KingKat

I've been in a CBS league for years and I'd say it's worth the cost if only because it lest you maintain your farm roster in one place. I wouldn't say the interface is better than Yahoo! per say but it's definitely good and the player updates are much more frequent. I'm always going back to my CBS league to get info on the players I'm scouting in Yahoo! You get a way better idea of how long DL stints will be, how players will be used, etc. It has Gameday Audio integration which adds some value to offset the cost. I'd much rather fork up the cash and migrate to a CBS league than move to ESPN which is at very very best a lateral move.

Same here. I usually do a search in page on the league home page for the name of any new guy to check against the owned prospects lists but I still get nervous. There are so many little known guys who are owned that you can't make any assumptions on availability and a simple spelling variation would be enough to make you mess up.

I'm really looking forward to seeing Sierra do a Sergio Santos for another organization.

The Jays had four positions this year where they were near the worst in baseball offensively and defensively. Catcher Second baseman Left Field Third baseman Hopefully third base takes care of itself with Brett Lawrie putting together something closer to a fully productive season (and yes I realize that there's a lot of optimism in that sentence but it doesn't make sense to pursue another option when the incumbent, at least potentially, has a lot of value). As for the other positions, If all the Jays did was to put no hit all glove players there would still get way more value than the no hit or glove production they got this year. That's the easiest way for this team to improve cheaply even if it unlike this year's moves, it's not something very sexy to sell to the fanbase. Once again, I put zero faith in AA's ability to recognize value. I think he'll just put together a different but similar cast of lousy fielding veterans (heck, it might even be exact same cast).

I think the only way the Jays can hope to recoup the investment in prospects and salary that they made to improve the rotation is to sign a guy like Molina who can get some calls for them. I don't think there's any way to turn around this team withouth acquiring a good pitch framer. A guy who can both frame pitches and hit would be awesome but even a guy like Molina who can't hit much at all would be a godsend. Unfortunately, I have zero faith that AA will bring in someone like that unless he values that player for another reason. If AA truly understood the importance of the catcher's position, he would have tried to protect his investment in pitching this offseason by making a run at Russell Martin.

Holly crap do I have an addled brain. Juan Herrera is the prospect the Cards acquired in the Rzep trade. He's also a 20 year old infielder but he's terrible and unlike Rosell, he was actually in the Cleveland system.

I must have written 19 and started to correct that to 20. That would explain why I remembered writting 19... Anyways ignoring how addled my brain is, the point stands. He's young, he's a SS and he's hitting. Can you really ask for more in exchange for your left-handed reliever?

Damn. I could have sworn I wrote 19. Could you imagine a 10 year old in A ball? It would be like a real life Disney movie.

The Jays whiffed on a few prospects of interest in the deadline: Rosell Herrera is a 10 year old shortstop with a 1000 OPS in A ball. I scouted him pretty heavily for my fantasy draft and finally soured on him because he's repeating a level and had only half of that OPS the first time around. Now that the Cardinals have acquired him, I'm officially kicking myself for not drafting him. A young shortstop who is actually hitting? Who wouldn't want to add a guy like that to your system? The Cards are adding him and they tend to know what they are doing. Kyle Smith is a 20 year old at A+ with a career K/9 of 9.9 and a 3.88 K/BB. He's gone from dominant to merely good as he's climbed the ranks but he's a terrific return when you consider the Astros only gave up Justin Maxwell to get him. He's another guy I looked at long and hard for the fantasy draft but I made the mistake of letting him get to Gibbers. Maybe the Jays weren't interested in young prospects because they didn't fit their timeline but to let that deter you from getting a solid return for impending free agents and edge of the roster guys would be spectacularly short-sighted and I think it's very generous towards the Jays to think that these kind of deals weren't also available to them.

Weird trade for a fringe playoff team to make with the frontrunner but my team was built for today so no point in backing off now. The fact that it hurts the chances of the front-runner is kind of a fringe benefit. I am still looking to move prospects/picks to bolster my chances. I could still use another bat and some more starting pitching. My system is very thin but I still have a couple of name prospects and all my picks to move. I'm all in.

We can only hope.

