Farm

Cool

I just want to add that trading Donaldson is a no brainer for me. Even trading 5 wins for 20 million all coming in one year on a 85 win team for 5 undiscounted wins in the future distributed in whatever way you want would be worth it if the future wins come at a time when we are more likely to be elite. I think you can trade pitching during the deadline for close to full value but position players is a bigger question mark. Trade Donaldson, possibly trade our pitchers later. But we really should trade Donaldson away now and I feel quite strongly about this. I mean what if we had already traded Donaldson and signed Cosart to that contract or even a contract at 1.5x what was given.

The issue with this line of thinking is that good contracts decline in value with time. I'm not saying that don't have a chance of lucking our way over the course of a 162 game season into a wildcard birth, but doing so consistently is unsustainable. Toronto fans are fair. We want a perennial contender, and if we aren't at that stage then what we want is a direct way and plan of getting there, as opposed to prolonged mediocrity. With smart management and a top 10 payroll, it's obviously possible to slowly trend towards perennial contender status with shrewd transactions even as we play the hope-for-the-best-wildcard-mediocrity route. The question then becomes how quickly we would like to become elite. Do we trade some of our best expiring contracts to maximize the value and aim to jumpstart the path towards elite status in 2-3 years with a worse team in the short term, or do we grind it out and slowly get there in 4-5 years with a better team for now. A relevant question is the impact on viewership that particular choice has. Will being worse in the short term heavily impact attendance and views? Possibly. But part of me suspects that Toronto fans are more supportive than other fanbases for genuine attempts at rebuilds than other cities. Not to mention that Toronto fans may also be more prone to "switching" amongst the three major sports (basketball, hockey, baseball) when the fanbase feels that management is content with mediocrity. For me the choice is clear. I've been a serious Blue Jays fan since around 2011 when I started checking Blue Jays prospects sites daily. I'm not as big a fan as some of you on here but I'm more invested in the Jays than the average fan. And I would not hesitate to switch to the Leafs and Raptors for a while if I don't feel like the Jays are legitimate contenders or somehow exciting in some arbitrary way, especially considering how well the Leafs and Raptors are doing. I understand that they want to keep the goodwill created from the 2015-2017 seasons, but I'm not sure this mediocre approach is the way to go. Baseball is a standalone sport for a decent chunk of the season, meaning they won't be competing with the Raptors and Leafs anyways. Whether they are a 80 or 85 true talent team might not have a big impact on viewership anyways, especially if they bring in some exciting young names or new players. I suspect that many Toronto fans might not stay long if they have to watch another year of Stroman's douchebaggery on a 83 win team. Anyways, just some food for thought. Perhaps could be a start to a interesting discussion or just some more rambling (which I tend to do on these forums).

That does make sense. I suppose if winning and other similar criteria were extemely important to him, then he wouldn't be choosing the Jays in the first place.

I'm personally all for trading Donaldson but does anyone else feel like if we trade Josh away, Otani is less likely to sign here?

The thing is most of the guys here are so old that even if I give you the positive regression without any argument, the regression itself may very well be offset by age-related decline. Now I doubt anybody would want to trade Travis or Sanchez due to injury troubles wrecking their value. Pillar may very well be the ideal piece to let go -- defensive decline should be more drastic, sudden, and start at an earlier age. If Tulo or Morales can get you anything of value then I don't see why you would want to keep them. As for Pearce and Donaldson, PERHAPS you may be underestimating the additional value that having these players (especially Donaldson) for an additional playoff run that teams may be willing to offer.

