TwistedLogic

I like the idea of trying Goins out in LF. If he could be a serviceable defender there, it would raise his stock on the team and make it more justifiable that he's holding a roster spot. This team needs a good defensive LF in the worst way.

The Jays offense put up 0.9 fWAR last night. Before Game 1 vs Rangers http://i.gyazo.com/2d9ee1829003a48c1f56eebab993fd93.png After Game 1 vs Rangers http://i.gyazo.com/d21a75a44a13f16e19f9a85e98894da7.png

From the guy that brought you many Blue Jays cartoons in the past... I don't know what the f*** is going on in this video, but I'm posting it for science. 2Knuckles2Hippious:

The Astros will probably rocket to the top of that list pretty quickly behind McCullers and Correia.

Thanks to Stroman, the Jays have received the third highest fWAR (of all 30 teams) from the 2012 draft so far. http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/luhnows-first-astros-draft-class-has-arrived/ http://i.gyazo.com/aada45381b319717ee26f6ce6158d8f8.png

http://i.gyazo.com/09fd31a914038c78d7e2441694e488cb.png It's that easy. There's no disagreement over the strategy. The separator tends to be player evaluation. Which players are good? Which players will remain good? Which players will be the most good? The teams that have the most good players tend to be the strongest teams. You might not know why you bothered to read these paragraphs. When it comes to team-building, so much of the emphasis is on accumulating as many good players as possible. And that's good, that's important, because that's the biggest key to winning games. But there's another side of this, one that tends to get ignored. It's important to have good players, but it's also important to not have *bad* players. That might seem like saying the same thing. They're related, but they aren't identical. For example, let's consider two hypothetical mini-teams. Team A has three players. Two of those players are both +4. The third player is 0. Team B also has three players. Two of those players are both +4. The third player is -1. Of Team A and Team B, you could say each has a pair of good players. But Team B also has that bad player, relative to Team A's 0. So by this simple math, Team A comes out at +8, and Team B comes out at +7. The good players are critical, but a bad player still made a difference. Reality isn't quite that clean, in that teams are much bigger and we don't have perfect measures of performance, but we do have Wins Above Replacement, or WAR. So for the sake of this example, let's trust those 2015 WAR figures. It's pretty easy to navigate over to FanGraphs and figure out which teams have generated the most and the least total WAR. It's tougher to break that down. How much of that WAR is coming from good players, and how much negative WAR is coming from bad players? It's the latter I'm going to focus on here -- enough attention is already paid to the good-player side of the equation. You're going to see a table below, of all 30 teams, and 2015 negative WAR totals. The thing about WAR is it comes with a really convenient baseline, the level of performance expected from a so-called replacement-level player. Ideally, no playing time ever goes to guys who aren't at least replacement-level, but we don't live in an ideal world, as you can just ask the Phillies. So I've gone through all the 2015 data, and I've found all the players with a WAR below 0, and I've sorted them by team. Then it was just adding up numbers. Some of this is about depth. Some of this is about not needing depth. Some of this is luck. But the general idea is a simple one: Which teams have gotten the most negative performances, from players they've played? And which teams have spent the least time putting up with subpar performances? http://i.imgur.com/FuGUHQD.png Maybe that doesn't seem like much of a spread to you, but remember that the units here are wins, full wins, and we're not even to the halfway point of the season. The average is -3.4, meaning at the top you've got an advantage of more than two wins, and at the bottom a deficit of three wins. Not that the Phillies should really count as evidence of anything -- they were never going to be competitive -- but we can examine the non-Phillies results. And what's most interesting to me are the Astros. They might be the best example of the concept. By negative WAR, or really by avoiding negative WAR, the Astros rank No. 1 in baseball. By positive WAR, they're No. 15, right in the middle of the pack. Obviously, the good players are important, but the Astros have also gotten a lift from the bottom. They haven't had bad players bringing them down. They've been at least adequate all over the place, and when they've needed help, they've been able to dig in the system. The Astros have had surface-level ability, and depth. There's Hank Conger, behind Jason Castro. There's been Carlos Correa, behind Marwin Gonzalez, behind Jed Lowrie. Preston Tucker has done an admirable job after being pressed into service. Domingo Santana has come up. Lance McCullers has been outstanding in the rotation. Vincent Velasquez seems to be at least adequate. And so on. The bullpen's deep. There are still players on the farm. By negative WAR, the Astros are separated from the Angels by two wins. From the A's by three wins. From the Rangers by somewhere in between. And funny enough, when I looked at this same thing last October, examining the 2012-2014 window, the Astros came in dead last. Which means in a way, this happened quickly. The Astros had to put up with a lot of crap, but they've suddenly arrived, and they've arrived with depth to support a more-than-adequate front line. I wouldn't quite call them "complete," but they aren't far away. Right behind the Astros are the Blue Jays and Yankees, who have been modest surprises. I don't mean to just skip over them, so, let's all take a moment. Great. But now we have to move on, because I can't keep writing forever. I wanted to highlight the Royals, in fourth. Right now, the Royals lead the Twins by 3.5 games in the AL Central. They lead the Tigers by 6 games. Just by avoiding negative WAR, the Royals have given themselves a four-game advantage over both of those rivals. By positive WAR, the Tigers and Royals are nearly even. The Royals might not really be a team full of All-Stars, but they have been mostly a team full of at least adequate players. Rare has been the instance that the Royals have put up with a player actively dragging them down. It's a type of strength, avoiding weakness. Granted, in the Tigers' case, a contributor here has been the awful performance from Victor Martinez. That presumably has had to do with injury, and it's not like they could easily sit Martinez down. But it still informs the point. It's not just that Martinez hasn't been good. It's that he's been bad, and the Tigers have played him. So they ended up in a situation the Royals didn't face. There are eight different teams with no more than 2 negative WAR. And there are seven different teams with at least 5 negative WAR. Three of them have been intending to compete, and this helps explain why they've been disappointments. The Mariners have gotten a lot of bad contributions from seemingly decent players. The Tigers' strength is more about front-line players, not depth. And the White Sox just seemed like an incomplete team. They have an excellent core, but almost nothing around it, and this is what can happen. The White Sox would be in the race, if the negatives were just less negative. Instead, they're going to have to regroup. Don't take this to mean more than it does. Ultimately, the most important thing is assembling a group of good players. But they can't all be good players. And when the good players run out, you want to be able to avoid having to play the bad ones. Some of that is just going to be up to luck, but some of that, you can prepare for. There's no such thing as being too prepared.

