KingKat

That's not very encouraging at all. Makes the May timetable seem pretty arbitrary. Looks like we'll see a lot of Goins and Barney and maybe some Maicer too.

Thanks for posting. Immediately after I watched it, they autoplay gave me Phillips' interview with Jose: http://www.tsn.ca/mlb/video/bautista-addresses-his-contract-demands-and-more-in-candid-interview~817975

"Our depth is not that strong". Thank you Shapiro for stating the obvious. This team has done a good job of crossing the most obvious needs, putting rotations together for the big team and for AAA, bringing in another late inning reliever, signing a few bench guys and try out candidates but that's just addressing the most obvious needs. It's still not exceptional depth. Lots of question marks in the OF depth chart, Goins playing every day to start the season, Josh Thole is terrible but a necessary evil, 1B platoon takes away a lot of your roster flexibility. The team isn't pushing as much minor league talent onto the roster as AA did and that's a good thing but that's mostly because there's hardly anything left to push. AA would had have to sign guys for a AAA rotation and would have needed to bring in guys like Maicer, Tony Sanchez and Matt Dominguez too. Plugging holes is nice but Shapiro made it clear he'd still like to have better depth. Some of that may get addressed internally at spring training but it sounds like the team might still bring in more bodies too if the opportunity is there.

The harassment case happened when he was with the Mets before he went to ESPN and had his tryst.

I love anything from the original Planet of the Apes.

Yeah for all the talk of depth, the off-season hasn't done anything particularly remarkable in terms of addressing it. For the most part, it's just been bringing back guys who were here before and some fringy roster candidates on the side. Then there's been moves like Storen/Revere which don't address depth at all but just shift it around. I mean I have no problem with the moves overall but at the end of the day, this team still doesn't have exceptional depth. There's better pitching depth than there was last year and mostly mediocre depth elsewhere which is par for the course.

It's a board meme not a serious call for moderation.

When Goins/Pillar/Donaldson will come up in a big situation, the lineup will look awful but there's no guarantee that will happen with any frequency. There's so much variance. For every time, your s***** lineup works against you, there will be times where it lines up perfectly late in the game in a big situation but no one will notice that. They'll only notice the times it doesn't work. In the end, it's likely to all be a wash.

If this was AA, he's be called insane for wanting Bruce. No one would have a problem with Brown. It's a good no risk upside play.

A perfectly cromulent ride?

Well Lewis couldn't exactly will them to win the World Series when he started covering them. That's no doubt an outcome he would have rooted for but as it turns out, it really didn't seem to affect the popularity of his eventual book.

Yeah but even before Hollywood got involved, Lewis had already shifted the spotlight away from many of the good players and towards the marginal ones in his book.

When it started to become clear Tulo doesn't want to do it, Martin became my favourite choice for leadoff but again, this is practically a non-issue. Overall the expected run value for a month or two of a s***** lead-off hitter is negligible even before you start accounting for creative platoon scenarios.

You. Possibly only you.

Maybe a leadoff platoon with the other guy hitting somewhere in the bottom third of the order?

Good way to squeeze the maximum plate appearance out of however few games he plays.

Well I don't like it more than anyone else but I'm assuming we're just talking about a temporary assignment anyways. Basically means they prefer not to mess with the hear of the lineup while Travis is out.

EE is an enigma. Seems like a nice quiet fellow but we don't really know him that well. Barely speaks English, doesn't spend much time around Toronto, virtually invisible in the media. For all we know he's a bigger douche than Bautista so let's not trip over ourselves to praise him for a few platitudes. He seems to have the wisdom to live by the adage "Better to keep quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt".

Two is an easy choice for me. I'll take the best chance of winning with Bautista over the best chance of having him longer. I mean if the team didn't have Martin, Donaldson, Tulo et all, there would be a lot of money to sign Bautista forever but you might not have last year's playoff run or a very good team this year either so f*** that.

I voted mediocre but I find that word has a negative connotation that I don't like. My descriptor of choice would be "perfectly cromulent".

EE playing his cards right. There's an opportunity here for him to take advantage of this. The team could use some good pr and he might benefit from the fact that Bautista seems to have priced himself off the team.

I get what you're saying but the timing is curious. Still might just be a coincidence of course.

Chuckle.

Yeah given that Pompey and Pillar are both good CFs, Dom's defensive limitation don't really get in the way of him bumping ahead of Carrera and Lake.

Jody Vance?