I think what happened to Escobar really epitomizes AA's Dr. Jeckyll and Hyde act. At the beginning of his tenure, AA seemed to target two things in his trades, depressed assets and upside. What did Morrow, Lawrie, Escobar and Ramus all have in common? They were all assets that their respective teams had soured upon and they all still had upside. Since the Napoli trade it's been the opposite. The upside is always on the other side. So what happened? Why did AA let talent outweigh reputation when acquiring Escobar and then flip the equation right around at the first controversy? Isn't that kind of hypocritical? Kind of cowardly? And from a baseball point of view isn't it self defeating to devalue your own asset much the same way Morrow, Rasmus, Lawrie and Escobar were devalued by their previous teams? It's such a 180. I'm thinking either AA never intended to follow the Rays model for very long and figured he only needed to trade for upside in the beginning (if that's how he felt, it's certainly not what he conveyed at the time, not to mention it's stupid) or what seems more likely to me is that AA lost his nerve, lost his faith in the plan when the results didn't come or when it became harder to make high upside trades (the 2011-2012 offseason was awfully quiet). Whatever model AA's following now, it's not one of constant renewal like the A's and Rays follow. In the current model, after acquiring upside for several years, you decide that it's time to flip a switch and piss upside out the window. What the f*** happened? Were we duped all along or did AA's vision get warped?

O.K. he's not really the best and this kind of play is exceptional but after AA cowardly gave up on him at the first time of adversity, I can't help but root for the guy and love it when he does something great. http://mlb.mlb.com/shared/video/embed/embed.html?content_id=29106687&width=400&height=224&property=mlb

TheScore.com was not purchased by Rogers. Only the television network was purchased by Rogers and they don't even call it The Score anymore, they call it Sportsnet 360. So when people say TheScore.com is independant, they don't mean that they have maintained a level of independance, they mean it is litterally independant i.e. was not included in the sale to Rogers i.e. it is a seperate company that is not owned by Rogers.

Oh wait he doesn't... TheScore.com was not sold to Rogers, it continues to operate independately. Stoeten isn't a Rogers shill. He is just incredibly thin-skinned when interactin on the Internet. He doesn't really listen, his default seems to be to assume whoever he's talking to is a over-reacting knee jerk fan when it is in fact him who has a knee jerk reaction to any negativity that doesn't come from his inner circle. I like him a lot but I refrain from commenting on his blog because it's not productive to have a discussion with someone who gets instantly annoyed with you and I'm not really interested in merely annoying someone who's writing and speaking I otherwise enjoy. The funny thing about Stoeten is that he has some pretty negative opinions about the Jays himself. He's mentionned a few times on his podcast that he's sitting on a post about how despite AA being on the job some time now, the team is still heavily reliant on players originally acquired by J.P. Ricciardi and hasn't gotten nearly a much as it needed from AA's acquisitions. It's sounds like a good read but he's worried that it will enable all the fans that he has painted with a very broad brush as knee-jerk reactionnaries. It's a shame he feels the need to tie himself into knots to counter negativity (à la Wilner) and isn't more intelectually honest about the fundamental problems with the Jays.

Yeah really depends on what you mean by "well enough". It's a bad fielding team but not necessarily worse than expected.

Tao was never that optimistic though. I don't think he was ever sold on this new direction.

Square brackets. That's the part I always get wrong.

Mortimer retweeted this from one of his BP colleagues today: Jays fans will also be happy to hear that Matt Smoral was better today. FB 90-93 topped out 94. Threw a couple nice back door sliders

