Dick_Pole

Exactly. Baseball has a charm about it in its uniqueness. I think umpiring is part of that too, though just a personal opinion.

I honestly think Montreal will see a baseball team once again...maybe not in 5 or 10 years but in a few decades. Why? Because every city that has ever lost its only baseball team since 1900 has eventually gotten one back. Milwaukee, KC, Washington, Baltimore, Seattle. The only exception is Brooklyn which doesn't count as its own city and even so I think is a pretty good candidate to get a franchise again too. MLB is just too arrogant to admit it failed in a market.

Then why not standardize the diamonds? Only sport out of the North American big 4 where the field of play isn't the same across all venues. Same type of thing, kind of. A home run in Wrigley that's not a home run in Oakland is a far greater abomination than a strike in Wrigley that's not a strike in Oakland!

Best thread ever, so many lulz

I would hate that. I may be in a minority but I think part of the charm of baseball is the human element to it. A pitcher doesn't only need to know the hitter he's facing but also the ump - what's going to be a strike and what's not. It adds a layer of complexity even if it adds in a layer of Bautista whiny-ness. A "standard ump" takes away one of the baseball handicapper's best bets too. I'm not an expert on this but I tailed someone who was kind enough to post his over/under picks on game run totals based on some umpiring data he gathered in another forum and it's been the only time I consistently made money betting on individual baseball games.

Agree to the minimum pitching rule of three batters or to the end of the inning. Another version of this rule would be to limit the roster size of pitchers to 11 or 12. This would force managers to think and make strategic decisions instead of bringing out a LOOGY whenever an opportunity presents itself. Also agree to reasonable measures for pitchers and batters to abide by to lessen time between pitches. This gets tricky though because there's always a work around like throwing to first if there's a runner on. Disagree to the reduction/elimination of warm up pitches for starters/relievers. As someone who use to be a pitcher (not a good one so I'm not bragging), you need a feel for the mound and depending on what happened during your team's half inning and the weather, you may need those warm up pitches to get loose again. A hitter has a batter's box to warm up so it's only fair a pitcher gets the same privilege, right? Disagree STRONGLY to the infield fly rule being changed. It was implemented over a hundred years ago for a reason. Any quick Wikipedia check will show you why. Disagree STRONGLY to the aluminum bats, for the reasons that other posters succinctly posted already. I would approve of eliminating interleague games, however its not going to happen especially with 15 teams in each league. I agree with the 15-day contract rule brought up. Another idea for games that go beyond a certain point, say 14 innings, you get to access a "reserve player" or allow for one or two players taken out to be put back in. If there's a great 17 inning pitching duel, I don't think anyone wants to see it end because a non-pitcher has to pitch. I agree that the Blue Jays should be playing the Tigers and Indians more than or equal to the Yankees and Sox. Those are the this team's natural rivals. However baseball wants to implement that is up to them. Maybe Oakland moves to Brooklyn, Minnesota moves to the west and the Jays to the central and it all works itself out. I agree that teams should be able to trade draft picks. At least picks for picks on draft day so teams have the flexibility to move up if they really covet a player.

I hate the defeatist attitude where the Jays have to tank or take a step back to move forward. How many Hall of Fame and near-Hall of Fame players did the Braves lose by the mid-2000's? Their version of a tank was basically a .500 team from 2006-2009 and they're right back to the playoffs again. The Braves version of a tank 8 years ago was better than the Jays version of a contender last year. The Jays DO NOT need to tank a season and they DO NOT need a top 5 draft pick. What they DO need are some people who know how to draft and develop quality players consistently and know how to properly manage a roster. I will never, ever applaud the team having a bad season no matter how many other people think it will benefit them in some intangible way in the future (it might change the FO, it might result in a better draft pick etc)

It's actually a really smart idea, if someone wanted to take this forum somewhere from a $$$$ perspective. If it's meant to be just for fun, not really sure if bringing in a bunch of CHP clones is really what people here want. In 2007 when Twitter was nothing they pushed their Tweeting service big time at some music festival and now it's a $20 billion company. The user engagement here is very high. The Alexa stats show a 4.5% bounce rate and 7 page views and nearly 7 minutes per user per day. That's really good. Contrast that to the MLB site where people spend half the time and the bounce rate is 36% and they have a lot more content and functionality than just message boards. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bluejaysmessageboard.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mlb.com

Hmm and when I use Chrome instead of Firefox for the link, it comes out to completely different numbers!

