Dick_Pole

Well hell, this again. Expected as Merryweather gets DFA'd. For all of you still with Donaldson PTSD, just pretend the trade was Donaldson and Liriano for Merryweather and Hernandez and shut the f*** up already. Four years of whining about this while at the same time the team played the Liriano situation perfectly.

FWIW some dude on the sports gambling forums I peruse with a pretty decent capping track record would tail Thompson's starts pretty religiously. There was something in his pitching that the guy's modelling obviously liked relative to what Vegas lines were offering.

What's defined as better? More runs scored than last year? Better rate stats? They already swept the board finishing first on all of the rate stats last year. Going to be hard to top that. I voted the same. I think they OPS lower but with some better luck/more clutch hitting have about the same or slight improvement on runs scored. The improvement here comes from pitching and defense.

The only way this makes sense is if the Jays know something bad medical wise. Thornton is of less value and has a greater chance of clearing waivers, all things being equal.

What I meant with that wrt Varsho is that most of his value is defense. So there will be little variability in his outcome. Will probably be pretty close to a 4-5 WAR player barring injury. Floor: 4, Ceiling: 5. That's exactly what this team needs with a guy like Guerrero who we don't know will be a 3 or 7 WAR player or Bichette who made his season in the last six weeks of the year.

I don't think it was this thread. But I read in one of them that Boston is a prime destination for Bauer. Then someone started chiming in with Boston being a liberal city. In voting patterns maybe. But not when it comes to inviting in degenerates and being degenerates themselves. Known as the most racist city in the north. Remember that time that dude threw a beer can at the World Series trophy and damaged it? No? That's because that behaviour is so par for the course from the fan base it's not even a big deal. Bauer would fit in just fine at Fenway. Well maybe not so much pitching half his games at Fenway.

Regarding Bauer and the age debate. It's an interesting one. Bauer is known as one of the most specialized and least athletic baseball players there is. Now does that mean he will age particularly poorly or Bartolo Colon his way to a 20 year career.

LOL the NHL definitely gets more leeway. Junior hockey players have been getting away with gangbangs for years and Hockey Canada is...kinda...sorta...looking into it now. With the same amount of fervor and zeal one would expect when the world's first masculine feminist government leader makes ever sold bold threats against you.

Seems like the $10 million earmarked for Bellinger went to Belt instead. With some adjustments made to the OF defense to make this work for the roster. Imagine the usage of Belt under Montoyo's watch lol. The Jays look like they've been going for higher floor, lower upside type of players this offseason. Which is fine given the streakiness and variability of possible outcomes for the top end of the roster. Just guarantee a playoff spot and worry about the rest once they get in.

Enough with the worst team talk. Let's talk about best expansion team. In the early 90's after the two World Series victories, you could pretty much say it was the Jays having won two in 17 seasons. They've lost some ground, now it's a little muddied. Five expansion teams have won two World Series - Jays, Astros, Mets, Marlins and the Royals. The Marlins have done it in the least amount of years, but I refuse to let them get away with their paltry regular season play. Also, they are in a weird position of having never won a division despite their championships. A sign of a weaker team getting lucky rather than a strong team rightfully claiming its championship victory. The most memorable World Series teams are the ones which were overwhelming favourites. The Yankees dynasties, the Athletics team of 1989 while whimpering out the year before and after, and I would put the Jays back-to-back as a "strong" World Series winner. The 1987 Twins and the 2006 Cardinals are the two worst teams I can think of in my lifetime winning, and the Marlins victories definitely feel closer to those teams than to the Jays, A's or Yankees teams. Royals have played more seasons than the Jays and are generally the worse regular season team with little hope of winning any time soon. So they are out. Astros are the only expansion franchise with a record over .500, with the Jays being close to that mark. Mets are way below .500, but most of that is due to the franchise digging out of a huge hole from their first 5 years, like the Jays. The Astros have their infamous win of 2017 and the dominant win of 2022. The Mets are also in the running, with both of their World Series being well known and memorable - the 1969 Miracle Mets, and the cocaine-fueled Buckner boot series in 1986. All three of the teams are contenders this year, with a pretty good claim to best expansion team if they win. For now I'm going to go the homer root and say the Jays slightly eke it out having 15 less seasons than the other two teams, with the Astros close behind.

