BlueBirdBro

These MLB TV between inning ads are maddening.

Colby I'm not even surprised.

Zaun is giving a speech about how postseason games are played. I have no idea, but I wonder if he has played many

Interview with AA about the behind the scenes acquiring Tulo/Price. Once again, it's from the Sun, but quotes are quotes. Copy/pasted because you only get so many free articles a month and I'm sure nobody actually subscribes. If you’ve ever bought a new house, paid full price, without having yet sold your old house, you might have an inkling of how anxious Blue Jay GM Alex Anthopoulos felt on the evening of July 27. The Blue Jays were four days short of the trade deadline, the most important trade deadline in club history. For the current management group it was now or never and they desperately needed a starting pitcher. Now they were faced with a dilemma. A deal was on the table with the Colorado Rockies to get Troy Tulowitzki and reliever LaTroy Hawkins. To get it done, they would have to spend a big chunk of prospect currency. The deal was going to cost them (in addition to Jose Reyes) Jeff Hoffman, Jesus Tinoco and Miguel Castro, three premier young arms. It was a very tempting deal both for now and for the future, but what about that premier starting pitcher that they so desperately needed to solidify their run to the playoffs? “We debated a lot,” said Anthopoulos this week. “Not about the player but about the acquisition cost. We knew we wanted to get a starter. We were doing the deal on the Monday night so we had a conference call in the early evening. We decided that we weren’t going to do the deal but we would re-visit it on Friday. How the Blue Jays' trade deadline deals got done Jays fans contemplate sick days, vacation requests Whiny Jays fans should wake up and smell playoffs “The concern was that we would be shut out on starters. That was what the group thought. We felt we needed to get the starter done. “Afterwards, I got off the call and thought about things and I sent out a note to the group to say ‘Guys, I still want to go forward with this deal, and we’ll get a starter one way or the other.’ We were going to get a starter, I believe, one way or the other. You just didn’t know who it was going to be. There was a chance Price would be available. You just couldn’t time it, and the concern was moving some of the assets in the Tulowitzki deal.” Who could be sure, after spending big on Tulowitzki, they would have enough to spring the deal for a starter? Anthopoulos already knew which starter he wanted the most: a tall lefthander employed 400 kilometres down the highway in Detroit. “I just felt confident we would come away with a starter,” he says now. “I think that was a concern: Are we going to get shut out? If we move these assets, Hoffman, Castro, Tinoco, is that going to limit our ability to get another starter?” Anthopoulos gambled that he could still get it done and continued to pester Detroit Tigers GM Dave Dombrowski about David Price. “David was just a great fit, he was totally healthy, performed in our division, great teammate and he fit everything we wanted in a front of the rotation guy,” said Anthopoulos. “Even as we asked about Cueto, the whole time I’m still calling Dave to check because David would’ve been our first choice. I called Dave Dombrowski, I told him, ‘The Cueto market’s starting to move, any chance, anything change, if anything changes please call me.’ We were always enthusiastic to get a guy like David, we just couldn’t force Dave Dombrowski to make a deal. We knew it was going to be expensive.” The one shiny, enchanting asset Anthopoulos had was lefty Daniel Norris, a talent he was loathe to give up in almost any deal. The one exception was Price. When Dombrowski finally indicated he was open for business on the Wednesday night, less than 48 hours ahead of the trade deadline, he went right to Norris. That’s what it was going to take: Norris, plus Matt Boyd and Jairo Labourt, for two months of David Price. “And, look, Norris was being asked about in every other deal,” said Anthopoulos. “We just weren’t prepared to do it. The one exception was a guy like Price. It was an expensive ask, but obviously we were prepared to do it.” Anthopoulos couldn’t dither. It was not widely known yet that Price was on the market and if the word got out, who knows what other teams might have offered? “I just knew that the Astros had been in on the Hamels deal,” said Anthopoulos. “We knew the Dodgers would be involved, we knew the Giants would be involved. Timing’s a big thing. Deals can fall apart fast on you. The deadline’s on Friday, it’s Wednesday night. If you have a chance to close a deal, you should close it. I can’t tell you the number of times a deal’s fallen apart on us — millions of times. You think you get close, you might try to buy time, stall and then all of a sudden it’s gone. Things change that fast.” Things certainly do change fast. The Tulowitzki deal was announced on July 28. The Price deal went down on July 30. On July 29, the Blue Jays beat the Phillies 8-2 to pull their record back to .500 (51-51) after 102 games. From there until the end of the season, they played .700 baseball, winning 42, losing 18, overcoming a seven-game Yankee lead by the third week of August. “When you win it validates the work you’ve done, validates the work of your staff,” said Anthopoulos. “You don’t do it alone. There are a lot of people involved and I could go over every single transaction and I could single out one or two people in each case that were very prominent in those decisions. All the work we have done as a group finally paid off for us.”

Sportsnet broadcasted from Shark Club Toronto the day they won the AL East. Good place.

Twins lineup today sucks

Pathetic. Royals are laughing at us. f*** you Gibbons. Two f***ing B lineups in a row.

Wishluthwistulish-things they want to see

Buehrle for a few then bullpen?

Everyone sacrifice whatever important item you're willing to part with to give the Twins temporary super powers.

I don't like this thread. It feels like a jinx when nothing is wrong.

Pretty much same lineup as yesterday posted

Leaving the CN tower blue is a nice touch

Kawa: IM DRUNK Amazing.

Cespedes drilled in the left hand...leaves the game....

This lineup is amazinggggg

Joe East-West

Ace gives no f***s:

Mercy is overrated anyway

They're talking about how to use him the rest of this game

Pretty sure that scoreboard flashed "O's Baseball" Down 10-0 and hit a meaningless HR, makes sense.

lol ok umpire

If you're ever thinking of getting MLB TV but are hung up on the quality or "bang for your buck", just go for it. MLB TV is amazing. Bottom line.

This is a really good Reddit post I feel should be shared. The dude comes up with his own metric to measure baseball offense "dominace" and compares the Jays season to the rest of MLB history. Some really interesting notes. Sorry if it's been posted.

f***ing Baltimore. Ugh. Do something right for once.