TwistedLogic

I don't really know how buyouts affect AAV, but I'd assume that the idea of not physically having to pay that buyout until it's time to make a decision on the option, it's still technically deferring money off the 2017 payroll. I don't think AAV is a real issue here.

And he posted it after I began on my own post. Anyway, North was pointing out that Ramirez's option had been exercised. I was throwing out the idea of deferring salary through the use of a buyout. It's not really the same thing at all. But thanks for reminding me that we twitter now, good mod.

There's actually the possibility of an (unlikely) scenario in play here, where a "mutual option" could be used creatively to assist with the 2017 payroll and enable the Jays to make a few more moves. The Jays payroll is currently sitting at 132.7M. Setting aside maybe 5M for league min guys and 3.3M for Stroman, it puts them at 141M. If they only plan on hovering near the 2015 payroll of 160M, a Bautista signing in the 1/18M range would likely eat up their entire budget without allowing any subsequent moves. However, if they were to sign Bautista to a 1 year, say, 10M deal, with a mutual option in 2018 that carries something like a 10M buyout, they'll essentially have signed him to a 1/20M deal with half of the salary deferred to 2018. That could open up the possibility for deals with Valbuena, Moss, Holland, Logan, etc. A club option or a team option would have both technically made this a two year deal, and with the changes to the qualifying offer, I don't think that's what Bautista is looking for. A mutual option with a buyout attached would give him the 1 year deal he wants, ensure that he gets his money, and help the team with a (necessary?) deferral. Probably not what's in play here, but a potentially brilliant move if it is.

Would be so f***ing cool if they could still manage to somehow sign Valbuena for 1B. Pearce, Pillar and Bautista in the outfield everyday with Upton off the bench and Smoak and Carrera obsolete. That one move could still really set this team up well. But with Bautista's salary probably in the 20M range, and Stroman and league-min guys still unaccounted for, I really doubt the Jays still have the juice to sign anybody decent. They'll probably roll with a scenario like the one I outlined above and they'll probably go bargain-hunting for relief. Considering how they acquired Grilli and Benoit, getting RPs for cheap doesn't bother me nearly as much as seeing the words "Justin Smoak" on a Toronto Blue Jays depth chart.

Lots of people were begging for this move to happen, and while I think it's a fine signing, this pretty much guarantees two things: - The Jays will have at least one really poor defender in the outfield. - Justin Smoak is probably going to receive a significant amount of playing time at first base. I was all for a Bautista reunion, but with the condition that he'd be playing first base. Based on the Shapiro/Blair interview from a few days ago, the Jays clearly still view him as an outfielder for some reason. This also probably ensures that the are no more significant position player moves coming. Bautista will man RF, and Smoak and Upton will probably platoon, with Pearce jumping between spots to accommodate whatever guy isn't playing that day. Can't help but feel like the team doesn't really improve from the 2016 roster in this iteration.

lol

I've got a lot of family in Chicago, so I'm considering making the trip as well. Just kinda sucks how much more the tickets will cost now that the Cubs aren't hot garbage.

Whoever is responsible for creating this narrative deserves a lifetime of mild inconveniences.

They're all awful.

Without checking on the framing numbers, all those guys look f***ing terrible. I wouldn't mind Suzuki all that much but he's probably not taking a strict back-up gig. Maybe Hanigan is still good at framing? I don't know, he sucks at everything else. I've been pretty pro-Shatkins to this point and I still think there's plenty of time left but it's definitely been a little triggering to see Smith and Iannetta moved for pennies on the dollar without the Jays having been involved.

I'm irritated that the Blue Jays weren't in on this. Who else is available as a back-up catcher that isn't f***ing terrible? The D-Bags get Iannetta, a 1-win player, on a 1.5M deal. That's a steal.

