KingKat

Burns has had a good overall season. I'm not basing my evaluation of him strictly on AA numbers.

Of all the things to hate about this team, this barely even registers for me. Even if it turns out that the Jays are the least forthright team in the league about this sort of stuff, it hardly seems to matter. At most, it's a sympton of the weird parrallel universe that is the Jays brain trust, not a problem per say.

I think Burns has played his way to top of the heap right now. Head and shoulders over the other position prospects. This is the only prospect bandwagon that I'm on board right now. I'm down on everyone else.

This is how Stoeten reports Johnson to the DL "I really have nothing on this one, folks. It sounds about right for this f***ing season, don’t it? And it further complicates the whole qualifying offer thing, much to the delight, I’m sure, of those who have yet to grasp that Josh Johnson didn’t just emerge from the ether last November, and actually has a track record that looks a metric f***-tonne better than what he’s shown in most of his starts this year and demands at least a little attention be paid to it. Oh, but sure, hate him and think he sucks, go ahead! See if I care! Just makes it easier for me to figure who’s useless." This is the current state of DJF in a nutshell. Everyone who disagrees with me can't see the big picture while I'm just going to dig my heels on whatever position I had to start the season.

Non-prospect no but nothing special either. He's probably a top 5 position prospect in the Jays system right now but that just doesn't mean a whole lot at the moment.

He hasn't really warranted serious consideration as a prospect so no.

He is. One of his latest pieces was a very original and insightful take on steroid controversy.

Drew is pretty sharp and he used to dig into the numbers a lot but he seems to have taken on a kind of willful naivety lately. He just assumes that he's not qualified to have an opinion on what front offices are doing because he doesn't have access to their knowledge. That's a perfectly reasonable position but it's kind of a dead end for a baseball writer. The answer he gave me on DJF though thoughtful and respectful was little more than a smokescreen. Saying that players are human beings and not poker chips is pretty facile and doesn't really counter any argument I made.

Miss U.S.A. is a property of Donald Trump and is a qualifier for the Miss Universe pageant. It doesn't have a talent competition and it favours a more "glam" look (read into that what you will). Romero's old flame was a bit of a train wreck. Why he's so tore up about it is beyond me. Must have been a first love or something.

That's basically all Stoeten. Hardly anyone else writes for the blog anymore and the ones who do just do game summaries. Despite his reputation as a douche, Dustin Parkes was by far the site's best writer and at least when he would provoke the fans he would do so with his tongue in his cheek and a good sense of humour. He's moved on to other things. Stoeten can be really entertaining on podcasts and stuff when he's not s***ing on his readership but his writing is indeed full of ambivalence and condescension and he's rarely funny anymore.

Pretty soon, he'll have been a jackass to basically everybody. This is Wilner all over again. At first Wilner was fun because he mostly made sense and only tore into really reactionary fans but as the quality of his callers increased, the discourse stayed the same and he kept making a bigger and bigger ass of himself. Is there anyone left here who still listens to his show? The DJF readership has already decreased a lot and it's only going to get worse if Stoeten keeps deliberately antagonizing those who read and comment on his blog.

Maybe not panned but it was seen as a bad fit since it pushed Hanley off of SS (and practically out of town). That was also the same problem with that contract from the Jays perspective. They had a SS. If AA swallows his pride and accepts the Escobar fallout, the Jays don't need to make such a massive investment at SS. Even Hech as terrible as he is offensively was a viable enough option for the Jays to justify putting their money elsewhere.

Those Marlins contracts were panned when they were signed last year. What has changed? I think if anyone other than Jeffrey Loria was a the helm, the Marlins would have been praised for changing course. They dumped all their bad commitments, they picked up prospects and they weren't a contender to begin with. What's not to like?

I mentionned Message Boards in my post because I wanted to attack the idiotic strawman that says that everyone who hates the Jays moves now, loved them then but I shouldn't have used it because it gave him an easy out. The funny thing is that Stoeten loves Jon Hale and I also cited him. By Stoeten's logic is Jon Hale also incapable of putting moves into context? I doubt Stoeten recognize me from message boards but if he did what difference would it make. It's not like I act like the raging imbecile that he wants to believe I am.

