Terminator

You can only polish a turd so much! OF still looks like s***!

Our OF is so bad.

The worst thing about him is that he framed the lineup card or whatever and made it an ordeal. It's like come on dude, you got rocked. Bad look IMO

Flurry of moves being made today. Good on Atkins for recognizing how s*** the roster looked and making the changes to improve it.

Biggio starting at 2B tonight. Saw it on twitter. I think Drury is probably better at 2B but he's probably just a bench player moving forward. I think trying to develop Biggio there is the right move and I hope he gets the lion's share of the starts there.

Bat Biggio leadoff you coward

Need to clear a spot on the 40 man for Biggio too so I think Feierband is definitely toast.

Haven't seen this mentioned yet but Zac Rosscup was claimed. Going to need to make a move for him. Will definitely be a reliever but I'm not sure who. Could be Feierabend even though he doesn't have options.

Who knows what order Montoyo will put them in or what positions the defensively flexible guys will actually play but the starting lineup looks a lot better and should resemble something like this: C- Jansen 1B- Smoak (S) 2B- Sogard/Drury (L/R) 3B- Vlad Jr. SS- Galvis (S) LF- Biggio (L) CF- Grichuk RF- Gurriel DH- Tellez (L) Bench- Maile, Sogard/Drury, Davis

I'll be interested to see where they play both of these two, particularly Biggio. Corner OF needs the most help but Sogard is cooling off too. Hopefully with more OF options it means Grichuk will be full-time in CF and Davis will be in a permanent bench role. Watching him start the last 6 games was testing my fandom.

Agreed. Throw them a player where we have extra org depth, some cash or perhaps even international money. At this point it's safe to say that the juice (a Top 25-30 organizational prospect) just isn't worth the squeeze (rostering one of the worst relievers in baseball on the 25 man all season long). If Elvis was a Top 10 organizational prospect type then fine but he's not. On top of it I wonder how this affects his development. Can't be ideal.

Yeah he has definitely beat my expectations. Should be a decent player for us. Problem is, no defense power guys like him go for about 4 million bucks on the FA market right now so he's probably only providing surplus until he hits Arb. Hopefully his plate discipline issues resolves and he gets a little extra OBP to go with that power.

I'll give you Jansen. Dude was a Top 40 prospect and his defense is better than advertised. His bat turns around and I agree, he could become a Top 5 Catcher. We're on the same page with him. But the other guys? How are you "as hopeful as ever" that 2 of those 4 become average players? Are you basing that off of anything? Maybe Tellez? Oh come on get out of here with that preachy ******** lol! I'm not whining just for the sake of it. I'm stat scouting/stat casting them all the best I can. Just not seeing what I like and what it means for next year. Steamer/Zips/Statcast all say these guys suck. If you provide evidence otherwise I'd love to hear it. Cheers.

He's slashing .248/.302/.467. League average this year is .244/.319/.418 but that includes NL teams and their pitchers hitting. Rowdy is basically an average bat. Could get to solidly above average but even then he's one of the slowest runners in the league and a poor fielder.

You have to consider minor league numbers as well and McKinney hasn't exactly shined there either. On top of it, he's in the bottom 5% of exit velocity this year which is actually kind of hard to believe. I just don't see what there is to like with him right now.

Who do you specifically think will be a decent to good asset? -Jansen should be solid -Teoscar has almost 900 PAs and little to show for it, turning 27 this year -Drury has 1200 and has performed even worse than Teoscar with the bat, turning 27 this year too -McKinney has almost 300 PAs and a negative half WAR to his name, going to be 25 this year -Tellez is actually an average bat but that's not good enough given his poor defense and baserunning -Gurriel in 300 PAs is replacement, he'll be 26 in less than 5 months -Surely you don't mean Urena, might have a decent glove though -Then there are the Brito and Davis' of the team who are barely worth mentioning So yeah, you say some of these guys will be decent or good but I can't tell who are you actually talking about other than Jansen.

I hear you but that's not a good excuse IMO. When you sign injury prone 30-somethings like Buccholz and Shoemaker don't get caught with your pants down when they get hurt.

The trades have been fine. They've traded a bunch of crap and got little in return. Looks like 2 guys might stick in Grichuk (an average regular who we have since locked up long term) and Thornton (a backend starter). They've basically ignored FA, despite prices being ridiculously low, so they could play Teoscar, McKinney, Gurriel, Drury, etc., none of which are panning out. It's almost remarkable that they've rolled the dice with over half the lineup and haven't hit on a single guy this year. Their moves to patch the rotation have been just as disastrous. Jonathan Davis being the leadoff hitter, making emergency May trades for Edwin Jackson and starting a knuckleballer like Feireband....yeesh. The end result is a s***** team with TONS of holes, a good but top heavy farm system that won't be able to patch all the holes, and a clean slate with the payroll. I'm not seeing a quick path back to .500 (or even being decent) here, especially with a bad rotation and bullpen that is only going to get worse once we trade Stroman and Giles.

When the team is a dumpster fire little things get magnified. Now Atkins is throwing his manager under the bus over this lol. To think it all could have been avoided if Vlad simply would have been given the day off before or after.

Roger Clemens started a game for them a couple years back too. I went to a game before, pretty nice park.

Montoyo batting Jonathan Davis leadoff two days in a row.

Lol geezus. If I gave you the first part of that tweet about bunting practice and told you to come up with a way to make it sound even worse I doubt any of us could actually beat the real tweet.

That's a fair take. I do think keeping a Pillar, signing a better bullpen piece and another starting pitcher or something wouldn't have killed the long-term development of the franchise but let's just forget that and examine the players they did decide to role with. It's pretty damn remarkable at how badly they whiffed on all these guys. They all seem to be hit the ball hard types with plate discipline issues. Whatever Shatkins thought they could do to fix the plate discipline is failing miserably. As for re-shuffling the deck, I'm not sure how many more times they are going to be able to do that. Sub-.500 finishes and trending down in the win column will only be tolerated for so long. The bottom has fallen out and the franchise is in the toilet. We have like 4 or 5 good big leaguers on the 25-man, it's going to take a while to turn that around and for the first time since Shatkins has gotten here I'm questioning if they'll see it through.