http://www.sportsnet.ca/baseball/mlb/tao-of-stieb-do-the-blue-jays-actually-suck/ (I'm posting the text here but you should proably click on the link and send a page hit Tao's way if you can.) Maybe it’s a touch harsh to say that the 2013 Toronto Blue Jays “suck”. The team itself is not so awful as to be unwatchable, and has actually been rather entertaining at various points of the season. (I’ll pause here while you instinctively summon up an argument about the team’s “consistency”. And I’ll silently judge you for doing so, though I am sympathetic and realize that it is not your fault seeing as though you’ve spent your whole life being fed the load of hooey about “consistency” by people in the business of creating noise about sports. But really, you should stop complaining about foolish consistency. It’s the hobgoblin of small minds.) The 2013 Blue Jays are not nearly the omnishambolic catastrophe that we saw unfold painfully before us in 2012, befallen by injury miseries, compounding underwhelming performance miseries, compounding bullpen implosions, compounding behavioural miseries, compounding the general misery of Farrellball. This year’s edition of the team has hit better, fielded well enough and features one of the most reliable bullpens in recent memory. So it’s not all drudgery and burden to watch them play. It’s just…they were supposed to be so much better than this, weren’t they? After a winter in which they emptied out the system to go “all in”, acquiring veterans with track records and trophies on their mantles, even my relatively tempered expectations for the team weren’t this tepid. And to torture the poker analogy: How exactly do you go all in, bust out and then attempt to all in again the next year? Next year? Are we already talking about next year? Yes…yes, we are. It’s not an absolute impossibility that the Jays get some decent starting pitching and go on some sort of run that propels them into the crowded mix for an outside chance at a spot at a one-game playoff run. But the smart money is against it, so the question that you’re left asking is: What the hell? What’s the plan now? The Blue Jays had a perfectly defensible plan up until this past season. Build through the draft and international signings, and develop the eventual contender through the Eternal Rebuilding Process. But the urgency of winning in the short term led them to empty out the system to bring in the likes of R.A. Dickey, Josh Johnson and Mark Buehrle to support Brandon Morrow and Ricky Romero in the rotation. Needless to say, it hasn’t exactly worked out as planned. The flummoxing question as a fan is not so much one of whether the Jays should be buying or selling – they should always be both, really – but rather, what’s the new timetable for contention? Are the Jays ready to start dealing from the shallow depths of their system in order to bring in more major league talent? Does it make sense to take a shot at even more short-term veteran players like Jake Peavy with a view towards contending in 2014? On one level, it certainly makes sense to attempt to ride out this season with as much of the Major League roster intact as possible. The lineup has been fine, and could be much better if good health and reasonable expectations of progression come to pass. The bullpen is deep, promising and somewhat cost-controllable through the next several seasons, though one can rarely predict reliever performance from one year to the next, and the team will eventually have to make decisions between a few of the bullpen arms. All of that ponderous re-tweaking amounts to deck chair feng shui on the Titanic if the team can’t figure out their rotation, which for 2014 looks to be cluttered with pitchers who might have profiled at some point as aces or number twos or threes, but have recent performance that makes them look more like fours or fives or minor league roster depth. Do Drew Hutchison or Kyle Drabek factor in as positives for the rotation next season? What – if anything – can we expect out of Brandon Morrow at this point? Is R.A. Dickey’s surreal, magical moment over? Does Josh Johnson return on a qualifying offer, and if so, do the Jays get enough out of him in another “contract season” to make him worth their while? Even if a shard of positive light ekes in through the bottom of the door, what’s to say that the bullpen doesn’t implode or the lineup doesn’t take a step backward? The step forward into contention this season has been a bit of a bust. Those underwhelming results also augur poorly for next season. Which leaves me as a Jays fan asking this fundamental question: If not this year, and not next year…then when? And for all the hoopla and fireworks of the offseason, are the Jays really any better off than they would have been by staying the course? Are we getting closer yet?

Did he burn an option by virtue of being added to the 40 man (he doesn't have any actual MLB time)?

Good read. It's funny how there's a lot of talk about whether the Jays should be buyers or sellers when they aren't even in a strong position to be either. AA may end up doing nothing just bescause there's not much to be done. The system is thin which makes it hard to buy and there's not much to sell that wouldn't significantly substract from the 2014 team.

Pillar and Jimenez may have similar offensive upside but you can't lump the outfielder with the catcher with plus defense. Look at the catchers in the MLB right now. It's a wasteland as far as offensive production is concerned. The fact is Jimenez doesn't have to hit that much for the glove to play. He's the system's only legit position prospect (unless you want to wishcast on a teenager). Does this make him elite? Hardly because the system is a wasteland but that's still no reason to lump him in with sub-prospect position players.

It's a 2 week matchup.

Where did you see Tellez?