RickJay

Yeah, I'm not sure why Izturis should be the first guy on the DFA train. He can at least use a glove, which Emilio cannot, and sad though the comparison is, he's a better hitter.

It's evident now that he didn't pan out, but what was your impression of him two years ago? It's chancy, but it's not the sheer lottery the latter rounds are. A first round pick is no guarantee, but the success rate is high enough that wasting your pick on someone who never pans out can be considered a pretty expensive failure. A ninth round pick that doesn't pan out, well, you don't really EXPECT them to, you're just filling your organization and hoping some of them develop. A first round pick that fails is a legitimate screwup. Half of all first rounders make the majors and a surprisingly high percentage become regular MLB ballplayers.

Nobody projects the organization's problems onto the broadcasters. Pat Tabler continues to be the color guy on TV despite sitting there through years of incompetence and being just about the least informative color commentator in the history of sports. I cannot remember him ever saying anything insightful I couldn't have heard from the guy sitting next to be at the ball game. The broadcasting team is a different business with different priorities, and Wilner's keeping his job has little to do with how true or intelligent his comments are - in fact, you can make a pretty strong case that they want stupid announcers (see: Pat Tabler.)

They signed him because at the time he did have promise. Martin is a big kid, and they saw someone who had the raw potential to become a serious power hitter. But it didn't work out; he never developed the ability to hit home runs. After two years in which he showed no development, they cut their losses. It's impossible to know for sure how a 17- or 18-year-old kid will develop; some exceed your expectations, and for some, how good they are at 17 is how good they'll ever be. Signing minor league free agents, and drafting kids beyond the first or second round, is a lottery. Some work, some don't. There's no other way to put it.

Ortiz just, just missed hitting that ball to England. Buehrle does not look good.

That understanding implicitly exists between all MLB teams and their AAA counterparts. Many AAA teams have decided to let their affiliation contracts run out specifically because their MLB masters couldn't put decent teams on the field. If Anthopolous told Buffalo he'd give them a good team he wasn't saying anything 29 other GMs didn't say. Look at the rosters of any AAA team; they're all full of marginal veterans who can play decent AAA baseball but have little future as prospects. That's on purpose. If AA is actually keeping players in Buffalo to allow the Bisons to win games knowing it will cost the able Jays games, he should of course be fired. But I don't think that's the case.

Because teams sign lots of guys with some degree of promise, knowing man of them won't pan out. This is a routine occurrence. Every team does this many times a season.

Whatever Negrych's BABIP, 1. There comes a time when you begin to expose yourself to ridicule by making a personnel choice in defiance of the immediate facts, and this is one of them. Negrych is destroying the International League, and Emilio Bonifacio is embarrassing himself and his team. If we were talking about two weeks' worth of games that's one thing, but it's May, Bonifacio isn't getting any better, and if a guy batting .430 in the IL with incompetent players in the major leagues ISN'T good enough to get promoted, the guys in Buffalo are going to start wondering just what IS good enough to get promoted. 2. I simply do not believe Negrych can possibly be a worse player than Bonifacio. He isn't going to bat .430, but he looks like a guy who could bat .260, draw a walk here and there, and play competent defense, three things Emilio Bonifacio cannot do. Bonifacio's OPS+ is what, 30? If Negrych is ever going to play reasonable Major LEague baseball, it's in 2013; he is at the height of his powers, right now. The upside of recalling him is that he could play shockingly well and be traded for something before he turns into Mike McCoy. Suppose he comes up, bats .285 in a hundred games... it'd help the team immensely, win some games, and you could deal him to a sucker organization for a B prospect. 2-B. But suppose Negrych fails. So what? What have you lost? Realistically, you've lost nothing. Bonifacio is unwanted; it's not likely anyone would claim him and if they do, oh well. If Negrych blows a game or two, will it really matter to this magnificent 13-24 team? There's basically no downside. 3. There furthermore comes a time when the players need to be held accountable and the organization needs to say "Look, we have to start replacing people if we keep losing," and replacing injured players or the eighth guy in the bullpen doesn't count. I'm not suggesting they panic and trade Brett Lawrie; you have to be sane. But if you don't have the stones to replace the utility guy batting .165, just what ARE you willing to do?

So wait, how many position players are on this team now? 12? Christ, what a fiasco. You know how should have been fired some time ago? George Poulis. When did this team last NOT have an injury-plagued season?

