TwistedLogic

The f***. He looks incredible. Normally I'd be concerned about a player who's got a big power tool dropping a ton of mass but the kid is still yoked. Tree trunk arms.

Rich Hill signing for 2.5M with Tampa. Gotta imagine that if the Jays were in at the same price range there'd be a good chance he'd pick them instead. Hoping the fact that they passed on him means that they have their sights set on a pitching target already. Side note: I'm not about to enjoy hearing Buck Martinez call him Richeel for an entire season.

Overnight roundup:

Bauer's contract is a lot more roundabout and wonky than initially reported. He's actually getting 38M in Year 1 and 47M in Year 2 if he opts out. Year 1: 10M Signing Bonus + 28M Salary + 2M Bonus if he opts out. Dodgers can defer 20M if he does opt out after Year 1. Year 2: 32M Salary + 15M Bonus if he opts out. Year 3: 32M Like I had initially speculated on here, it's evident that both sides deliberately structured this contract to lead to a Year 2 opt-out. The Dodgers scare Bauer away from opting out after Year 1 by adding a clause that would cost him a f*** ton of money in deferrals. They push him to opt out after Year 2 with a 15M bonus for doing so. For all intents and purposes, this is a two year deal that the Dodgers creatively structured by tacking on a third year to circumvent the CBA and reduce the luxury tax implications of the contract.

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The Blue Jays roster is hilarious.

Agreed. The only guy on the roster I'd say fits the examples in the FanGraphs study is Biggio, who's pretty reliant on his OBP. I'd probably bat him leadoff just because of that, but you can't really go wrong with him anywhere in the order just because of how stacked the rest of the lineup is. Hell, the days that Kirk gets playing time, the Jays will have a legitimate power threat at every spot in the lineup outside of Biggio, who can still knock it out a pretty respectable rate. Edit: And it looks like I'm underselling Biggio's power. For all the s*** he gets about having no game power, he had the #7 ISO and #7 SLG in 2020 among all qualified second basemen. He might have the weakest power on the team but he's still among the best guys at his position.

2012 pales in comparison to 2014. The Dickey trade dampened the f*** out of the excitement I had over the Marlins trade, the Melky signing, and the return of Gibby. And as we all know, the Marlins trade wound up being a massive bust anyway. There was literally nothing bad about 2014. They started off with a banger by signing Russell Martin and then blew the roof off with the Donaldson trade. And all of the little moves AA made that offseason were practically flawless. They picked up Carrera and Kawasaki on MiLB deals. They signed Smoak to a 1M contract. They got Colabello off waivers. They made four separate 1-for-1 trades that got them Saunders for Happ, Estrada for Lind, Travis for Gose, and Hendriks for Nessy. The amount of value over the next few years that the Jays squeezed out of that offseason considering the absolute pittance that everything cost was unbelievable. The only move that could be classified as a poor one on paper was Saunders for Happ and that's mostly because Saunders had a freak injury in Spring Training that f***ed up his meniscus and cost him the entire season. They still got Happ back the next year. They even kept it going into the season when they had that crazy trade deadline and picked up Price, Tulo, Lowe and Revere (and outside of trading Boyd for Price, which I'd do again in a heartbeat, the Jays won all of those trades). Between the excitement in the offseason, the crazy trade deadline, the return to the playoffs, the MVP campaign from Donaldson, the story of Stroman getting injured and coming back, and the culmination in the Bautista bat flip homer, 2015 was far and away the best year I've ever had following the Jays.

FanGraphs put out a pretty interesting article on one of the key themes in this thread: Who should bat leadoff? https://blogs.fangraphs.com/should-good-hitters-lead-off-fangraphs-investigates/ TLDR: The batting order does impact how many runs you score over the course of a season and it does make the most sense to bat a high OBP player leadoff while keeping power hitters in the heart of the lineup. The conundrum for the Jays, and one that the article above doesn't necessarily tackle, is this: what if your best power hitter is also your best OBP guy? That's what the Blue Jays have in George Springer and it will be interesting to see where they decide to bat him.