Walking away with something like Holland, Valbuena, Logan, Iannetta and Pagan would be excellent. Even better if you can fit Bautista into it somehow, although I don't think the team has the budget to sign Bautista if they intend on getting another outfielder, a back-up catcher and at least two pen arms, and if they don't intend to get them via trade. [color="#000000"][font=Verdana](1B) Valbuena / Bautista (SP1) Marcus Stroman (2B) Devon Travis (SP2) Marco Estrada (3B) Josh Donaldson (SP3) Aaron Sanchez (SS) Troy Tulowitzki (SP4) JA Happ (LF) Pagan / Upton (SP5) Francisco Liriano (CF) Kevin Pillar (RF) Steve Pearce (RP1) Roberto Osuna (CA) Russell Martin (RP2) Greg Holland (DH) Kendrys Morales (RP3) Jason Grilli (RP4) Boone Logan (B1) Chris Ianetta (RP5) Joe Biagini (B2) Darwin Barney (RP6) Glenn Sparkman (B3) Pagan / Upton (RP7) Aaron Loup (B4) Carrera / Goins[/font][/color] World Series contender? There's no hole on that roster until somebody gets injured. How much should that realistically cost? Something like 4/1 for Iannetta, 6/1 for Pagan, 18/3 for Logan, 8/2 for Holland, 21/3 for Valbuena? I might be a little low on a few of those (and maybe a bit high on a few?) but that's about 27M added to the 131.8M they're sitting at now. They've said to have more than that available, right? If you're cool with going Carrera/Upton/Pompey for the third outfield spot (and therefore eliminating Pagan) and you can get Bautista for something like 28/2 to replace Valbuena, that should still settle the final payroll under 160M.

Is the emerging trend that you can find something to nitpick about every player in baseball? lol. I think you can erase everything beside Bautista and replace it with "draft pick". And I'm not sure why you put (strikeouts/defense) next to Valbuena. He doesn't seem to have a real problem with either. There is always a large portion of the free agent crop that has question marks but it still feels like there are more middle-of-the-road guys available than normal. I even forgot to list Logan, who would still be a good fit for the Blue Jays and is also still weirdly available.

Speaking of how close we are to spring training, is it weird for there to still be so many decent free agents on the board? Bautista, Trumbo, Saunders, Wood, Holland, Wieters, Hammel, Napoli, Valbuena, Carter, Pagan, Alvarez, Moss, Blanton, Romo, Utley feels like there's a lot of quality still available. Maybe it's a recency thing and it's always like this, and maybe it's because there's a lot of guys that fit the Jays needs (OF/RP) but I don't remember the market being this rich this late into the offseason.

He's definitely a she.

This is more common and a guy like Delabar is a good example of it. Most of the activities you'll do in your rehab are just good exercises in general to gain strength and precision.

Just to expand on this a little more, is it just me or does anyone else remember AA looking f***ing terrible after every major trade deadline or winter meeting? I mean he wasn't necessarily in excellent shape as it is, but it feels like every high intensity baseball period would end with AA delivering a press conference with bags under his eyes and his face looking swollen. I'm not going to go looking for a video but I just remember many times where he didn't look healthy. I don't think at any point during this past year Ross Atkins stopped looking like a dapper motherf***er. Even if it's just an appearance, I think fans can have a little more faith in a GM that doesn't look like he's going three days without sleeping. Somebody who looks like they might still have some energy left to make the small moves. Side note: I nominate Ross for eligibility in the next Hottest Jays voting.