Chris Russo on High Heat, talking about the Jays 1-0 win over the Rays: http://m.mlb.com/video/topic/7417714/v197760083/the-brushback-on-blue-jays-winning-in-tampa/?query=blue%2Bjays

Toronto Blue Jays’ Daniel Norris plagued by familiar frustrations in Triple-A, but feels close to big-league return http://news.nationalpost.com/sports/mlb/toronto-blue-jays-daniel-norris-plagued-by-familiar-frustrations-in-triple-a-but-feels-close-to-big-league-return Jays’ Donaldson explains leaping catch into stands http://www.sportsnet.ca/baseball/mlb/jays-donaldson-explains-leaping-catch-into-stands/ Gibbons: ‘There’s no quit’ in this Blue Jays team http://www.sportsnet.ca/baseball/mlb/gibbons-theres-no-quit-in-this-blue-jays-team/

http://i.gyazo.com/05002360263ca3a9fae089cdd3e37c33.png http://www.sportsnet.ca/baseball/mlb/travis-expected-to-rejoin-blue-jays-on-friday ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – Devon Travis is expected to rejoin the Toronto Blue Jays on Friday after recovering from a shoulder injury that’s kept him out of the lineup for more than a month. The second baseman has been rehabbing at triple-A Buffalo and the team has been waiting for him to regain his timing at the plate before activating him. After a slow start, Travis now has four hits and four walks in six games, setting the stage for his return. “I think so, yeah,” manager John Gibbons said Wednesday. “I would guess that’s probably going to happen. That’s kind of the plan, anyway.” Travis, 24, started the season strong and in 36 games has batted .271/.336/.504 with seven homers and 26 RBIs. But at the beginning of May in Cleveland, he took a Brandon Moss smash off the collarbone and ended up hurting his shoulder compensating for it at the plate. Once back, the Blue Jays plan to slot him into the lower part of the batting order after using him in the leadoff spot briefly during Jose Reyes’ absence earlier in the season. “He was struggling there at the end because of his shoulder before we finally sat him down, but for the longest time he was leading our team in RBIs,” said Gibbons. “He seemed to always be getting that big, big hit. He was in the bottom of the lineup and turning it over for those guys up top, was playing good defence – I mean, he was doing everything. We know we have a good player, hopefully he’s ready to go when we get him back.” Travis’ return will bump Ryan Goins out of regular duty, but Gibbons intends to use the slick infielder to spell Travis, Reyes and even third baseman Josh Donaldson plus occasional duty in the outfield. “He has done a tremendous job, I think that role right there is really a great role for him because he’s such a good defender,” said Gibbons. “You can put him anywhere and he’s good. But he’s played so well we’ve got to make sure that we keep him active.”

If I was an NL team, I wouldn't trade for Kemp or Lind either.

Even though I wasn't a fan of this deal at the time, market value for Lind probably wouldn't have been much higher. He was a platoon-only guy going into his age 32 season, making 7.5M. Besides, we don't know which teams would have wanted him, and which of them would have offered something the Jays needed. I don't think AA makes many deals without having exhausted every other option first. BTS should probably feel insulted by this.

Except the fact that Valencia has a 141 wRC+ against lefties throughout 602 career plate appearances.

You said that Buchholz is the worst suggestion for a trade target, and that suggesting him was equivalent to trolling. In other words, you had no idea how good he's been and you were talking out of your ass. Or are you telling me that you'd pass on a top-10 SP in 2015, for a rotation in desperate need of help, just because you dislike his personality? For how much you bitch about the state of this team and how badly you think they need to make moves, that makes you look like a colossal moron.

What the hell are you guys talking about? Buchholz has been a top-10 SP so far in 2015, and he's been worth twice as much as the Jays best arms. http://i.gyazo.com/83fd0bf89806c8eb831138528e14c5bc.png

According to a report yesterday, Hamels apparently blocked a trade to Houston as well. I think the Rays are a lost cause in St. Pete. I don't think they'll ever sell that place out; not just because it's a bad stadium in a bad location, but because I don't think the fans actually exist. It would be one thing if fans were making up for the lack of attendance at the stadium by swarming online boards, but the Rays might have one of the smallest online presence of any MLB team as well. For a team that has no online presence and has nobody in their seats, I don't see where they can go to try and appeal to fans to come out to watch the games. Who knows, maybe they have great TV ratings from a very large amount of people who don't know what the internet is.

Who gives a s***? Everytime somebody is banned, the mods don't need to give their posse a reason. He told o2 to kiss his ass, that's reason enough, but even looking at his most recent posts, everything there is garbage. Half of his posts consist of calling somebody a retard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idPYpHTKpDM

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