Regarding worst team: I repeat, the Mariners (as well as the Jays) are victims of being in more competitive leagues, with multiple playoff-worthy seasons during their droughts. The Mariners are certainly in contention for top 5 worst teams, but they aren't the worst and some of that is due to bad luck. I also took the Marlins out of contention because of their World Series wins despite them being the worst regular season team all-time. I definitely give more weight to the regular season than others do, but that's because others give almost no weight to the regular season at all. I can't stand teams that tank for multiple seasons to eventually get good. Padres, Rockies, Rangers and the Brewers also have a big fat goose egg for World Series wins. I don't think it's fair to penalize the Mariners for not making it to the World Series to such an extent that they are worse than the Padres just because they lucked into a couple of pennants then got stomped in the WS while Seattle's good teams got stomped one or two rounds sooner. The World Series buys your franchise some credibility points. Pennants don't. No one outside of the fanbases of the pennant winners remember pennants.

By far the biggest what-if to me is what if Bautista got hotter just a couple month before in 2009? Would the Jays have kept Halladay? This team went from all pitching-no offense to all offense-no pitching in record time.

I reject your assertion that it's the Mariners by the country mile. I'll play along with your recency bias and ignore the fact that the Phillies didn't whiff a championship for their first 90 years of existence, twice that of Seattle's age. But I won't play along with the Padres. The Padres have a .464 all-time winning percentage versus the Mariners at .474. The Padres may have had 7 playoff appearances in 54 years versus Seattle's 5 in 46, a slightly better ratio. But the Mariners had two years of 93 wins and one year at 90 where they missed the playoffs. Those three seasons basically bookend their drought. San Diego got snubbed once in 2010 with 90 wins, but also have a division pennant with 82. Seattle's lack of franchise success has been impacted by being in a historically more competitive division/league. Put the Padres in the AL and the Mariners in the NL and those two playoff appearances is 2005 and 2006 disappear for the Padres and they have a longer drought than Seattle*. *Depending on the outcome of a Padres tiebreaker against the Rangers in 2010. The Lions pick is a decent choice though.

I know people like coming in with emotions over facts on this board, but the Leafs and Cubs are nowhere near the worst franchises in pro sports. They are both probably in the top half of their sports. Like it or not, the Leafs bought themselves a lot of credibility points back when there was 6-8 teams in the NHL and hardly anyone who saw those teams are still alive. Cubs might have gone over 100 years without a World Series victory, but their team was mostly just mediocre, never bad. The Jays have an equal amount of 100 loss seasons as the Cubs do in 100 less years of existence. The Phillies are the worst MLB franchise. The most losses of any pro sports team in the Universe. I say Universe because I assume some civilization with a billion year head start would have had the good sense to disband a pro sports team before they hit 11,000 losses. Padres and Rockies are next up, avoiding the worst franchise fate only because they were expansion teams and haven't had a chance to suck as long as the Phillies have. Marlins get a break because they somehow snuck in two World Series victories within their s*** history. Honourable mentions to the St. Louis Browns before they became the Orioles and the Washington Senators sucking twice, then losing their team, twice. In terms of overall sports the Arizona Cardinals are like the Leafs since 1967 but the St. Louis Browns before 1967. Clippers obviously in the NBA, plus the T-Wolves. NHL is kind of hard to come up with the worst teams since teams aren't that laughably anemic like in other sports. Maybe the Canucks? They've gone about as long without a Cup win as the Leafs plus they put up s***** regular seasons too. So yeah, any one of those teams I mentioned make acceptable or defendable cases as the worst teams ever. But not the Cubs nor Leafs. Anyone who chooses them is just laughably wrong.

The Jays can sign Bauer but part of the deal is he has to shill Bell phones and internet. That should offset the public company problem.

We just went through this with Cody Bellinger, albeit for very different reasons. Thinking because the Dodgers released him, that no one was going to come close to the arb figure because they could have just paid the arb plus a nothing prospect to 100% secure his services. Then the Cubs sign him for a couple million less than the arb figure and Terminator comes in here flexing his muscles as if anyone wanted to pay more than 1/10 for him. Bauer will find his way on a team somewhere.