I don't really understand this sentiment to be honest. Acquiring Donaldson and Escobar were WAR trades. The Martin signing was heavily influenced by pitch-framing. The Tulowitzki trade had a lot to do with defense. AA's Blue Jays never sought out a superstar big-game closer and relied largely on finessing their bullpen with guys like Janssen, Cecil and Oliver leading the way. Scouts traditionally value the toolsy athletic players (like Anthony Gose) and traditionally underrate the solid contact/discipline guys (like Devon Travis), and AA made that trade the other way around. There wasn't anything necessarily old school about acquiring Estrada for Lind either. Alex Anthopoulos made a lot of good baseball moves. I don't think AA's problem was that he wasn't modern enough. I think his problem was that he enjoyed playing fantasy baseball in the real world and tunneled in on making the biggest possible deals without paying as much attention to what he was giving up as he should have. He'd then burn himself out on making those big moves (all those stories of how little sleep he got) and be too exhausted or disinterested in filling out the bottom 5th of his roster. You don't acquire Tulowitzki and Price one day and then let Valencia go just to hang on to Loup or Colabello the next. As Joe Girardi would say... I was the #1 Alex Anthopoulos fanboy in this fanbase, but I was very excited when Shapiro and Atkins were brought in. I know I said many times that I thought Anthopoulos would work much better in a scouting director/vice-president role, where he could focus on his strengths, continue seeking out his good plays but have at least one door to go through before pulling the trigger. Where the Travis and Estrada-type moves could still push through, and moves like the Marlins and Mets deals would have hopefully gotten veto'd by a better executive like Shapiro. But we all knew Anthopoulos wasn't coming back after that 2016 season, and as much as I'd like to still be witnessing his ridiculous trades (I'm almost certain Joey Votto and Andrew McCutchen would be Blue Jays right now), I think the current establishment is better for the future of the organization.

"The Maness Procedure"

(Apologies in advance if reading this gives anybody chlamydia): "But Happ, Biagini, Upton, Grilli, Benoit, Liriano etc were not designed to be impact moves that pushed them over the top. They were gambles that worked out. Did they really foresee Happ's season when they got him? What about Biagini the rule-5 pick? What about Grilli the 40-year-old being their main set-up man? In other words, they got lucky last season. Those were all cheap-skate moves with the intention of staying just relevant in the division. I did not see an ernest effort to push the team over the top while they are in the window of contention." - Satan, 2017

That's exactly who I was thinking of when I read this. Seems like the perfect candidate for it. Yanks should have put him under the knife last year. Wasted recovery time in a rebuilding year.

