Terminator

You don't always have to touch the base.

lol Well he is batting after Francisco and his massive manly hacks so that doesn't help.

Well then that's even worse. He's clearly a better pitcher than Hendricks.

AA said something along the lines of going with Hendricks avoids having to use a starter who is limited to 65-80 pitches for a couple of starts as they gain arm strength. If he wouldn't have put Stroman in the bullpen for two weeks this whole problem would have been avoided. We are going to need 7 or 8 starters by the end of the season. Hendricks likely would have gotten his shot sooner or later but he should have been in line behind Stroman and then Redmond.

If we get a starting pitcher I we'd have a pretty good shot to win this division. 85 wins could very well take it.

Alvarez does look like a legit #4. As for the rest of those guys, this is just my opinion but Hech and Marisinick are bench players. I am not sold on either Nicolino or DeSclafani, I wouldn't bet on either being serviceable starters in the big leagues but maybe they'll prove me wrong. I agree with you on Escobar, he was wasted in a deal because of non-baseball reasons.

I kind of prefer Pillar. He can (supposedly) hit lefties so in addition to being the backup OF he can platoon at DH with Lind.

There is?

Navarro is fine as a patchwork starter and for what we are paying him. As others have stated, he's probably better suited as a good backup to a mediocre starter but for 4 mil in FA he's fine.

We didn't have the money to outbid the hometown Phillies for Ruiz.

I'm Ron Burgundy?

I remember that one now. Thanks.

Has Diaz ever laid a bunt down?

I see it all the time still.

That's really dumb of the FO. Even if they view him as the 3rd best Catcher, that's not how they should see it. They should see him as a much needed platoon partner for Lind. The fact that he can play C is only a bonus that shouldn't be looked at as a detriment because we already have 2 Catchers on the roster.

Should I have said daily? It was a dumb joke about how often Yunel Escobar (and how he is no longer a Jay) is referenced.

Ah, the weekly Yunel Escobar compared to Jose Reyes thread. Always a pleasure.

This should be our bench: C/DH: Kratz- platoon partner for Lind, I'd actually start him at C in those situations and move Navarro to DH C: Thole- catches Dickey, pinch hitter, emergency 1B UT: Tolleson- platoon him and Francisco with Lawrie switching between 3B and 2B OF: Gose- backup OF, defensive replacement, and pinch runner It isn't half bad but AA seems to hate the idea of having a backup CF on the team.

I thought that was done to make room for Janssen. Then Santos being replace with Jenkins. Then who is being moved for Diaz?

Oh no, bringing up Diaz for who??

Before the season weren't a lot on this board dreading AA trading Sanchez for Samardzija?

