Dick_Pole

I wouldn't call Rendon stupid. I'd say he just doesn't give enough of a s*** to avoid saying dumb things. Then does the bare minimum to avoid getting lynched. I can't imagine playing for the Angels is much of a motivator. Especially how things turned out for the team since July of last year.

Probably some nerd metrics in the baseball nerdosphere are gaining traction and they are telling pitchers, particularly mediocre ones, to give it a try. Until there is an uptick in elbow injuries that they haven't yet accounted for in the models. Who am I kidding? They don't care about that. The more guys on the long term IL, the more interchangeable RP you can flow through your 40-man like an assembly line. A baseball-ruining nerd's wet dream.

Noticeable trend for Max ITT. Every jobber the Jays let go is s***. Every jobber the Jays keep is gold and must be defended in essay-like rants. Had Ryu returned, he would have outperformed Pearson. Granted, he'd also come at a higher cost.

Everyone's post history here is terrible. Including mine. Stop throwing rocks from your glass houses, losers.

That was before two more miserable years of underperforming players and zero playoff wins with the most frustrating playoff exits possible. People get angry at this because they are rightfully angry at the Jays front office. These are just lightning rods used as scapegoats for anger because the real issues behind the failures the Jays have encountered are more complex. Like why so many of the young stars from this team massively underperformed previous years and expectations. Bad health advice and training? Bad leadership? Bad team chemistry? Bad coaching? Bad computer nerd advice? Could be a mix of all of those but in lieu of having those difficult to pinpoint answers, blaming the team for signing Vogelbach is what fans settle for.

Remember when this man suggested (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that the Jays sign Votto, Donaldson and some other over-the-hill has been and was relentlessly mocked for it? Welp, the Jays have been dumpster diving a tier below that. I know MILB and all. But someone else said it well. A better team with depth doesn't even waste an MILB spot with this type of player.

I would be totally on board with Rogers increasing the price of the women's channel, LGBT channel and anything else that doesn't appeal to straight (white) sports-loving men and drop that extra revenue dollar for dollar into the Jays payroll.

Not sure if anyone was strongly against what he believed. Or was merely providing a rebuttal due to the very annoying and repetitive way he would present his argument. Team might have to shed some payroll under certain circumstances. And then expand on that idea using about 10,000 words over 100 posts. Wow, groundbreaking stuff. He deserves no apologies. I haven't read a full dean post that is more than 2 sentences in a while.

Isiah Kiner-Falefa is the baseball version of Ice Spice. Way too much conversation about such a minimal impact player when there is far more important things to discuss about this team.

Mauer is definitely a guy who comes across as "hmm I thought he did more than that" when you actually look at his career. Some guys are just blessed by being memorable. Even though he was in a small market. Give the Twins some credit. They have three team-exclusive Hall of Famers in Puckett, Oliva and Mauer. By HOF standards, all three definitely rank in the bottom half, maybe even bottom 10% of all HOFers. That really challenges the narrative around players being underappreciated in small markets. Like, if these three guys spent their entire careers with the Yankees, would they even sniff the Hall of Fame? Pretty sure Bernie Williams knows the answer to that. Don Mattingly can back him up. They made the best of being big fish in small ponds. And now Canadians have to go re-think why their narrative "Halladay/Stieb/Delgado/Player X was underappreciated cuz Toronto ain't New York" clearly doesn't apply to the Twins.

Low scoring environments = defense valued more. Higher scoring environments = defense valued less. I guess one day when Manfred is replaced by someone with balls and we see pitching roster limits so teams can't game the system rostering forty 98 mile an hour jobbers throughout the year and 10-8 games become the norm again, defense first players will be habitually undervalued even with Statcast and computer nerd defense stats available.

Not sure how old you are but I think there is a bit of revisionist history when it comes to this thought that defense wasn't as emphasized. Defense wasn't as easily quantified and there were mistakes on how to properly evaluate defense. But it was definitely valued. Ray Schalk wouldn't be in the HOF if it wasn't. Look at how pathetic the 80's were with small ball and bunting and such. You don't get to that point unless defense plays a very big role in the sport. If anything, it's the turn of the century where defense was abandoned in favour of dingers at every possible position. And now that I write this out, I'm almost talking myself into agreeing with your point because that was right around the time when Beltre was in Seattle lol. So I guess my point of contention isn't that defense was "once less valued" but that at that specific time defense was valued less than it may have been in the 1980's or today. It ebbs and flows in baseball as opposed to it being less prioritized until Statcast came along.

Pretty clear to me why. There's an upper tier of HOFer and lower tiers, especially as the HOF got watered down with a player like Harold Baines. You might not agree with somebody's reason for voting or not voting someone in, but you should be able to understand the logic behind it. Griffey? Maddux? Randy Johnson? Definitely yes. Todd Helton....ehhhh yeah maybe but let's make him wait a few years first. As punishment for not being as good as those other guys. For instance, if I was voting, I would not have voted for Jeter. Knowing that he's a definite lock and absurdly popular and I don't want to contribute to the 99.9% yes total that should be reserved for the best of the best who made a mockery of the 100 WAR line. Ultimately none of this stuff matters or should matter. But it kind of does.