Idiot

People blame Shapiro and co. for not spending enough (or whatever) to extend our window. AA is the true idiot for not creating a window that is worth or even possible to extend. Don't forget the amount of prospects we gave up and the amount of (backloaded) salary we took in with the Reyes/Buehrle/Johnson trade. Let's not forget the fact that Reyes and Buehrle were signed by the Marlins through free agency, and that they were willing to sign with a terrible organization particularly because they were willing to overpay. I will never understand why we gave up so many prospects for contracts that were acquired through free agency. Why couldn't we have just signed free agents ourselves? Because nobody wants to play for Toronto? I don't buy that argument. That trade was essentially Marisnick, Desclafani, Hechavarria, Alvarez (and more) for bloated, underperforming, and backloaded contracts. Let's not forget that Reyes was nowhere near as good for the Marlins as he was with the Mets. His only positive in his 2012 year was that he was healthy enough to play 160 games. We all know the R.A. Dickey trade was fantastic for many reasons (don't forget we signed Wuilmer Beccera for 1.3 million too) by now. But don't forget that the reason we traded for a 38 year old knuckleballer was because after adding the bloated free agent contracts of Reyes and Buehrle, we didn't have enough payroll to sign anybody else "impactful." The solution is of course to trade two of our top three prospects so we can get a supposed 6 WAR (the dome will help the knuckleball guys) for 5 million that year while we give up a combined 12 years of control of d'Arnaud and Syndergaard. #worth The Donaldson trade was of course, fantastic. But compared to the two above disasters, they are still big negatives. The right time to spend during free agency to extend windows is when you have cheap contracts relative to their performance. That's what AA should have done - spent money instead of of prospects. Cheap contracts come through control over players their first 6 years of service time, or when you get lucky with outperformance or unexpected improvements (Bautista and Encarnacion). We don't have enough of those cheap contracts anymore, and it's not feasible to buy the amount of wins we need through free agency. The Yankees weren't able to do that, and unfortunately (or fortunately), we are not the Yankees. Alex Anthopoulos lacked patience. He was so shortsighted as a GM. Even with fantastic drafting and development, he was unable to build a sustainable winner. And it's debatable how much impact he had on that as well. On one hand, he did allocate a larger amount of payroll on the draft compared to other organizations and by all accounts he hired many new scouts. On the other hand, much of that success from drafting and development should be attributed to the director of scouting and simple luck. The fact that AA was unable to capitalize on such a crazy influx of young and cheap talent makes his errors all the more disappointing. Shapiro and Atkins tried to plug in the holes to a sinking ship this year. And while they have failed, it's understandable why they tried to do so. But it's time to tear it down, because we are too old, and simply not good enough. There is very little (because I never want to so no/never) upside to expensive contracts given to old and constantly aging players. In my opinion, the proper way to use the payroll (because we are such a "big" market) to speed up the rebuild is to try to maximize the amount of surplus value we can find through free agents so that we can either trade them away or they become cheap contributors to a future contender (like Encarnacion and Bautista were to us a few years ago). And the best way to maximize the upside to these free agent contracts is to find players that come cheaply. I believe that it is easier for someone to outperform their 5 million dollar contract than it is for someone to outperform their 15 million contract. Then trade them away. More Smoak, less Morales. While the Morales signing was defensible at that moment in time given the market conditions, in terms of maximizing potential upside useful in a rebuild situation it was still poor. It is doubtful anybody would be willing to part with much in terms of prospects for a bat-only 33 year old player. If we are strictly looking from an asset collecting standpoint and disregarding wins, it would have been better to sign four relievers for 5 million each. Let's arbitrarily say two of those relievers could have been from some specific analytics that pointed to future outperformance/improvement, while two of those relievers could have been from some eye test or some different form of analytics. Just spread out the money given, randomize or switch up the criteria you use to evaluate them because we accept that we don't know everything or nearly enough, and then you hope you get lucky with your lottery tickets. The key is maximizing the amount of lottery tickets you have by spreading out money in an intelligent way. Let's say the the front office expects relievers to continue to increase in importance in the future. Then sign four relievers and hope for the best. Or let's say they expect defensive outfielders to increase in importance due to more outfield shifting in the future. Or they exppect players who are equally proficient in the outfield and infield to increase in value because of possible four man outfields. Or let's say advances in quantifying certain aspects of defense through Statcast allows front offices to value certain players more. Then project what those areas are and sign those f***ing players. It's not easy, but this is what they should be paid to do. And this is the type of thing they should be doing. Or at least trying to do. At least try to get lucky. That's why I think rebuilding teams in particular need to rethink the way they value roster spots. Each roster spot is valuable because they provide an opportunity for you to get lucky. And that's why aging unproductive s*** veterans are doubly harmful -- they are blocking players that might break out for reasons that we don't know yet. Yan Gomes is still sad. Signing Bautista not only blocked a top 30 pick in the upcoming draft, but he blocked 18 million going to other lottery tickets in our absolute s*** bullpen during a reliever bubble, and he's blocking right field where an Ezequiel Carerra could be breaking out, or a Pompey could be breaking out, or a Dwight Smith Jr. could be breaking out. Yes, signing Bautista was also "defensible," especially due to fan pressures and fan expectations. But signing him for that amount of money in what appears to now be a losing season has much more consequences than losing 18 million. And while the signing was defensible, maybe the front office should have known better. Maybe they should have realized what AA, through idiocy, shortsightedness and an appalling lack of patience left them, was not worth salvaging. tl;dr f*** AA. Rebuilding and roster management is interesting. Maybe front office should have known better. But seriously, f*** AA

Realistically, 2-10 with Donaldson, Sanchez, and Happ all injured really does mean that 2017 is almost worth being written off. Next season is not a write off. But with an aging core, decisions have to be made because their values decrease with time. By all means, you can wait until next year. But in all likelihood, they will end up being even worse players with lower values. And that's why tough decisions need to be made earlier than that.

But we would have more shots if we did blow up the roster. Which is the whole point of it.

But it's more likely that you'll win 5k in poker the next day than someone who didn't

With the age of the core, I don't see the justification for taking a shot in 2018. There's a greater chance of natural decline than improvement for a lot of our key players (Tulo/Martin/Happ/Morales) - and baseball is pretty much the opposite of basketball in that it's very much a team sport - just look at Mike Trout and the Angels. It's not like Donaldson is still being paid the minimum either. He's going to command a large salary in his last year of arbitration as well. Dave Cameron said in a recent chat that he saw Josh Donaldson as more of a offseason trade guy than a deadline trade guy. I'm not sure why - perhaps trading a third basement is harder than an outfielder or something in the middle of a season. But from a games played type of perspective, trading him this deadline would probably gain the most value compared to in the offseason. Obviously this is dependent on how the rest of 2017 goes. But if you were telling me you'd get maximum value trading away Donaldson now, I'd honestly strongly consider it. Our team is just so old...

