metafour

Lane Thomas (who we traded for IFA pool money) is hitting .305/.352/.659 with 7 HR's in AA for the Cardinals. He is still only 22 and always had promising tools despite lackluster performance. Hope we dont end up regretting dumping him off.

Exactly. Vicuna is getting a little interesting as he's starting to hit, but the kid has 0 career HRs in 823 minor league at bats and just 24 extra base hits. The offensive difference between that and a guy like Smith who could hit 15-20 HR's a year (with a ton of doubles) in the MLB is greater than the difference between their defensive values.

Him and Warmoth both had equally impressive Cape Cod showings and were borderline first rounders going into their JR seasons. Warmoth continued performing and solidified himself as a first rounder whereas Smith had a terrible season and fell to the fourth. He is a legitimate SS with above-average pop so there are real tools there. The swing-and-miss is a legit concern but his strikeouts are down so far this season (he's at like a 20% K rate right now I think). He's also relatively young as he was still 20 at time time of the draft and doesn't turn 22 until July I believe.

Kevin Smith went 3 for 5 with three doubles yesterday..........

It was such an obviously absurd pick right from the start. A slap hitting high-schooler with the pretense that he should be able to stick in CF...what could go wrong? Its not like he was even a burner on the basepaths either. A profile like that puts so much pressure on the hit tool, because unless he's an MLB .300+ hitter there are no other tools there to justify a #1 overall selection.

Based off of what? Rocker is throwing as hard with more consistency and less variance, and he doesn't possess obvious injury concerns unlike Hankins. His curveball is also better than any secondary pitch that Hankins is currently throwing, considering that he scrapped the slider (there seems to be legitimate concern that the pitch is hurting his arm, hence why he's not throwing it and has replaced it with a fringy curveball). I mean, the difference between the two wasn't that great even back when Hankins was getting top 1-3 type hype, except now you have one guy who's stayed healthy and has pitched as well as he did last summer, while the other guy got hurt and has had velocity all over the place while also scrapping his best breaking ball. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Also, just LOL @ the Jays being linked to two HS players. That must be a mistake. I was told that Shapiro, who runs our draft, only drafts college players. The data from a decade ago clearly backs this up. McDaniel and Longenhagen are clearly idiots.

Fangraphs just dropped their first mock which is only 10 picks but packs some potential team/player connections, among which mentions that we are showing interest in Kumar Rocker and Connor Scott which are literally my two favourite options at #12 right now. https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/2018-mlb-mock-draft-v-1-0/

New Top 55 from McDaniel and Longenhagen came out today with lots of movement: https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/updated-2018-mlb-draft-rankings/ They're releasing a mock draft tomorrow which may feature the first look at who we've been on to date.

His stuff is down and he's still a reliever risk as essentially a two-pitch guy with an awkward arm angle. That in combination with the fact that his performance is down and this being a strong class at the top half of the first round means that it wouldn't be even remotely strange for him to be there at #12. The more interesting question is whether or not he's even an auto-pick for us at that point considering that he already failed one physical with us.

Pretty likely at this point. He could always finish the season strong and land back in the Top 10, but his stock is down to mid first round now.

Kevin Smith is killing it. Another 2B so far today. Strikeouts are down too.

Your son is a Jew?

Pearson was apparently scratched because of a back issue yesterday. He was definitely scheduled to start second.

LOL @ not having a VPN in 2018.

Meatball? It was a perfectly scripted four seamer right at the top of the zone. Moncada wasn't even close to it. A hitter missing a "meatball" results in a fouled ball, not a guy whiffing by inches.

Did you get Matsui?

Before the 80's Computer Science was a ******** field that led to nothing, hence why males had no interest in it. You think that females have a natural interest in sitting in front of a screen looking at code until their eyes bleed, and this all changed when those meanie males told them they couldn't do it anymore?