I've been looking at some web traffic ranking stats for an unrelated project and decided to see how this site fits in just for the hell of it. http://bluejaysmessageboard.com.websitetrafficspy.com/ Not bad. Apparently this site could be sold for $4K if the admin wanted to. 5,842 rank in Canada according to Alexa (means only 5,841 sites get more traffic in this country). But it's real popular in Grand Bend for some reason. 30% of all this site's traffic comes from there and it's ranked 13th overall. To put it in perspective only huge sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google etc are getting more traffic from Grand Bend internet users than this site. I guess those beach bums really like talking about baseball in the wintertime. Or I found the home town of that puppy nut. Would be fun to see how this site compares to the MLB Jays board, except I don't think they can rank it by subsection like that. Only MLB.com works.

Have fun counting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_sports_team_owners Without going through it myself I would guess out of the 4 popular North American ones - less than 10 and shrinking. Off the top of my head I remember Disney dumping the Ducks a while back which sparked the whole debate over the Mighty Ducks moniker.

Oh yes, completely agree. I misunderstood what you were saying at first.

Something like that. Although they no longer have that black hole at catcher who is completely useless in every form after the all-star break dragging down the whole team's offense. People blame the starting rotation and injuries in 2013. Well they recovered from that in July. Most of the terribly unlucky injuries occurred in the first half of the season. Reyes and Lawrie were back. By the time Bautista and Rasmus were out, the season was already over. Dickey and Buehrle were pretty good in the second half. Rogers was s*** but Redmond was passable in the second half as a replacement for #5. What brought them down was this one-dimensional offense led by the all-or-nothing lunatic big mouth catcher who probably had a negative impact on the thinking of the more impressionable players like Lawrie.

You say a corporate entity as if that's some kind of advantage, just because they have access to a lot of cash. Rich old men have exactly one person to be accountable to - themselves (maybe their wives and children too). A corporate entity has thousands of shareholders that they are directly accountable to, as well as 10's of thousands of other stakeholders. People need to read a Rogers quarterly financial report. I do it as part of my job. While they are adding costs to the Media division - NHL and spending on baseball players - they are crying poor ("only" 40-50% margin) on their wireless and cable divisions, both of which have seen cuts to employees in the past two years. How bad does it make Rogers look if they are firing people left right and center and adding to the Jays payroll? For now they have generally gotten away from too much scrutiny over this. But the stock price has really struggled compared to Telus, Bell and Shaw especially over the last year. I'd be more than happy to see them say "f*** it" and allow for a $200M payroll to create an inefficient lower-tier playoff team. But in reality, it isn't happening. And if it did right before the next round of layoffs after another several months of the share price drifting aimlessly - wow.

They got to .500 after the 11-game winning streak and were in the hunt. April did not sink them.

The ASG is meant for fans. Not just the people who discuss advanced baseball theory on FanGraphs and message boards, but ALL fans, even the so-called "dumb" ones. If they want to vote "stupid" then let them. They are paying customers. It's not like politics where democracy of the dumb and/or unaware actually matters. It's the f***ing All-Star Game. Another reason why I support the "at least one player per team rule". If you're a fan of a team on pace to lose 105 games that year, your mediocre star's appearance at the ASG might be the highlight of your s***** season. Don't take that away from them.

Makes a lot of sense. Maybe they'll attach a Rogers ad to it just like they attach one to each urinal in the Dome.

Oh, I know what I said!

Colby Rasmus in July? Or hopefully Moses Sierra in April

I deny NOTHING!

This f***ing guy is so desperate now he's making s*** like this public. Who is he now, Sabean? This is like telling people that you banged a hot chick that you had a reasonable shot with, but you started bragging about it before closing the deal and she found out and now she wants nothing to do with you.

I have not heard of it until today, but it looks like I already agree with you.

Against a guy who is arrogant enough to announce his retirement a year ahead of time so he's got a whole season for people to pawn over him in a goodbye ceremony. I'd say a Jose vote is more of an anti-Jeter vote than pro-Bautista vote.

Anthopolous is still better...though it's getting harder for me to type that.

By the time the Jays season starts, this s***** weather will be over. And if they stink, I can preoccupy my time with other things during the summer.