With that level of insight, maybe you could consider writing my biography?

There's a reason my account is named Farm. As Blue Jays fans, that's typically all we have to look forward to.

I actually agree with you completely. Let's just say that we fast forward one year and it turns out Howell and Smith both sucked and we have no new information beyond that. Should we chalk it up as bad luck and sign two players identical to February 5, 2017 Howell and Smith or do something else? I'm not sure what I would do in that case.

Or there are still things we don't know yet.

(Almost?) everyone here is a fan of the Jays and we all have our opinions and analysis on moves that we make. The problem is that we don't have a record that we can go back on to analyze and improve our decision-making/opinion-making process with. Would anyone here be interested in making an effort to develop a framework to analyze moves with? We spend so much time talking about moves and thinking about them that I thought it would be interesting if we made a group effort to improve our thought process. I was thinking we could begin by looking at past moves the Jays have made in recent history. For each transaction we can have two posters write a piece on why it was good and why it was bad. I think it would be cool to see if there are some methods of analysis that are better or worse and go on from there. Definitely open to suggestions/improvements but just wondering if any of you would be interested in something like that.

I agree with this idea

???? McCutchen was an amazing player. He is also 30 years old. His BB% fell, K% fell, ISO fell, BABIP fell, and his Defense fell. Soft% increased, Med% and Hard% all increased. Scarily enough, his liner rate only fell from 23.5% to 22.5% while his IFFB% increased from 5.9% to 12.6%. [ATTACH=CONFIG]1667[/ATTACH] Take a look at his plate discipline. The scary thing is that nothing's really changed. His swing rates and contact rates all look reasonably close to his past years. So the question is why did he drop off a cliff? The red flag here is that he had a massive decline on his defense AND his offense. If someone cared enough they could go and find a list of star players who averaged 5+ WAR in his previous 4 years with over 5 thousand PA, above 28 years old (just to be fair), experienced a massive decline in both offense and defense and then see how these players bounced back the following year. Now that's too much work for me, but I think the simplest answer here is a physical decline. The question is whether he was hiding an injury that he could recover from or it was just gradual wear and tear from 5000 plate appearances, and your belief of that is probably where differences in his future value arise. I just believe aging curves are a thing for a reason. Let's do some contract/surplus value calculations, without discounting since I am too lazy to. Going to assume 8million / WAR as well which seems reasonable to me. Having said all that, let's say McCutchen drinks from the elixir of youth and bounces back in a dramatic way, and finishes with 6 WAR in 2017 and 2018. With 2 years/28.5 million, that's around 68 million of surplus value. Now let's project that Travis gets the same 2.5 WAR from his two injury shortened seasons for the next four years (funny thing, just noticed that Travis is at 1.000 of service time). That's 80 million in value, and if we project out arbritation salary, that's probably already close to the 68 million the McCutchen brings to the table. But yes, let's trade away Alford (~15 million surplus value with a reasonable floor due to defensive value), Pompey (~10 million surplus value if we believe John Manuel in saying that he would still be around a top 100 prospect). Why not trade away two more prospects including Vlad (~20-30 million surplus value) too right? In conclusion, what you proposed was not very smart. And diversification is also a thing.

"Steve: Where does Anthony Alford fall in your top CF prospects? 2:51 Eric A Longenhagen: Not sure where he lines up compared to all the others right now but I can tell you he’s a 7 runner with 6 raw power and is probably pretty high on the list. 2:51 Eric A Longenhagen: On pure upside, maybe just behind Brinson?" Brinson ranked at 102 confirmed

Could you link to that? From what I'm reading, it seems like that is for more general interference on the primary act of fielding a "batted ball." The new rules are about double-play balls/transfers at second and should supersede the rule you just quoted. These are the new rules in their entirety: http://mlb.mlb.com/pa/releases/releases.jsp?content=022616

Which one is that? Could you maybe link it to me real quick?

"A runner who engages in a "bona fide slide" shall not be called for interference under this Rule 6.01, even in cases where the runner makes contact with the fielder as a consequence of a permissible slide." Let the debate be whether or not it was a bona fide slide. If it was, then interference is allowed.

I'd like to join in if there is still room. 1. Nafro 2. GSnarls 3. Aselvana 4. FrozenRopes 5. Governator 6. LetTheBallFly 7. maahfaace 8. Pinkfloid 9. TilsonBritoFan 10. Thomas Malthus 11. JuniorFelix 12. Condor13 13. BigBounceyBlueBalls 14. Canadiansportsjunkie 15. wanderer 16. Gorlak 17. nmrch 18. YorkShireBlueJay 19. 4thOFan 20. Farm

This is a one year league so it won't be dynasty right? No prospects etc.