Exactly. It is literally known as the "Scandinavian Paradox", because the more they try to push women into engineering and STEM, the more they end up with female nurses and other female-dominant jobs. The only way you can force someone to do something that they have no biological interest in doing is if you place them in a position wherein their livelihood depends on it; hence why as you mentioned you see females in the least free and most oppressed societies on the planet flocking to STEM. These dumbasses think that if you force girls to play with cars that they will grow to become mechanics. No, idiots: boys naturally play with cars because a large part of male biology revolves around a need to understand how things work, which later develops into an interest in becoming a mechanic. Girls don't want to be f***ing mechanics. The ones that do, are statistical outliers, and I'd bet if you tested them you would find that they ALL possess far greater levels of testosterone than is normal for a female to possess. They've proven this s*** all the way down to chimps (give female and male chimps a choice of toys, the male will choose to play with a truck, the female will start nurturing a doll), yet somehow in 2018 we're living in this delusion wherein its supposedly all a toss-up, because god forbid we come to the unfair conclusion that males and females aren't equal, and their interests vary significantly. You have professors losing their jobs because they dare to bring up the legitimate and factual conclusion that male intelligence falls on the ends of the bell-curve, whereas females are distributed along the median. What this means on a global sense is that the majority of the smartest AND dumbest people on the planet are always going to be males. The ratio is something like 8 to 1 males to females when it comes to genius-level intellect.

No, you are 100% wrong. Any psychologist worth anything knows that there are clear gender-differences in behaviour which ultimately play a giant role in occupational interest, hence why despite massive environmental intervention in Western nations to "push females into STEM", the number of females who are willing to do that type of systemic-based work barely fluctuates. No society proves this more than the Scandinavian nations who are ahead of everyone else in "workplace equality" (and have been for decades) and yet somehow possess the greatest ratio of female to male nurses, and male to female engineers on the planet (its like 20 to 1 or 25 to 1 for each). You see, in these first-world nations where there is little poverty, when you give people the option to do anything they want (ie: you downplay environmental factors), you naturally empower biological factors which drive females to jobs that revolve around compassion, caring, nurturing, etc....ie: nursing, teaching, pediatrics, etc. You see far greater female participation in STEM fields in developing nations like India, Southeast Asia, China, etc. which practice far stronger forms of "patriarchy", why? Because there is a giant environmental factor which pushes females to those higher paying fields in those countries: the economic need to provide for your family which may be a bunch of farmers or other poor rural peasants. Girls in these nations aren't "taught" to be IT professionals or engineers, you are talking about societies wherein females are still expected to do nothing but take care of the family, yet alas the economic factor of the environment they belong to gives them a reason to strive for those jobs. That doesn't exist in Canada, or Sweden, or Norway, etc, etc, (or at least it exists at a far less significant rate). We have entered a dark-age in academia wherein biology supposedly no longer exists, all driven by this ******** notion of post-modernist egalitarianism. The idea that everyone, regardless of gender, is some sort of "blank slate" is absurd and utter ********. They have found behavioural differences in infants that are barely weeks old. They've also found significant links between testosterone and behaviour. They know that children with higher levels of testosterone will develop communication and social sense at a slower pace. The reason why males dominate STEM is because the male brain is wired towards interest in those tasks; just like females dominate nursing, primary education, psychiatry, PSW work, etc, etc. Anyone with a working brain should understand why the sex that is tasked with birthing and raising children would have a natural biological preference towards working with kids, for instance.

He works out, so he'll be good forever, just like Bautista.

There isn't a female on the planet who possesses the athleticism required to play a passable middle infield. You know how fast you have to react to actually make plays on balls coming back at you at 100+ mph off the bat? Also, the generalization on few pitchers who were passable with well below average velocity is among the most factually dishonest positions you can make. Guys like Moyer possessed well above average movement or other qualities which made them work. There are thousands of male pitchers who throw in the low to mid 80's who will never, ever pitch in the MLB...why? Because they aren't f***ing Jamie Moyer, and Jamie Moyer is an outlier of the greatest sense. That is like saying that just because Muggsy Bogues played in the NBA at 5'3" that what, this proves that females with their stunted height can also clearly play in the NBA?

I don't want to live on this gay Earth anymore.

Not really, the difference between the NWL (Vancouver) and the MWL (Lansing) is minimal at best. Sending him to Dunedin also means he's not being thrown into the likely s*** weather in Lansing.