He's incredibly thin skinned and he doesn't seem to realize that he's the one who is bringing down the level of discussion on his site by being such a reactionary. If eveyone you talk to is an ******* then you know maybe you're the *******.

Stoeten is the new Wilner.

Stoeten posted his AA f***ed up but not really because he was unlucky and the Red Sox were lucky but really there the same post today: http://blogs.thescore.com/djf/2013/08/12/reality-check/comment-page-1/#comment-324982 I got into it with him in the comments a bit and he encouraged me to share with you my fellow circle-jerkers. KingKat says: 08.13.13 @ 2:10 PM EDT REPLY Sure luck played a role but luck always plays a role. If you’re a smart poker player, you don’t just count on luck, you measure your odds and you evaluate your risk. Yes it could have worked differently for the Jays with better luck but what were the odds and did those odds justify sacrificing prospect capital and payroll flexibility? Did AA’s moves really have a better chance of panning out then say the James Shield trade? If you remember not everyone was on this band wagon, TaoOfStieb wasn’t and neither was Jon Hale. There were a ton of sceptics within the more sabermetrically inclined portion of the fanbase as plenty of message board discussion can demonstrate. Not eveyone who criticizes is a reactionnary. The genius of the Red Sox moves wasn’t that they panned out and the Jays didn’t. Good fortune surely played a part in that. The true genius was how little risk the Red Sox took on in their attempt to improve their team. They kept their prospects, they didn’t take on long term contracts. Is it harder for the Jays to do that? Absolutely. The Jays need to overpay to sign free agents but overpaying through salaries that you acquire by trade in addition to trading prospects is hardly a desirable alternative. This was bad process. Optimism is intoxicating and can may you root for bad process but it shouldn’t make you lose sight that the process is bad. Flags Fly Forever can be a pretty facile justification for some bad decision making (yes that’s a poke at Drew but the guy should know better). Jaysfan23 says: 08.13.13 @ 2:13 PM EDT REPLY Getting James shields would have cost use D’arnaud + Syndergaard + prospects from the marlins trade KingKat says: 08.13.13 @ 2:52 PM EDT REPLY I’m not advocating getting James Shieds. I’m just saying what the Jays did was no smarter than the widely panned James Shields trade. [*] Andrew Stoeten says: 08.13.13 @ 2:22 PM EDT REPLY If you’re unwilling to comprehend anything related to the timing of the deals or the pressures to not sit idle for several more years, and how that complicates things further, please, by all means, go back to your little messageboard circle jerk. Declaring “this was bad process” shows that you have your head deeper in the sand than the people you’re attempting to criticize. KingKat says: 08.13.13 @ 2:50 PM EDT REPLY I can’t understand the context of the move? The context of taking on a lot of risk to add to a team that wansn’t a contender in the first place. I suppose that’s good process. But yeah sure, I’m the one with the head in the sand.

He will make the NFL as a backup DB if he has to. That's clearly all he cares about.

I think this is a case of AA wasting bonus money trying to be too clever. If the Jays want to sponsor his burgeoning football career, Alford will take the money but that's the extent of his baseball commitment.

I don't understand why he doesn't get converted to relief. He's too volatile to find success as a starter and even if he returned to form, Joe Maddon has let the cat out of the bag that all you have to do to beat him is load up on LHH and exploit his reverse splits (which were there pretty much the whole time, they just weren't exploited).

Didn't he break up with her? (On a side note, she was Miss U.S.A. not Miss America, that mistake is all over this thread).

I can deal with anyone but I get frustrated when the other owner keeps lobbying for his offer rather than developing a different one. It doesn't mean the deal won't get done eventually but it makes the process irritating.

I'm looking for pitching and I still have few young ones to trade. Nicolino, Blackburn, Fullmer, Rodriguez are all available. My picks are available as well.

One of the best tools would be the trade interface. You can actually offer trades to other owners that incorporate farm players. You might even be able to do picks but I play in an auction league so that doesn't apply to my current setup so that would have to be researched.

If I remember correctly, a subscription to Gameday Audio is 10$/year so that would more than offset the cost and it's a pretty cool thing to have. I use it to listen to day games while I'm at work.