 2 straight ALCS appearances is great success. We had the best run differential in 2015. If you are so proud of your work in the private sector you must also understand the need to have proper metrics to evaluate success. You can't guarantee a world series win or even an appearance. This isn't the NBA. We need to use other metrics to evaluate baseball teams than number of championships. And there are a number of well established metrics that point to the 2015 Jays as being the best team in baseball. They were objectively very successful. The fact of the matter is, we WON more than just 2 other teams, 2 years in a row. You think that Mike Trout and Ryan Goins both have the same chance to be the best player in the league next year? Of course you don't. Projections aren't about being right 100% of the time and accounting for every little detail. But if you are right more often than you are wrong then you end up like the Astros or Dodgers. If you don't even f***ing try you end up like the orioles.

Without looking anything up, I think he's using the curveball like 1/5 as often as in 2016 and using the change up 5 times more, with overall fastball% being relatively similar. It looks to me like basically he's replaced the curveball with the changeup as his primary offspeed pitch because of the blister issues. edit: looked it up. He was pretty similar in 2016 and 2017, and a totally different pitcher in 2018 http://www.brooksbaseball.net/outcome.php?player=592717&b_hand=-1&gFilt=&pFilt=FA|SI|FC|CU|SL|CS|KN|CH|FS|SB&pFilt=FA|SI|FC|CU|SL|CS|KN|CH|FS|SB&time=year&minmax=ci&var=pcount&s_type=2&endDate=09/10/2018&startDate=02/29/2016

In a vacuum I agree with moving him to the pen for all the reasons you said, but our rotation next year is so thin I think we might as well give him one last chance at starting. If he does well he could bring back a haul at the deadline as he would be a good starter with a year of control still left. If not, then you try him in the pen and see if you can flip him in 2020 as a reliever.

On the other hand, it could just be court being slow and s***** like always. We could just as easily see some s*** go down right in the middle of the world series

Is anyone else upset that gibby pinch hit for jansen? I think that's a good example of why hes not as good of a manager for the young players. Let the future of the franchise win a game for you maybe

Presumably money saved would be reallocated to the team in some way. We have used money creatively before (taking on salary in the liriano deal for example)

Would it make sense to try to offer Vlad an extension through 2026 right now? Would either party entertain that idea? That way we wouldnt have to worry about service time manipulation, and since the team is taking on extra risk presumably we would have to commit less than if we went year to year.

Here's a thought: Everyone seems pretty much convinced that the Jays will call up Vladdy in April, right at the time where if he plays all the rest of the season he will be one day short of one full year of service. this would get us a 7th year of Vladdy that we wouldn't have gotten if the front office called him up to start the year and never optioned him to the minors at any point before FA. We lose him after 2025 instead of 2024, and all we have to do is pay for one extra year at league minimum. Pretty solid deal! But how come there's not really much discussion about calling him up in June next year, to avoid the super 2 date? This doesn't get us any more years of Vladdy, but it would result in pretty substantial savings. You would pay just 3 years of arbitration instead of 4. Basically you are trading the final arb 4 year which would probably be like 30 million dollars for a year at league minimum and all you have to do is give up like 6 more weeks of vlad in 2019. That's a pretty damn good trade, considering we really don't need his bat in the lineup next April and May if we aren't planning on competing anyways. 2019 500k 2020 500k 2021 500k 2022 500k 2023 arb1 - 8M 2024 arb2 - 15M 2025 arb3 - 25M 50M total or 2019 500k 2020 500k 2021 500k 2022 arb1 - 5M (4.5M extra) 2023 arb2 - 12M (4M extra) 2024 arb3 - 22M (7M extra) 2025 arb4 - 28M (3M extra) 68.5M total Obviously the numbers could be tweaked - I totally pulled them out of my ass, but I seem to recall salaries going something like that in Arbitration. The general pattern should hold regardless of how you tweak the numbers. That's a lot of payroll space each year to throw away in 2022-2025 just for 6 weeks of Vlad next year when Atkins said there is no plan to compete anyways