Well, s***. Shapiro should fire Atkins and hire you as GM. You seem to have all the solutions!

This conversation seems dead, but I absolutely hate this idea. All these asinine ideas from Manfred regarding low offense and long games stem from the fact the teams routinely go through 30 pitchers a season now. Most of them nameless, faceless slobs who can throw really fast at max effort for 20 pitches. I don't want to make it any easier for teams to do this. If I had my way, I'd put a cap for how many pitchers you can roster in a season. 15 subject to adjustments for season-ending injuries. Force teams to go the Rich Gossage and Mark Eichhorn route when developing their pitching staff and in-game decision making and you'll see a pick up in offense late in games.

I remember that year when Hutchison had a K an inning over 185 innings back when that was still an accomplishment and never understood why he couldn't put it together. Probably the only pitcher in the league who has gone from 9 K per 9 to something like 5 per 9 in the last decade.

Imagine multiple pages dedicated to an argument of hitting versus defense when the last game the Jays played they scored 9 runs, lost and blew an 8-1 lead with the final blow being a bloop defensive gaffe.

Just remembered that the Jays will be facing AL East opponents six less times this year. That should be good for another 2-3 more wins than if facing the 2022 schedule.

So I did some random reading/watching about that ridiculous 1884 season from Old Hoss Radbourn and figured that he had to be #1 single season highest WAR of all time. Turns out he was #2: https://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/WAR_season.shtml I just had a laugh over the mugshots and how one of these things is not like the rest (for multiple reasons). Then I had to think how absolutely ridiculous that 1985 Gooden season had to have been that the only comparables are Ruth and pitchers that threw 600 innings in a year. He blows Ohtani away, blows Bonds away. The only one that comes close that was recent enough for most of us to witness it was Clemens when he was a Jay. How the hell did this dude not make it into the HOF after that season at age 20? I know how people talk about Bellinger or the tragedy around Jose Fernandez and wasted opportunity but I don't think we will ever see a flame out on the level of Dwight Gooden again.

Can Spanky still make short and bald jokes though? Those are sort of like disabilities, and are some of his best material.

This is a tough question. Do I think this roster is better now than on April 1, 2022, having seen them play out 2022? Yes. But do I think the Jays are better now than what I thought on April 1? No. I legit thought this was a 100 win team. Then the same BP issues propped up, Berrios took a big s***, and Guerrero was 3-4 WAR lower than where I expected him to be. I expected 100+ wins in 2022 and a serious playoff run, got 92 and a sorry playoff performance instead. Now I expect around 95 wins, which is better than 2022 but lower than my expectations of the 2022 team. So there's my long winded non-answer.

Reading some more of these comments, it feels like people still have PTSD from the Ricciardi drafting and development years where the best home grown talents were Lind, Hill, Romero and Rios over a decade. That PTSD has resulted in prospect hoarding syndrome. I suffer from it too sometimes, since my first reaction to the deal wasn't positive. After looking at the situation, it's a fair trade and both sides have won. Regarding the farm being thin. Of course it's going to be thin. They just graduated a whole ton of guys over the past 2-3 years and have a pretty set roster for the next 2-3 years. By the time they need some replacements, the farm will have been replenished. I'm also in the camp that the Jays know their prospects best and trust them when they are "selling low". Previous regimes would have us believing that Ricky Romero was the ace of the future because they had no choice but to hype up what little they had. On a team where guys like pittance free agent signing Kirk and late round draft pick Jansen came up with relatively little fanfare to become significant contributors, the Jays have set themselves up where they can "sell low" on Moreno...and two years from now we'll probably see a Moreno-level talent to be excited over again. And yes Jansen was an AA pick but he didn't really do much in the minors until Shapiro was around so the new regime gets credit for their role in player development. When you pick a guy past the 10th round that turns into a good player that's 90% PD, 10% draft luck and 0% draft skill. If you were that good, you should have picked him at least 5 rounds beforehand.