Maness a trailblazer? New surgery for elbow repair cut recovery time By Derrick Goold, St. Louis Post-Dispatch - 2 hrs ago http://i.imgur.com/63HgADo.jpg Former St. Louis Cardinals relief pitcher and current free agent Seth Maness works through a throwing routine at John Burroughs High School in Ladue on Friday, Jan. 6, 2017. Maness is recovering from elbow surgery that ended his season last year. The seams on the balls Maness threw whistled as they traveled 90 feet away to Cardinals second baseman Kolten Wong who was playing catch with Maness. Photo by David Carson, dcarson@post-dispatch.com When Seth Maness shut his eyes before a surgeon opened his right elbow, the former Cardinals reliever was not sure what awaited him on the other side of sleep. The troublesome ligament in his throwing arm had to be fixed and a complete reconstruction would mean missing an entire season. He went under unsure. He woke up a potential trailblazer. Maness is a week away from returning to the mound and expects to be ready for opening day, just 7½ months after surgery, because Dr. George Paletta performed a repair that could eventually prove to be an alternative to Tommy John surgery for select big-league pitchers. Until the St. Louis-based orthopedic surgeon saw inside Maness’ elbow, he wasn’t sure if Maness was a candidate to be the first established major-league pitcher to receive the new procedure, Paletta said. Now, the doctor and his patient are eager to watch as Maness’ first time toeing the rubber could be, in their words, “a significant step forward” for the industry. Another doctor who performs the repair surgery, Dr. Jeffrey Dugas, said there is “cautious optimism.” “It was a game-time decision,” said Maness, a free agent. “I’m going into it sort of expecting Tommy John and hoping for the other one. You go from looking at missing a whole season to possibly being back at the start of the year — that’s a big relief. When Dr. Paletta told me, it was like this little ray of light: There’s a chance.” Maness, 28, completed three sets of throws at a distance of 90 feet on Friday in the John Burroughs School gymnasium. He is scheduled to take the mound next week for the first time since his Aug. 18 surgery. He has been encouraged by how his arm feels at every stride in his rehab, which is accelerated from the usual Tommy John timetable. The Cardinals did not offer him a contract in early December, making him a free agent — one of the leading groundball relievers now available to any team. Sooner than expected. The surgery Maness had, called “primary repair,” doesn’t have the sexy name. It doesn’t have the brand recognition of Tommy John. But it also doesn’t have the lengthy recovery time of its famous forefather. It is a repair and buttressing of the existing ligament at the bone, not Tommy John’s reconstruction of the ligament. The scar Maness has on the inside of his right elbow is the familiar arc of a Tommy John recipient. (Two of the Cardinals’ five starting pitchers have the same scar.) And the medical code assigned by Major League Baseball to Maness’ profile for interested teams is the same as Tommy John. As a result, so are the assumptions about the righthander’s availability for 2017. The surgery he had is too new to have its own code. “It has that potential to be big,” Paletta said. “People are watching this and it’s an interesting thing for all of us,” said Dugas, a managing partner at the Andrews Sports Medicine & Orthopedic Center in Birmingham, Ala. “There is a lot that we need to learn from Seth, a lot that we need to learn from all of the guys (who have had it). We need the data. There are still so many hurdles to go over, but we’re excited to watch what is going to happen because of what is possible. We’re going to follow him very closely.” “Everyone in baseball should be following this,” said Jeff Berry, Maness’ agent and co-head of CAA baseball. “He was an outstanding major-league reliever. He was hurt in 2016, was never right. He has this surgery and he needed the ligament repaired, but he’ll be ready for spring training, not out for the entire season. Imagine that. Think about the economic impact that has for the game. Think about what it means to his career.” "Scary Little Thing" Tommy John, pioneered by Dr. Frank Jobe and named for the first big leaguer to receive it, is a complete reconstruction of the ulnar collateral ligament using a graft. Since its first use, in 1974, Tommy John has been improved but remained largely unchanged as it became the industry standard for treating tears of the UCL. The year absence required for rehab has become as familiar and commonplace in baseball as the one-inning closer and interleague play. Major League Baseball has been unnerved in recent years by a spike in Tommy John surgeries. By 2015, the proliferation of Tommy John, or TJS, was referred to as an “epidemic,” and baseball commissioned a study to understand why the rate of elbow injuries had increased at all levels the game is played, including high school. In 2014, 31 major-league pitchers had UCL reconstruction – twice as many as the average from the previous decade. Its ubiquity in the game led to misconceptions, prompting the American Sports Medicine Institute to stress how “10 percent to 20 percent of pitchers never make it back to their previous level after Tommy John surgery.” Major-league pitchers know this reality well. They sense it with every twinge. “It’s that scary little thing. It’s always in the back of your head,” Maness said. “You know anything in that area and automatically you want to avoid assuming any elbow pain is it. Because, oh man, it’s a career. Today, it’s not a career-ender, but really for a reliever it throws a little wrench into the scheme of things. I’m expendable. Things can happen.” Paletta, a partner at The Orthopedic Center of St. Louis, is one of the nation’s leading Tommy John