KingKat

O.K. cool. So which one is Speedy's team then?

Who is "In Soviet Russia"?

Latos did leave the team to deal with a family issue. There might be something going on with him but it's ultimately a moot point. He sucked and deserved the DFA for his performance.

Between Brock Holt, Paplo Sandova and Marco Hernandez, they have plenty of internal options. It just so happens that by some weird fluke, all three are injured at the same time but they still have a couple of depth guys in Rutledge and D'Arnaud that they can roll with for now. It's not a desperate situation. Doesn't really make sense to go for Frazier unless they are using Devers as a trade chip.

Not according to Roster Resource (those guys are fast, already have him listed on the Jays depth chart) http://www.rosterresource.com/mlb-toronto-blue-jays/

Geez... That looks super secretive.

I'll take an established junkballer over a "trying so hard to re-invent himself as one but failing miserably" junkballer like Latos any day.

They have such a good track record with these kind of guys that I would assume they see something in him that says he can be effective.

Front office's m.o. seems to be if you're getting Ks you're probably doing something right. Can't really argue with the results either, Grilli, Benoit and Liriano all started showing improved results practically the moment the Jays took a flyer on them.

That's not true. You may feel that you're wasting good liquor by mixing it and that's fine but that doesn't mean that your mix drink will somehow magically taste the same no matter what you put in it. That's like saying that quality of ingredients doesn't matter when you're cooking.

Probably bitter that he had to pitch on Stroman jersey day, lol.

It had high production values, tons of licensed products and loads of cameos. The ratings weren't high enough to attract the kind of sponsorship needed to offset the cost. Dramas are already the most expensive genre to produce before you even start to deal with all the specific costs related to Pitch.

Decent showing against an excellent pitcher.

Looks like the bulk of the drop-off happened between 2013 and 2014. Two mph gone just like that.

My guess is that it's mostly health related. Guy looks pretty unwell.

It's not about where you're stuck. It's about what your starting point is. If you give Roger the option of having that 70s low 80s win team and trying to build off of that, and say maybe spending it up to a low to mid 80s team that might catch lightning in a bottle and tread water for a few years until a franchise player falls into their lap (potentially Vlad for instance) they are going to opt for that over a rebuild ten times out of ten.

I agree that momentum doesn't matter. The big thing is that Rogers will want to keep the ratings healthy. If you give Rogers the choice between a full tear down and a World Series in five years and five years of competitive teams that fall just short but keeps the ratings high into September, they will choose the later every time. Sure that's a false dichotomy but it does show that Rogers's priorities are different than those of another owner. They care about the TV ratings in a way that other owners don't. Another team might look at when the TV rights are up and only really care about where the team is in the ratings when it comes time to negotiate as opposed to year to year. Rogers will fund a payroll just to keep the team robust enough for the tv ratings and because of that they won't see the same economy in a rebuild that other teams would. The tradeoff of a rebuild is that the product may be bad but you save money on payroll which should balance out any loss of revenue in attendance but for Rogers a rebuild is a double whammy. They not only lose at the gate but they also see their media content lose value. I just don't see them having any appetite for it and that's not necessarily a bad thing. One can look at the Cubs' perfect storm of a rebuild and be envious or that but their rebuild made it look a lot easier than it actually is. A rebuild wouldn't necessarily go that smoothly and year to year retooling can work quite well.

I didn't say I regret that paricular trade. I was just throwing out names for discussion purposes.

Joe Musgrove, Yan Gomes, Matt Boyd, Daniel Norris.

Salty was replacement level last year. They probably didn't expect him to be much better and didn't sink a whole lot of money or faith in him. He was a replacement level catcher with some MLB experience and theoretically the ability to provide a bit of pop from the bench. This wasn't a "good" signing because there was no real upside but they paid very little to merely plug a hole. Turns out he wasn't even good enough to be a plug. I don't think you can blame the front office for not anticipating the extent to which he bled value and I'll give them credit for bailing on him when he did.

To put this perspective... It took 50 games of Thole to get - 0.5 WAR. Salty bled as much value in a tenth of the games and Thole is a much better framer so the effective difference is that Salty this year was considerably more than ten times worse than Thole last year.

He was at -0.5 through 10 games. Zero WAR is a big improvement over that pace.

If he pitches a shutout tonight, it just means that whoever trades for him misses out on his best start of the season. The last chance to get him before the shutout would have been yesterday. There's barely any point now.

Nice. I like that a non-Asian player has that nickname.