intrigid

2015 Blue Jays = 2000 Mariners

Sell to who? Who is this supposed party that's going to make them an offer they can't refuse? Saying Rogers may sell the jays because they're so damn valuable is like saying Apple might sell off their iPhone division because it's so damn valuable. That's not how value works.

Yeah merging this into another (generic) thread was stupid. Doesn't matter how unimportant the topic is. Someone will glance, see there's no topic, and start one, and then it's even more splintered than before. Merging two threads of the exact same topic into one is good, but merging a specific one into a generic one is not something I agree with.

They are increasing the budget in 2016 tho in terms of Canadian dollars. In terms of US dollars (where most of their expenses are) their revenue hasn't increased that much.

It wasn't the "shackles in the contract" that was the problem. It was the organizational structure. AA wanted and expected the promotion to president. He was snubbed. That's all there is to it.

Only false in the most technical sense. The act of hiring Shapiro as president was the act of saying goodbye to AA. Only a fool believes that AA would tolerate a snubbing of such epicness.

There are ways around it. AA will tell the government official that Shapiro changed the locks on his office doors. They don't really check into those things. $500 a week is $500 a week.

The question is WHY was Shapiro chosen as the new boss instead of AA. Either you believe Shapiro is better / smarter / more qualified, in which case you should be happy AA is gone, or you don't believe this in which case you should be pissed that Shapiro got chosen for the job over AA.

They never should have brought in Shapiro as president. AA should have been promoted an autonomous president/GM role, giving AA the ability to continue GM duties until he chooses his own successor. And if this was too much of a workload for AA, they should have hired a separate VP of baseball operations so that AA isn't concerned with ticket sales and concession stands and crap like that. The only time an organization should ever bring in an outsider to run it is when the organization sees itself going in the wrong direction, and it wants to blow itself up and start over fresh. The act of taking Shapiro, previously AA's peer, an outsider, and hiring him above AA, was a giant middle finger to AA, and anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot. The act of hiring Shapiro was the act of pressing the panic/nuke button. The only question is whether Rogers realized they had pressed this button.

If you're down by 1 run in the 9th, and you have 2nd and 3rd and nobody out, and a lights out closer coming out. To suggest that shouldn't affect your strategy is ridiculous. If your philosophy is "our team win score tons of runs, prevent plenty of runs, that should get us enough wins over the course of a season", then that's a perfect recipe for making it to the playoffs and exiting early.

"Small ball" is a factor in teams ability to win 1 run games and outperform their expected W/L record. To what extent teams can do this, I don't know.

I love how he's his own agent.

Home field advantage doesn't increase your number of home games.

That's nice and all, but seems no different than literally any other athlete.

Pennington starts game 6. "You know I thought he looked really good out there."

Move Bautista to 3rd, Donaldson/Martin the catcher/DH platoon (Martin catches on Dickey starts), Colabello to 1st, and put Edwin back in the outfield.

People just love to hate Bautista because of his superiority as a player. If he was a 20HR, Colabello type utility player, nobody would talk about him, let alone hate him.

I know that feeling exactly. It's what I felt the Saturday and Sunday after 0-2 to the rangers. Might have more to do with lowered expectations than anything else.

Stop right there. All other things being equal, a random team can expect to go 2-0 a full 25% of the time. Between 1985 and 2014, how often has the home team won the first two games of the LCS? Answer: 22.4% of the time (13 / 58).

In the 7th game of league championship series (1985-2014), the home team is 10-5. In the 5th game of 5-game LCS in the same period, the home team is 8-7. Remember, that "8" is the team that did not have home field advantage.

"Fire the manager" chanting is to losing baseball what farting is to beans.

It's OK. I usually don't read others walls of text either. But one thing I mentioned is there's no real evidence that the order of home games changes the likelihood of winning at home. Winning LCS home field advantage is like winning the right to call heads or tails in a football game.

Lol this series has a chance of being the exact mirror of the 85 ALCS.

I'm getting a little annoyed by fans shouting "HFA!!!" as if to prove that they were right and Gibby was wrong for backing the jays into the playoffs. Not that know-it-all fans bug me in particular, though they do. But what bugs me the most is that nobody is interested in researching this subject and figuring out what LCS HFA is actually worth. So I did the research myself, and the results might just shock you: Since 1985, when LCS 2-3-2 was introduced, thru 2014, home field advantage has resulted in zero extra home games. That's right, not a single extra hone game has ever been played in the LCS due to the team having the privilege of playing games 1, 2, 6, and 7 at home. So how did I arrive at this conclusion? Turns out all I had to do was break down the series by number of games and count them: 4 - 7 5 - 15 6 - 21 7 - 15 Four and six game series by definition always result in an equal number of home games for both teams, so we don't even need to look at those. 7 game series always result in one additional game for HFA-advantage, while 5 game series have the opposite effect. And since the number of 7 and 5 game series are the same, they would cancel each other out, and we expect no difference. And indeed there isn't. 167 home games have been played by teams who earned HFA. 167 home games have been played by teams who failed to earn HFA. Of course, none of this suggests that home field isn't an advantage. In the playoffs, the home team wins about 57% of the time: http://www.foxsports.com/mlb/just-a-bit-outside/story/adam-wainwright-derek-jeter-mlb-all-star-game-world-series-home-field-071714 And none of this proves that HFA doesn't result in wins, though there's no evidence that the order of home games affects the likelihood of winning at home. It just means that home field advantage doesn't, you know, actually get you more home field games! This speaks more to how fair the 2-3-2 format is, and how it really favors no side in particular. Of course, the exact same principles apply in the world series, but seeing as it's determined by the all star game, it's not such a matter of controversy. And of course, there's always the sentimental value of the deciding WS game guaranteed to be at home. Now, none of this applies to LDS series. There, HFA has +1 home game in both 3 and 5 game series, with a wash in 4 game series. So there will be a significant advantage. In other words, both 1st and 2nd seeds have a true and equal home-related advantage in the postseason, while 3rd and 4th seeds have the disadvantage.

So now we're just throwing personality out the window when ranking likeability?