Farm

What an ugly lineup today. Revere Navarro Smoak Kawasaki Goins Pillar. Yikes. That being said,

Godzilla

donaldson over trout baby!!!

Totally uncalled for

Do you agree with the premise that the Jays need to add another top tier starter to the rotation? If so, adding Price makes a lot more sense IMO.

Seriously though. Disagreeing with you isn't negative. Is 3.7 WAR over 6 years that ridiculous though? I mean you obviously you have to take into account injury risk but won't insurance cover a portion of that? If 3.7 WAR for 6 years was the rate, I wouldn't immediately say no, depending on the other available free agents willing to come here. We want to win now, and our 2016 team should be good as well. Tulo, Travis, and maybe even Saunders for the entire year. Our offense is pretty much set. Is a Stroman/Dickey/Hutch/Sanchez/Osuna rotation good enough? Even if we add a Zimmerman or Leake type during free agency, it's highly probable that something will happen to the rotation and we will want to add another top tier pitcher at the trade deadline -- and the Price trade took about $50 million in prospect surplus value.

If we make the playoffs and have a solid run, will players want to come to Toronto in free agency more due to success/fans? I feel like that is a pretty big problem. Although I was pretty onboard with the idea behind going for it with the Marlines Reyes/Buehrle/Johnson trade, I hated the inefficiency of it because two of the three were free agents the previous year. Why didn't we sign them ourselves? Assuming that our management is competent, the fact that we couldn't sign our own free agents suggests that we have a problem convincing players to come here (like Ervin Santana).

It isn't necessary - but then it is likely you are going to have to suck and draft high for a couple of years like the Astros. Unless you can consistently draft better/develop players better (or just get lucky), you are going to have to pay more if you want to be consistently good.

But there probably still is a relationship between dollars spent and overall talent in the organization. The Dodgers in general and the Toussaint trade are pretty clear examples of where having money leads to acquiring more talent. Hell, the Revere and Pennington trades are examples of that too -- probably could have given up less or worse prospects if we paid for their contracts. One possibility: more money leads to worse management, leading to a parity of sorts. But this seems like a lazy explanation. The more likely explanation is that salaries are artificially repressed due to entry level contracts and arbitration. Combine that with the fact that baseball players hit the ground running (due to the minor league system) and peak relatively early (due to the high prevalence of injuries, especially among pitchers) and the nature of baseball being a shitshow in terms of random volatility in performance, and it makes sense that there isn't a strong relationship between dollars spent and games won. If you check out http://freakonomics.com/2012/10/11/money-didn%E2%80%99t-buy-happiness-in-baseball-in-2012/, in general there is a positive relationship dollars spent and games won. The relationship might not be strong, and it might not always be statistically significant, but it is there. Maybe organizations with high payrolls don't allocate their resources in the most optimal way. But I don't think there is a question that spending more leads to more talent, and by extension, a chance at more wins. Just look at those talent for dollars trades, and international free agency. I believe that there is a strong relationship between dollars spent and probability of organization talent/success. There just has to be, and to think otherwise is probably something cheap organizations encourage.

In 2009, Fangraphs showed that there was a 0.83 correlation between actual record and predicted record based on fWAR in the 2009 season. In 2012, The Hardball Times gathered data from 1996-2011. They found that there was a 0.91 correlation between actual record and bWAR. It is 2015 and we shouldn't be having this discussion. More WAR is clearly correlated to more wins.

I made an account just to let you know how dumb this is.