Dick_Pole

In all of this talk about Dickey, has he even said anything about wanting to come back and play next year? I mean...42...

I understand what you're saying except: 1. This assumes any thoughts of converting Osuna to a starter are officially dead. 2. You're not describing the base case. You're describing an injury scenario case. If all three of EE, JB and MS leave, the base case scenario is Pompey or Lake or whatever the front office can pick off the free agent market to replace them. Ensuring they re-sign those guys or find other productive hitters to replace them trumps the Dickey to Diamond comparison.

11 teams out of the race with potential for another 2 or 3 more to fall out by the end of July. It's looking like the best buyer's market since the second wild card has been introduced. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I think the Jays' rivals will have greater need and ability to add to their teams than the Jays do. I don't like the idea of making it easier on them than if 20 teams thought they had a shot at a playoff spot.

I think people are looking at this in a vacuum. Spending $10M on Dickey means spending $10M less elsewhere next year. I'm more bullish on Hutchison than the average poster but I don't think the downgrade will be nearly as severe (if there is even a downgrade) than, say, having to replace Encarnacion's bat or Saunders' contribution from this year. This team is blessed to be fairly solid with its pitching staff going into next spring training. With a limited budget, spend on shoring up the position players first. If that massively fails, then sure, bring in Dickey to improve the team by any means necessary and maybe trade one of the other starting pitchers to fill the holes in the outfield. As implied by the back-and-forth in this thread, Dickey is not such a slam dunk player to be re-signed that he should be considered a top priority. The Thole apologist reasoning ITT is unacceptable. A fangraphs check of all catchers with a minimum 40 PA has Thole tied for 60th at -0.3 WAR. +0.2 WAR catchers rank 36-42. So the difference between a good back up catcher and a bad one is 0.5 WAR at the all-star break. Not huge, but not insignificant either. I'm with BTS on this one, it's an easy place to improve. Whatever knuckleball effect there is is completely negated by having to carry Thole on the team, assuming this front office has also been brainwashed by Thole's agent into thinking he, and only he can catch Dickey's damn pitch.

Most people who make pitching line predictions do so tongue-in-cheek. Everyone knows that the chances of predicting someone's IP, K, ER, BB and H with absolute precision is low. Predicting the short term performance of one individual (in terms of "good" or "bad") has a lot less variables than predicting the performance of a whole team one year in advance. ....or recent graduates to the MLB. Plenty of young and/or controllable talent on the current roster. Would it be nice to have a power hitting 1B waiting in the minors? Yes, but it's not the end of the world that there's not.

Uhh don't you understand that this is the part of the thread where as Blue Jays fans we're all supposed to blindly say "yeah, f*** that *******" as if we are at a Trump rally.

See Jim? Economist: "Canada is doomed for a recession and a weak loonie next year unless oil goes to $80 then we're all good again" I like how you bold "That's the building block of a .500 team on the fringes of contention" to prove your point but ignore the rest of my sentence "plus we don't know what Shapiro or Atkins would have up their sleeves to improve that roster." At this time last year when the Jays were under .500 and the playoffs weren't on anyone's mind, I remember people lamenting the horrid state of the starting staff in 2016 and 2017. The Jays had two guys under guaranteed contract and Sanchez who may or may not an MLB-worthy starter in 2016. The team was projected to be a bottom-5 rotation. But thanks to two smart signings of Happ and Estrada by the front office and Sanchez learning how to pitch the Jays lead the league in starting innings pitched and are #8 in WAR. Things are so good that one of those two guys slotted to be in the rotation for 2016 has spent most of the year as AAA fodder. And all the guys except maybe Dickey are coming back next year. So a 2017 team that has the building blocks of of a .500 team on the fringes of contention in July 2016 is a pretty damn good position to be in. Barring a rash of injuries or the front office completely falling off their rocker the team's 2017 situation can only improve.

Jim, you should be an economist or political analyst or something because you like to say a high volume of s*** to try to fear monger your point across to others but you're actually saying nothing. You list 13 guys hitting free agency which at first glance one would say "holy s***, Jim is right, this team is toast in 2017 there's no way they can replace ALL those players". But let's take a look at this list. Morales and Floyd aren't even active on this roster, and Thole shouldn't be. That takes us down to 10. As someone else pointed out already, Grilli is incorrectly on this list. That's 9. Even mentioning these 4 guys on the same list that starts with EE is very disingenuous. Chavez, Cecil, Storen, Barney and Smoak are relatively replaceable players or can be resigned for a reasonable price. Now we're down to 4. Dickey may or may not be back with this team. If he's back then great, if not, then let Hutchison replace him and bank the $10 million to try to re-sign someone else. Even if Hutchison is a lesser pitcher than Dickey (which is debatable) Hutch + a catcher with a pulse > Dickey + Thole. So we're left with three - Encarnacion, Bautista and Saunders. Now losing all three of them along with Smoak would be a pain in the ass only because the team would have to replace four corner OF/1B/DH spots. But replacing any one of them is not too difficult. The team is locked at all the scarce positions - C, CF, 2B, SS, 3B - unless BTS get his way plus the starting rotation is solid and Osuna will be in there either as another starter or the closer. Resign one of those three guys and find two other 105 RC+ guys to fill in the two remaining spots and this team still has a far above average lineup (with possibly better defense) even if it's not quite as potent as today plus a cheap if not spectacular starting staff. That's the building block of a .500 team on the fringes of contention plus we don't know what Shapiro or Atkins would have up their sleeves to improve that roster. The 2017 Blue Jays will still be an envy to many teams even if its in "rebuilding" mode as the front office tries to restock the farm.

