TwistedLogic

All of me wants the Mariners to be good again as long as they don't get in the way of a Jays ring. They've had such terrible luck for so long and have some of the best fans in sports.

Heading into this game, the Jays had scored every single run in this series after the 6th inning. Then they have that 9th inning rally. Absolutely pummelled the Braves pen.

Really don't think that's what happened here based on replays. His foot was already hurt before he threw his hands up.

I reallyyyyyy hope this isn't an achilles.

Don't worry, the reddit crowd isn't looking for discussion forums. They already have reddit, lol. If we were going to get an influx of redditors, it would have happened in 2015 when the team was at the height of its popularity and these boards were still easily discoverable. Most people who are looking for message boards these days are either hardcores or older gen types that have used forums all their lives and don't like reddit. If we do get casuals on here, it's on us to be welcoming and inclusive and not alienate them out of the gate. A lot of people are willing to learn if the people sharing the knowledge aren't obnoxious about it.

Mhm, I don't think the Google issues stem as far back as 2015. Feels like the wide majority of the active forum members are from the OG class of 2013 when the forum started and then a bunch of people from 2015, since that's when the team got really good and people were excited to talk about it. But it's kind of sad how few active people we have with join dates after 2015, aside from the ones that repeatedly make new accounts. Hopefully getting more visibility on search engines will help us draw more people here.

Yeah, the only way to find this forum before was to google "blue jays message board" just because it's the name of the site. But the search result flat out had a flag on it from Google saying the site owners aren't allowing their search engine to index the site. All you got was the link and nothing else, not even a site description. So yeah, it was still possible to find this site because of that but far fewer searches brought it up than will now.

Game #36 Toronto Blue Jays (Stripling) @ Atlanta Braves (Morton) Schedule | Standings | FanGraphs | News | Video | Spotlight | Twitter | Reddit | Instagram 

Thanks guys! I'm a total noob to dynasty and haven't played any form of fantasy in like 8 years so have fun finessing me!

Game #35 Toronto Blue Jays (Ryu) @ Atlanta Braves (Fried) Schedule | Standings | FanGraphs | News | Video | Spotlight | Twitter | Reddit | Instagram  

Got some good news and not sure where to post it. I don't know if people care about this but I discovered a few days ago that Blue Jays Message Board wasn't being indexed by Google so none of our threads or our content have showed up in search engines for a long time. We've essentially gone years without being easily discoverable to potential new members looking for a Blue Jays community to join. I reached out to ju1ced about it, who didn't see my message because he's busy with real life. I then messaged Hurl who was able to flag him down. Ju1ced had a pretty good idea of what was causing the issue and immediately got to work on repairing those SEO holes. This was about 10 days ago. I just checked Google now and it looks like whatever fixes ju1ced implemented worked, at least to a certain degree. BJMB is back on Google and our content is slowly being indexed again. Not all of our content is properly indexed still and I'm not sure if search engines just need time to go through everything again or the site needs more SEO work. Either way, I'm quite happy that we're at least back on Google at all. Over time, that should help this site get discovered by more people and bring new members to this community.

Man, Vladdy can move.

Game #34 Toronto Blue Jays (Ray) @ Atlanta Braves (Wilson) Schedule | Standings | FanGraphs | News | Video | Spotlight | Twitter | Reddit | Instagram  

Nah, check out the Umpire Scorecards channel that tweets umpire reports after every game. Sub-90% games are rare. Most are above 92-93%.

I don't think this would ever happen. Players nowadays are throwing near-100 after already being out there for 7 innings. I really don't think we'll see an intentional drop in velocity for any reason besides some sort of biomechanical revolution centered around arm health. Lol, what? Not only would the umpire union not allow anything like this to ever happen, nobody in baseball would even propose it. An automated strike zone is meant to get calls right, it's not some tool of vengeance to extract some sort of weird sociopathic retribution on the umpires. At the end of the day, these are still human beings who are almost always accurate 92-95% of time doing maybe the hardest job in sports. Yes, we want closer to 100% accuracy but you can achieve that simply with an automated strike zone without all the added creepy stuff.

If they're shrinking the strike zone, I think the bigger problem is the top of the zone as opposed to the bottom. Both would obviously help but the high fastball is becoming the most dangerous strikeout pitch in baseball: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/fastballs-keep-pouring-into-the-top-of-the-zone/

Personally, and I never thought about this until tonight so I probably haven't considered all the ways in which this is a stupid idea, I'd like to maybe see them make the bat bigger. If there's a way to do that without substantially increasing the weight and significantly reducing bat speed, I'd like to see how that plays out. Feel like increasing the sweet spot even marginally would result in so many more balls in play and create an offensive boom. And that just feels like less drastic of a change than doing something wild with the mound like pushing it back, which I've seen a lot of people suggest. Changing the mound would require pitchers to go through a massive adjustment and I don't think making the bat bigger would be as big of awkward of an adjustment for batters. Obviously I want to see an automated strike zone but that's more so because I f***ing hate umpires. When it comes to offense, the robo zone will help but I don't know if it entirely resolves the balls in play situation. Will probably just mean a lot more walks, which is the most boring of the three true outcomes.

I know the off day is essentially over but the idea of using off days to have constructive discussions or work through thought experiments just occurred to me. I'm assuming most of the conversation in this thread will probably take place tomorrow but I wanted to put this thread up anyway to set a precedent for future off days So... historically bad offense and historically good pitching. It's either a plague or a paradise depending on who you are. This topic came up in the Around Baseball thread today when I posted screenshots of the FanGraphs historical leaderboards that show 2021 as the worst year ever for batting average, as well as the worst year ever for strikeouts. I know this is a contentious topic throughout baseball and throughout baseball fandom so I wanted to pose the question and see what everyone here thought. Do you think pitchers have gotten too good? That the TTO style (three true outcomes) is boring and the game isn't as fun when there's less action and more strikeouts? Or are you a fan of endless pitching duels? If it's the former, what kind of suggestions would you bring to the table if you were part of the action committee for Major League Baseball in charge of remedying the situation? Would you nerf the pitcher? Perhaps by lowering the mound? Pushing back the mound? Changing the ball? Or would you maybe buff hitting somehow? Perhaps by shrinking the strike zone? Eliminating the high fastball? Implementing an automated strike zone to make framing harder? Eliminating shifts? Offer your thoughts below and let's get a discussion going! Note: If people like this idea, I'll make sure to set discussion threads up early in future off days so we can talk through them throughout the day. Feel free to offer suggestions for future discussion topics as well.

Some not-so-fun facts about the "deadened" ball this year: The MLB as a whole in 2021 currently has the lowest batting average, literally, in baseball history. Lower than the 1800s, lower than the dead-ball era and yes, 3 points lower than even the 1968 "year of the pitcher" that resulted in the mound being lowered. 2021 also has the highest strikeout rate in history at a whopping 24.1 K% leaguewide. To put that into perspective, Nolan Ryan had a career 25.3% strikeout rate. The MLB as a whole at this point is essentially Nolan Ryan when it comes to drawing strikeouts.

Silky smooth. Here's the video with more replays: Looks even better in real-time.

Tyler Matzek with one of the better defensive plays you'll ever see by a pitcher.

Don't think he wanted to come here. And getting Brantley means they trade Grichuk and don't get Semien. Both guys have been key contributors so far.

Let's f***ing go. I like McGuire.