I agree that the luxury tax is unlikely to be an impossible hurdle. The problem is the team simply can't find anyone worthy to spend the money. At no time this off season have the Jays made it obvious that they are scrounging for spare cash. They have overpaid or fairly paid everyone and haven't made low hanging fruit cost cutting decisions that multiple people have mentioned over the last couple of pages. A guy like Bellinger is likely a bridge too far for the team. So they are stuck paying jobbers in hopes of one WAR improvements here and there. Also brought up by other people, but I'm surprised they haven't taken in any salary dumps yet. Maybe they are working on it. Right now this is probably the best use of payroll flexibility. I think more teams are working on this angle. That's why you still have such a wide list of free agents out there a couple weeks before spring training. Almost like accidental collusion. Let's see if Tatis or someone of his ilk gets moved somewhere in a surprise move. Then we might see the FA market get more active.

Manoah was seen as a big baby last year. But then what happened with Berrios being pulled early, a collective WTF from the players and then Schneider being thrown under bus, Manoah was partially vindicated in my eyes. In that it certainly wasn't 100% his fault as initial optics indicated. We had Atkins acting like a weaselly weenie two months later. Who knows what kind of conversation those two had in private. Especially if Manoah's size and temperament gives Atkins PTSD from his high school years. Reasonable to think that Jays FO can be evasive or non-direct with Manoah because they are a little bit scared of him. Then the 25 yo who tasted his first bit of adversity is left to navigate the situation all by himself. Then does what every person his age has been trained to do. Cry on social media when things don't go his way.

There was a guy in my high school who was 20 lol. So it can work the other way around.

Fangraphs and projection sites are the Yahoo Finance of the nerd baseball world. Literally anyone can go to Yahoo Finance look up some numbers for a few minutes and come to a conclusion to buy or sell a stock with justification and try to look smart while doing it. Meanwhile actual smart people come up with numbers that can't be found on Yahoo Finance or reasons beyond ones that any literate stock bro can come up with to buy or sell a stock. They are the ones who make the best money not the bandwagon jumpers after the fact. Manoah's projections mean f*** all. He's a volatile asset. His range of possibilities is too wide to fairly analyze. He is the Spirit Airlines or iRobot of baseball pitchers right now. Might as well keep him than dump near the lows. Tax loss selling occurs in December not January for a good reason.

I am not in favour of trading Manoah for the suggestions made it this thread. f*** these ******** projections. Or even what happened to his stuff last year. Manoah has a good risk to reward trade-off. The risk is basically nil. No downside to keeping him. Unless you think his personality is cancerous in the clubhouse. The upside is high. Who cares if the projections or whatever suggest his return to form is a longshot. Still exists. Laika is 100% dead wrong to laugh him off as a Rich Hill comparable. Rich Hill has been a FA jobber hopping from one team to the next for years. Manoah is an ex-first rounder who was hyped by the team and initially lived up to the hype. They may "project" the same but they don't have the same value to a team owned by a mega-corporation that feels entitled to an entire country's fan base. This isn't the Rays. Sometimes you need to move away from the computer numbers and weigh in external factors. Flip side if you trade him, the upside is whatever jobber you get, as discussed here. Very limited upside. Downside is Manoah is an all-star pitching in SD and Atkins can be dunked on all season like with Moreno. Team looks awful as they ruined him, let him go for cheap then SD of all places fixed him up. You know a guy like Manoah wouldn't shut up about it either. Atkins' only upside to trading Manoah is if he strikes out so hard that people at least stop talking about the Varsho trade. Better to keep him for better or for worse. If he sucks, he's buried at no real cost to the team until DFA years later when you're absolutely sure there is no hope. If he's good, then everyone involved takes their share of the victory lap in overcoming adversity or whatever.

I agree with that above statement. Some people spend too much time on this forum, where years of fellating the Rays from certain posters have spread like a disease. There is a mindless acceptance of the idea that you HAVE to trade a player to seek out some kind of value. And people harp on it forever if you don't trade the player "at the right time" or at all. Josh Donaldson, FVV, Siakam and I already saw a comment about Bichette a couple of days ago. People getting an early jump on him while the Jays are still expected to be playoff contenders for the next two seasons. Sometimes it's just the best alternative to hold onto the player. Maybe you thought you could compete and it just didn't work out. It's not like the package they got for Siakam was amazing. Imagine how little they would have gotten for VanVleet. A team that's competently run can afford to lose some players to free agency for nothing and recover by acquiring players using means other than trading pending free agents.

Hmm, the guy they got out of New Orleans as a cost cutting measure might have some potential. Former 13th overall pick at age 19 as a sophomore, injuries derailed his development.

Guess we see the end of that dumbass McDonald's promotion. I mean, who the hell is in charge of their marketing? Some 80 year old who has never seen sports? You had nearly a decade to do a lame Siakam swirl promotion and you wait until a trade is imminent to start one?

Just a bit of hyperbole. If the Jays find themselves in contention over the next couple of years and feel that him on their roster provides the best shot at winning games, they absolutely 100% must keep him to free agency. Not trading a 4-5 WAR player with 1+ years of control left isn't going to set this franchise back 5 years lol.

Yes, those two things would be positively correlated.

If Arizona gets bounced first round and the Jays make it to the World Series, no one talks about Varsho. He is a scapegoat for everything that people don't like about Atkins. Is it fair to him? No. But complaining about how other fans choose to be fans of the team is a little bit of a lost cause.

As added punishment to being a fan of this team, it should be required that Frenchsoup is allowed to post unabated and no one can IL him until either the Jays win a World Series or Atkins gets fired. The instant one of those two events happen, he gets booted.