KingKat

I know you're just a troll but I'd like to address this point all the same in case someone might genuinely be operating under this delusion. Through some weird quirk of unclutch hitting, he actually contributed next to nothing through the entire season.

We'll never know what could have been if not for that spring training injury but there's no helping that now. He'll never have his mobility back and he'll have trouble providing more value than he did last year (which still wasn't that great).

Dominoes falling...

Oh man... Who was that Jays pitcher from Vancouver who was a dock worker or something and became an older rookie? He was the "ace" for the WBC one year.

It's especially stupid given the market trends of this very off-season.

The audio is up: http://pmd.fan590.com/audio_on_demand-4/Mark-Shapiro-with-Jeff-Blair-and-Stephen-Brunt-jb-20170113-Interview.mp3

The Art of Fielding is really good but it's entirely fiction and the setting is college baseball.

Read this:

Good point. Pagan at 36 shows no real signs of regression in the looks department and Saunders has clearly been slipping since his Seattle days.

I think he just wrote "team" instead of "time".

Safe to say that either Pagan or Saunders would improve the team's collective Handsomeness Above Average score. http://www1.pictures.zimbio.com/gi/San+Francisco+Giants+Photo+Day+qHwki0HsFLjx.jpg http://assets3.sportsnet.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/saunders-headshot.jpg

Man what the hell is up with that 2015? That's a ridiculous outlier. Surely he must have been hurt?

Thankfully that never happened. Would the casuals hate that as much as the Smoak deal or is Captain Canada basically immune from criticism?

Another way to look at it is that despite him rather improbably providing a full season's worth of playing time, he still wasn't all that productive. I'd be very surprised if one year after agreeing to move him for Jay Bruce, they would re-up with him. You have to figure the sticker price is very low for this to happen.

I don't really see why a bat only, can't run, can't field, broken down outfielder would be preferable to an all around cromulent one like Pagan.

Going into "win now" mode at that point was dumber than dumb. It backed the Jays into a corner where they still had to add. They don't make the Marlins trade and there's no pressure to make the Dickey trade and neither of those trade did anything to help in 2015 and 2016. Certainly much less than another development year for their young pitchers would have.

Replacement level is 0.0 WAR

He was a decent GM cut from an antiquated cloth.

I think I remember reading an interview with him about it. Said he was still happy to have fulfilled a lifetime dream and he considers it a career highlight even if the season itself went very poorly.

http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/49/498794749f1ab35f1868fc509391c6f875e514ae6857d2382deee16176442a1e.jpg

The problem with that argument is that Smoak himself is an overpayment and I don't mean in terms of his real or imagined production but simply in terms of what he'd fetch in the market. In the current market, he'd struggle to find employment much less get what he got. Of course, the market on his skill set has cratered since he signed but pretty much everyone thought it was an overpayment back then too just not as egregious as it's become. Which isn't to say that back then I thought overpaying for Smoak was a big deal. I really didn't and I'm not going to throw the team under the bus now for misjudging the market. s*** happens. I'm just saying that the argument that they never overpay isn't true. I think it's part of the franchise m.o. to make low stakes over-payments for security blankets. I think the Chavez trade was another example of this. They got f*** nothing out of Chavez except the security of knowing they had a guy who could make starts. After dealing Chavez, they arguably overpaid for Feldman for the exact same reason. These deals end up looking bad because you can't exactly put a WAR value on having guys that in an ideal world you don't use but I understand why they do them and why they make sense in the big picture.

When AA originally acquired Smoak, he said it was a move driven by the analytics department. Smoak makes very hard contact. That's probably the main reason he keeps getting employed despite middling results.

To me it's more about Vlad's plate coverage than the highlight reels. It was just so uncanny. He was such a great pure hitter. It's hard to reconcile that with the idea that he's a lesser player than Jim Edmonds. Edmonds is the one I actually mostly remember from being a highlight reel staple.

Which I'm guessing is no worse than Moss and certainly no worse than Bautista.