AA has never really stated a love of YOUNG players, so much as UNDER CONTROL, even marginal ones. Which is fine, there's nothing wrong with valuing cost certainty. I'm not sure we can all be that critical of the guy unless we were similarly critical before April 2. To extend the poker analogy about as far as you can, he decided to go all in with a pair of jacks, which is a decent move. It'll probably pay off, but it's not certain. But now the flop has come 4-5-6 of diamonds and everyone else is throwing more money in, so it looks 99% likely someone's got the nut flush or straight. So be it. You win some you lose some. What's driving people bananas about this is 1. Blue Jay fans are, understandably, just fed up. Had the Jays not collapsed in 2000 and quite possibly thrown the division title away, or had they not been so unlucky in 2008, the playoffs wouldn't be a distant memory and this would be a frustrating but not enraging experience. This isn't just people angry about 13-24, it's people angry about 1994-2012. The team has had the prospects and the resources to win for twenty years and has screwed it up, year after year. The impatience is now exploding over this team blowing it. 2. Although the team and their apologists now deny it, the fact is the Jays DID help pump up the hype. The trades themselves were much publicized as win-now trades, the team was bragging about the moves, and the marketing campaign is triumphant in nature; the "Stadium Love" commercials are telling you "Colby Rasmus, Superstar," not "Colby Rasmus, Strikeout King." If you promise people a four-diamond-restaurant steak and instead you give them yesterday's meatloaf, of course they're going to be angry, and 3. The team is quite literally as dismal as one could possibly imagine. This isn't a bad team. This is a HORRIBLE team. Essentially everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong. If they were disappointing but not ludicrously bad, if there was something fun to watch, I think people would shrug their shoulders, look at the positives, and say "Meh, something good will happen soon." But this is on track to be the worst team since the expansion years, and there's nothing to see. No hitter is any good, really. The only good pitchers sit in the bullpen, either unused or pitching scoreless innings in game where the starting pitcher has already lost it or the hitters can't hit.

I'm not sure which is worse, the Angel Hernandez debacle or the pitching change idiocy. They're both stupid in such different ways. Dan Shulman sure gets one thing right, though; the video review should not be done by the umps, it should be done by an independent official in MLB's head office. That said, maybe not everyone here remembers, but umpiring actually used to be WORSE than this. I know that's hard to believe, but prior to the Great Quitting, you had a lot of old umpires from the 1960s-1970s school who were often not only lousy umps, but almost all of them were belligerent prima donnas. Imagine a whole league of umps like Cowboy Joe West and Angel Hernandez. Nowadays you don't even know 80% of them because they're professionals who keep their heads down, which is the way it should be. Back in the day, there were too many Cowboy Joes. No ump today is as incompetent as Eric Gregg.

Rasmus - this is going to sound stupid, but I'm not sure how else to explain it - just tends to miss the ball a lot. It's not just that he falls behind in counts, or gets fooled by a certain pitch, or chases out of the zone. He, more than almost any batter of equivalent strength and quickness I've ever seen, just tends to swing at a perfectly hittable pitch and miss it. That's actually not a particularly normal thing for a major league batter; an MLB hitter who misses a pitch usually does so because he incorrectly guesses the location or speed of the pitch. Rasmus, it's pretty obviouos, will quite often miss a fastball that he was looking for, that's in the zone, but he just doesn't put his bat where the ball is. That strongly suggests a problem with his mechanics. I haven't really seen a lot of slow mo tape of Rasmus but I know they've been working on the positioning of his hands, and that does tend to be the most common issue that leads to plain missing the ball. When people talk about a "hitch," that's what causes the ball to be over or under the ball; the tendency to misalign the hands after the load. I'm not an MLB hitting coach but I can't help but notice Rasmus's hands move a lot before the swing, and the bat is held at a really extreme angle where the barrel actually extends over his head towards the pitcher, which is rarely a good thing. (Jose Bautista does that too but he's such an unusual batter than he's not really someone anyone else should try to imitate.)

No mention of Steve Blass? 1972: 19-8, 2.49, 4.0 WAR, and [pitched well in the NLCS: 1973: Maybe the worst season in the history of baseball by a pitcher who pitched that many innings; -4.0 WAR (really) in 88.2 IP. Walked 84 men. Just could not hit a battleship from sixty feet. His team finished 2.5 behind so it's fair to say his sudden yips cost the Pirates the division. There's a reason they call it Steve Blass Disease.