Jays target off the board.

Major Update: I've done a complete overhaul to the OP in this thread. The Top 75 free agents list has been completely updated to reflect all of the changes in Steamer projections since I first posted the list on here. I've also added a few players to the list and might expand it further when I get more free time. I've also added a second tracker using the FanGraphs Top 50 Free Agents list that was published after the 2020 season. In reading the Top 50 list, the columns represent the following: 1: FanGraphs Top 50 Rank* 2: Player Name 3: Steamer WAR Projection (Present Day) 4: Steamer WAR Projection (October 2020, the date FanGraphs published the list) 5: Signing team *Because of how long it's been since FanGraphs made that list, some of the player projections have seen some wild changes. As a result, I've made several tweaks to FanGraphs' list to reflect the present-day valuations. I've noted the edits I made to the list below, with reasoning on each change. - Switched Springer (Previously 2, now 1) and Realmuto (1>2): Springer's projection has adjusted from 4.7 WAR then down to 4.5 now. Realmuto's projection has adjusted from 4.4 then down to 3.8 now. - Switched Gausman (14>13) and Paxton (13>14): Paxton's projection has adjusted from 2.3 then down to 2.1 now. Gausman's projection has adjusted from 2.4 then up to 2.7 now. - Switched Ozuna (5>6) and LaMahieu (6>5): Ozuna's projection has adjusted from 3.4 then down to 3.1 now. LaMahieu's has changed from 3.8 then up to 3.9 now. - Dropped Jackie Bradley 9 spots (18>26): 0.8 WAR decrease in projections (1.9 > 1.1). - Dropped Tommy La Stella 4 spots (19>23): 1.0 WAR decrease in projections (2.7 > 1.7). - Dropped Jurickson Profar 6 spots (35>41): 1.1 WAR decrease in his projections (2.0 > 0.9). - I also swapped Walker (20>22) and Odorizzi (22>20) because even though the two projections have stayed relatively the same, Odorizzi has always had a much more favorable projection than Walker.

No argument there. On a side note, I also seem to recall AA getting a little unlucky on a couple of sliding prospects. They would have had Lucas Giolito in 2012 until he stopped sliding a single pick before they went. Same thing happened the year after in 2013, when Meadows went one pick before them. Of course, they did finally luck out in 2014 with a sliding prospect when they got Jeff Hoffman, but we all know how that turned out.

While you have a point, Anthopoulos was the reason they had the billion high picks in the first place. I don't know if there was another GM in baseball that did a better job of gaming the draft compensation rules than AA did. The only other example I can think of is the Rays draft in 2011, which was far more of a garbage fire than any of the Jays drafts. AA is one of the primary reasons the draft compensation rules were changed.

lmao

I don't know if you'd find it as funny if people doxed you and started showing up/sending stuff to your house or workplace, which is something that's become all too common with social media. That said, I actually do agree with both of you that people who are vile shitbags online deserve the reality check that comes with a celebrity actually responding to them. As BTS said, talk s*** get hit.

The purpose of the third year is to reduce the cap hit for the Dodgers on the first two years. Both sides know that there's no way Bauer is going to opt-in to the third year, even if he regresses. This is a two-year deal, they just didn't put it down as a two-year deal because the AAV would have been 42.5M and the Dodgers would have had to pay a lot more in luxury tax penalties or had a harder time getting under the cap. I wouldn't be surprised if the Dodgers are the ones who requested the third year in there. And then of course, if Bauer does completely fall off a cliff, he has a $17M insurance policy.

Yeah, I said this earlier but the Blue Jays being in the video and then Rachel Luba only tweeting yesterday evening that it was down to two teams makes me think the Blue Jays were in it until yesterday. Jays reporters had been speculating that the team was out on Bauer right after signing Springer but it looks like they stayed in it for quite a while longer after that. Good news for Jays fans,