IIRC I think the rule was changed after TB tried to buy their way into Cooperstown through Boggs. Could have been Clemens with the Yankees as well. I dunno, the late 90's/early 2000's was such an immoral time for the MLB

I agree and I assume that you meant something along the lines of "this is all we need and what we can afford". This rotation lacks a top ace but is much better than the rotation of last year's champion. There's no reason to think the Jays can't slug their way to victory.

Alomar spent only 5 years here. Assuming the Jays let Donaldson run out his contract he'll have 4 here, a couple of years in Oakland and presumably several more years somewhere else that won't be as good as his run here. If he was to be inducted into the HOF with, say, 70 WAR and 30-35 of it was achieved with the Jays, isn't that enough to slot his entry as a Jay?

Normal fans fap over their team winning or good player performance. BTS faps over the possibility that veterans with large contracts can be dumped for nothing in the off-season. Because, you know, finding replacements at scarce positions like SS and C who will provide more production than Tulowitzki and Martin at a cheaper cost is going to be so0o0o0o0o easy to do given that the Jays have no immediate replacements waiting on the farm, no assets available to trade that won't create a hole somewhere else and that the 2017 free agent list is decent only because so many Toronto guys are on it.

I am still in the Sanchez BP/4 or 5th starter camp. Why? Because the instant everyone on here starts believing in him he will turn to s***. Remember those Stroman BP versus starter debates? Yeah, we should have kept those going instead of slotting him in as the team's ace.

No need for restraint. This is good news. One of the reasons to suggest keeping Bautista past this year was to appease casuals/bandwagoners. Matt just gave some reasons why this group might not be too upset to see Bautista leave. Bautista has priced himself out of town as even casuals have figured out his 5 year/$150M demand/suggestion/rumour was outrageous.

Isn't there a point in time where they will have to dismantle all of this? Say, before it takes $200 million annually to get their 12-man roster signed?

20 win pitcher by the end of the season. The good, cool type of win. Not the nerdy new school definition of win.

And if Trout got traded to the Cubs tomorrow he still wouldn't win because he didn't spend enough time in either league. The nuances of the BBWAA award system.

To be fair, connecting Strombo from "George Stambapolous" is a bit of a stretch unless you know who he is and realize that RealAccountant badly misspelled his name. So he is the one to blame.

The Jays have 7 games against Houston coming up in August. It's probably a good idea to scout their system in case there are any callups by then.

If this is what you believe, then I think you have a very cynical view of what baseball players can do in their early to mid 30's. If Bautista had player options during his final three years of the contract, AA would have either had to let him walk or sign him to an extension at a much higher AAV and longer term. Conversely, I think everyone would agree that Bautista going into the 2014 season had substantial trade value. Yes I know this is just one example looking in hindsight to prove my point, but I think your opinion on this is so far to the other extreme that using an example like this has merit. Basically I read it as, "a team should want their 32 year old players to opt out of their contract under every circumstance, even when they put up MVP-like numbers, because chances are they'll decline so much in their 33, 34 and 35 year old seasons that a contract that looks great now will look like s*** in 2 years".

I feel like there's something in Bayes Theorem that would help explain/debunk this line of reasoning, but thinking of statistics brings back nightmares of high school. At off-season 2016, yes signing player options mitigates the risk of the contract going bad at that time. But at off-season 2019 when it's been shown that the player's contract isn't going bad midstream, he walks. Only the lousy players remain and you have to hope they turn it around out of nowhere.

Dead money only applies to bad contracts. Let's say you sign 10 players to contracts at the end of this season, and all of them have players options starting in 2020. 5 turn out to be busts while 5 others are stars. The 5 who are busts - you're stuck with. The 5 who are stars will opt out and you'll have to pay more to sign them again or replace the production (assuming no cheap internal replacement option exists). If you have the 5 stars signed you can keep them, or trade them. 2020 will look like a disaster with some payroll flexibility as opposed to okay with little payroll flexibility.

s***, yeah...Jays should have held out for Drew Jackson...

LOL. People are dumb as f*** still sore about Bargnani. It was his attitude, not his skill set that was the problem. I think this guy can fit in well with the team. I suppose if he progresses JV becomes trade bait at some point down the road.

What's a reasonable return the other way though? The ninth pick and...???