AL East race might be closest ever Projections have all five teams finishing within two games of one another Updated: May 6, 2014, 3:30 PM ET By Dan Szymborski | ESPN Insider Sometimes our expectations are thwarted by reality, as Arizona Diamondbacks fans and Pittsburgh Pirates fans looking forward to October baseball have found. In the case of the AL East, the expectations coming into the season were that of a brutal melee, a yearlong war of attrition that left all five teams beaten, battered and bloodied in its aftermath. So far, these predictions have come true. As of Monday morning, a scant 2 1/2 games separate the AL East leader, the New York Yankees, from the AL East cellar dweller, the Toronto Blue Jays. While that's a larger number than the separation between first and last in the NL East, the difference is that nobody really considers the Mets, Marlins and Phillies to be in the same tier of ability as the Braves and Nationals. The AL East is a different story. Five competitive teams In the preseason, the ESPN Forecaster panel picked the Blue Jays to win 77 games on average, the best predicted record of any last-place team in baseball. The ZiPS projection system saw the AL East as excruciatingly close. The difference in average expectation between best (Boston) and worst (Toronto) was only seven wins over a 162-game season, the smallest spread in the 11 years ZiPS has projected the leagues. Since the end of March, that race has gotten even tighter. The two teams projected to be at the top of a very tight division, the Red Sox and Rays, have been treading water so far, and those mediocre Aprils are baked into the final record. The closeness of the race now is almost shocking, as can be seen in the ZiPS mean projections for the five teams for the rest of the season (see table). ZiPS projects four of the five teams in the AL East to have a mean projection of finishing at 83 wins, with Toronto only a couple of games back. Now, that doesn't mean that 84 wins will win the AL East; it just means that, according to the projections, no single team in the division is more likely to finish with more than 84 games than not. In other words, the AL East isn't likely to come down to who has the most talented team, but simply luck and which of the very evenly matched teams play above their expectations. Historically close In the million simulations that make up the ZiPS final projections, the eventual AL East winner ended with just 89 wins. That's an unusually low number for a division that features some of baseball's most talented and wealthiest teams. Not counting the years shortened due to strikes, for obvious reasons, 89 wins won the AL East outright on only three occasions during the divisional era: 1972, 1990 and 2000. Among tight races, where does this possible one rank historically? Going through the million sims of the ZiPS-projected AL East final standings for 2014, the average standard deviation for the teams in the division is 3.27 wins. To compare this historically, I repeated this simple measure of spread for the top five teams in every divisional and league race going back to 1901 and found that, yes, this projects to be an unusually open race. Of the 354 races looked at -- the strike-shortened 1981 and 1994 seasons are excluded, and 2014 projections for the other divisions are included -- the 2014 AL East projects to rank sixth among all races in tightness of the top five teams, and the tightest race of the wild-card era. Smallest standard deviation among top five teams 1. 1988 AL East, 1.48 2. 1973 NL East, 1.92 3. 1964 NL, 2.00 4. 1967 AL, 3.21 5. 1915 Federal League, 3.24 6. 2014 AL East, 3.27 (projected) 7. 1987 AL West, 3.35 8. 1933 NL, 3.56 9. 2005 NL East, 3.81 10. 1940 AL 3.90 Not surprisingly, the most wide-open races by this methodology include some of the most storied races in baseball history. The 1988 AL East was a three-way battle between the Red Sox, Yankees and Tigers until the Red Sox built a five-game lead that they nearly blew in the final week. The 1973 Mets pulled out the pennant in a weak division after being in last place as late as Aug. 30 that year. The 1967 American League race is still known as the "Impossible Dream" year by Red Sox fans; it featured a final day of the season in which three teams had an opportunity to be the sole first-place team, and the race was decided only when Twins starter Dean Chance melted down in the sixth inning of the Twins-Red Sox game. If early results are any indication, this year's AL East race could end up being an all-time classic. It's rare we see a true five-team race, but this is shaping up to be one of them.

Yeah, that option has a lot of merit as well. A Getz/Tolleson platoon at 2B with Francisco getting a pinch hit AB once a game would give us solid defense.

I'd start Francisco at 3B and Lawrie at 2B. I feel that Francisco has a chance to post a 2-3 WAR season whereas whatever shitbag 2B AA wants to call up (whether it be Tolleson/Getz/Kawasaki/Diaz/Goins/etc.) is replacement value at best. This plan also kind of hinges on Lawrie being able to play 2B acceptably, something I'm not entirely sold on. It's not ideal at all, but this roster has a gaping hole and I think it's the best way to fix it.

Not sure where else to post this but AA's solution to a Lind platoon partner is staring him right in the face in the form of Erik Kratz. He should be on the big league team, even if it means having 3 Catchers. Heck, when facing a lefty instead of having Kratz DH just have him catch and move Navarro to DH. Kratz is better defensively and it will give Navarro some needed rest. He's also played some 1B so perhaps in a jam he could do it again. Same for Thole. C/DH/1B- Kratz C- Thole INF- Tolleson INF- Getz I'd swap Getz (keep Tolleson bc his splits against lefties are pretty solid) for Gose and then you are looking at a somewhat serviceable bench.