Orgfiller

Yeah this is obviously true. Although it didn't even serve them all that well in the playoffs, they had to trade for Jack Flaherty and run bullpen games every other matchup. They won so obviously it wasn't crippling or anything, but I'm sure it hurt their odds going into it. Their depth is enviable but the volatility in their rotation due to health is astounding. Out of those 15 MLB calibre pitchers I'm not sure you can confidently claim 2 of them will be healthy come the playoffs.

Shohei Ohtani River Ryan Gavin Stone Dustin May Kyle Hurt (lol)

3 full injured MLB rotations, sure.

It's kind of hilarious how going from a 3-horse race to 2 actually made it infinitely more likely that the Dodgers are signing him and we got f***ed again.

An Alonso signing on its own prior to a Vlad trade would kind of be putting the cart before the horse right? It more or less signals the end of Vlad's tenure here, but if that deal isn't completed then it kind of hurts our leverage since teams would more or less know we have to get rid of him. Unless, we just sign Pete to be a 1B/DH partner with Vlad? Both Alonso and Vlad might genuinely gain defensive value by not ever taking the field.

Nobody wants to give Alonso 5+ years or a $100M+ deal. It's likely that he ends up with the Boras special of a 3 year deal at like ~$25M per with opt outs after each season.

I've seen enough of these former Toronto reporters throw their body on the line only to be wrong to frankly put no stock into a tweet like this. Might as well be coming from some random account with 3 followers.

Burr projects extremely well. Like, third best reliever in the bullpen good. Of course the lack of track record means the s*** can hit the fan very easily just like any other reliever, but he was borderline elite last season. Should just about have a guaranteed spot in the 'pen to begin the season assuming no injury or stuff backing up.

Vinnie projects significantly better although plays in an awful park and the recent track record says Naylor has been better. I'd probably trust the projections though since there's a chance Naylor keeps getting bigger and losing out on PT.

Not that I want to start this argument back up, but if all of these things happened then surely Ross would be the right guy to stick around for it? It would mean he made all the right moves and the state of the franchise would look a lot better. Unless we just truly believe his development track record is irredeemable and there's no amount of downstream hiring that can solve the problem. It's not like we're in this spot because Ross keeps swinging bad deals, it's just our drafting and development under his tenure has been woeful.

Room for Gimenez + Sandlin right? I think he got DFA'd as part of that deal.

Would rather Bregman at that point unless Alonso is a much smaller/cheaper commitment - which he might be. Vlad's arb salary would be absorbed by Bregman's so not adding too much to the budget, and Vientos is league min.

The Mets have some intriguing prospects. I wonder if they would part with Vientos for Vlad, it would be a massive overpay on their end, but they have the money to retain Vlad and Vientos is destined for 1B/DH anyway as a worse offensive talent. Would be best case scenario for us to maintain competitiveness while trading away a player of Vlad's caliber. Miss me with Brett Baty unless he's a thrown in.

RobinThicc going on his Kevin Gray arc. We wish you well in your future endeavours.

I agree. Honestly the league hitter ish part might be what we need to hope for at this point. The expected metrics think he's horrendous, but he does have the raw power to just kind of luck into league average production, and he's a good enough runner who "hustles" to earn a few XBH here and there. I doubt he can even crack a .275 BABIP again on pure talent alone.

Not at all. The signing bonus is added to the total value of the deal for AAV purposes. e.g. a straight 2/20 contract with $10M salary per season is treated the same by tax calculations as a 2/20 deal with a $5M bonus, $5M salary in the first year and a $10M salary the second. The Jays themselves might care about the difference for their yearly budget calculations, but the CBT does not.

Our star player meeting with just be Gausman pulling up with an iPad showing a compilation of his splitter whiffs, followed by Bowden Francis showing his success over the past two months of the season with the same pitch that he learned from the former. Pretty effective pitch if you ask me.

I think the question here when it relates to Varsho is if he has the ability to change his swing enough to square up the ball more. Like basically, does he have the hand-eye coordination to get it done. He's not an egregious chaser, 67th percentile last season although it's been below the 50th percentile for most of his career, which also saw an uptick in his walk rate. But I guess that in itself was an adjustment, take a few more pitches at the expense of quality of contact. He makes contact often enough, 76% for his career which is not bad, higher than guys like Bryce Harper, Matt Chapman, Rafael Devers to list a few. He honestly could stand to swing a bit less and work on being selective with his swing decisions. His biggest issue nonetheless is the totally exploited pitches up in the zone, he gets killed by those, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was a big reason why his IFFB is brutal, he's either whiffing up there or softly popping it up. He either needs to work on outright not swinging at those pitches, or change his swing to not be exploited by it. Can he do this? Does he have the talent to adjust in this way? That's the biggest question.

lol @ -1.6 projected reliever WAR. What the f***

I feel like one of Nimmala, Yesavage, Bloss could have made it. I understand Tiedemann and Orelvis dropping due to how their 2024s went, although for Orelvis the performance certainly was positive.

The limit is essentially the amount of international bonus money available. This is relative peanuts compared to the money that he would get as a non amateur free agent. Think Ohtani's first signing with the Angels versus the deal that Yamamoto got. International bonus pool will range in the ~$6-7M(?) per year, total, for a single international signing period, which resets each year. Teams can trade for additional pool money, but generally this is like +$1-2M max. It's not really a question of money. Sasaki is doing this because he wants to come to the MLB ASAP and face the best competition available, not because he's looking to maximize his earning potential. After he comes over, he'll be subject to the same team control that your typical top prospect making his debut gets, 2-3 years at league minimum followed by 3-4 years of arbitration (depending on Super 2 status), where the team has all the power. Sasaki is as even a playing field as you can get in terms of money in this league. It's like if the #1 pick in the MLB draft could choose where he wanted to play, with every team having roughly equal amounts of bonus available to spend on him and other draft picks.

There's basically no way to overpay here. Since Sasaki is bound to international amateur signing bonuses, it's already apparent he's not really in it for the money. $1-2M extra signing bonus isn't going to make the difference here. This actually puts us at a relative disadvantage since instead of bidding for his services with our wallet, we have to do it by convincing him that our development will make him the best version of himself. And then there's the other factors like the city, which I would actually think could be a positive for an international player, if only we weren't an East coast team.

Any team would be "all-in" on the idea of signing a top 10(?) prospect in baseball who is MLB ready for like $5-6M. I doubt we're even in the top 5 of teams vying for Sasaki, if only for reasons such as we're not a West Coast US team or have international reputation like the Yankees do, let alone other real factors like pitching development and state of the franchise.

With Clement I feel like you just hope that the BABIP favours him somewhat, because if he's swinging at everything and not necessarily hitting the ball particularly hard, there's bound to be some variance to the profile. As long as he's not getting totally exploited on pitches that even he couldn't hit - thinking breaking balls far outside the plate. Doubtful he'll gain any plate discipline, but I think the article shows that it's not a mirage that his ability to make contact is legit. If he can stick around league average on offense with excellent defense and good baserunning we'll take that. The defense is legit and he can play all over the infield at a high level.

He's pretty much a butcher everywhere. The Reds didn't even play him at 3B in 2024 and they continually trotted out some serious butchers at the position in that campaign. He has some decent physical tools, above average as a runner (73rd percentile) and arm strength (78th) so maybe you hope you can teach him routes in LF to become playable? But the profile is a bad 1B/LF defender with average hitting for the position. It's not like he crushes the ball or is particularly good at squaring it up or hitting it at a good launch angle. You could platoon him, but then why spend resources acquiring a guy like that via trade unless he's basically given away when you could sign a lefty masher like Grichuk for cheap in FA.