surgeons, with around 600 performed. He has done many of the Cardinals’ elbow reconstruction surgeries of this era, and this winter the team announced that he would return as its Head Orthopedic Physician. That came a few months after Maness’ surgery. Maness gave Paletta permission to speak to the Post-Dispatch about the specifics of his surgery. "The Right Pitcher" About two years ago, Paletta also started doing the “primary repair” option for elbow injuries that qualified. He has performed more than 50 of these surgeries, and he is working on a paper about his findings. There have been no failures, he said. Dugas, at Dr. James Andrews’ practice, performed his first “UCL repair with internal brace construction” in August 2013. Dugas has done around 150 of these surgeries and does not know of one that had to be redone or led to Tommy John. For both surgeons, the average time of recovery has been 6½ months instead of Tommy John’s 12 months or more. Paletta said 32 of the pitchers who he helped with a “primary repair” surgery have now pitched two seasons since the procedure. Mitch Harris and Maness are two of the three pitchers with major-league experience who qualified for and received the alternative procedure. Dugas described how the surgery has advanced cautiously from prep players to college players and for it to make this next leap to a major-league pitcher “it has to be the right pitcher, the right situation.” “In select cases of UCL tears, with this technique, they have the real potential to not miss the next year,” Paletta said. “This is potentially a huge stride forward in three ways. First, early results show a high success rate. Second, a return to play is cut by 40 percent. That’s a huge factor. We are able to accelerate the return-to-throwing (rehab) program for the athletes. With this technique at the end of 2016 we have a pitcher who is ready to pitch in games by opening day. “And the third way,” Paletta continued, “as a consequence of this, in the right setting, one would feel more confident moving to surgery early on.” Paletta had to see during surgery the condition of Maness’ ligament before being certain he did not need complete reconstruction. The integrity of the tissue is essential, and sometimes a big- league pitcher’s aged and worn ligament can be as solid as wet toilet paper. The location of the tear is also an indicator for “primary repair.” A rupture in the middle of the ligament requires Tommy John. But if the tear is at either end of the ligament, where it attaches to a bone, then the “primary repair” is possible. The “UCL repair with internal brace construction” – its full clunky name – begins with repairing the ligament and anchoring to the bone. A bracing system is then constructed out of tape to help promote healing in the area. That’s the recent advancement, one made possible by Arthrex tape. Paletta said he and others are borrowing from procedures used to repair ankles and knees to address an injury in the elbow. The clear benefit of this “primary repair” is that it addresses the native ligament, and thus doesn’t require a graft and the time that takes for a rebuilt ligament to assimilate. “We’re repairing the existing ligament and reinforcing it with a scaffold that provides increased strength for healing from time zero,” Paletta said. “From the get-go.” That also allows for a quicker return to pitching. "The Maness" Three weeks ago, Paletta cleared Maness to begin throwing. For Tommy John pitchers, the long toss program is eight to 10 weeks. For Maness, it was four. Tommy John pitchers won’t begin their throwing program until five months or more after surgery; Maness started four months after surgery. Lance Lynn missed all of last season recovering from November 2015 Tommy John surgery, and he and Maness are both expected for opening day. From 2013-15, Maness was one of the leading strike-throwing relievers in the majors. Of the 178 relievers in that time who had at least 100 appearances, Maness ranked seventh in walk rate (4.4 percent) and third in double-play rate (12.91 percent). He led all relievers by stranding 144 of the 215 runners he inherited. The next closest was 91. Throughout 2016, however he felt his arm sag and his results follow. He watched “as my game just slowly fizzled away,” Maness said, and blamed his mechanics until the damage in his right elbow was discovered. Paletta outlined several options for him – and one was the dreaded Tommy John, the vaporization of a year, and the uncertain future. The other was a mouthful, a surgery that didn’t have the snappy name but offered the possibility of a quicker return. With each throw, Maness is helping baseball study the new technique’s potential. It just needs a catchier name. “Does he need Tommy John,” Berry suggested, “or a Maness?”

I think I might actually hate this person.

Yeah, it's pretty good for news and I find it to be a more laidback environment. I mean, the GDTs and most of the general discussion is just as s***** as it gets here but the overall atmosphere is not as hardcore and it's so big that if you say something dumb, nobody will know about it an hour later. Forums are much more unforgiving in that regard. It's a lot easier to develop a reputation and one slip up can get people coming after you for months, even years in some cases. The most appealing thing to me though is that there's a lot of crossover between communities. A lot more things to discuss with a lot more people to discuss them with. Posting there is what got me into NBA and NHL and it's pretty much my #1 news source now for world events and things like that. All that said, I definitely see why it's unappealing to a lot of people. I had a pretty bad perception of it myself, but after I left here it was the most active Jays community around so I just chose to dig in. Was a really pleasant change of pace becoming a nobody and getting a fresh start.