max silver

You are so clueless it's truly astounding.

Looks like I got my wish this time as Gausman induced 14 whiffs with the splitter today.

He could really stand to get the splitter going at some point. To my eyes that's been the primary factor holding him back this season as he's largely gotten by with well placed fastballs in most of his better starts.

I don't think there's anyone that has seriously stated IKF was a bargain. He's easily justified the contract with his performance up to this point however so there's no reason he would be placed on waivers.

Wow bold move making a bet on something that's about as likely to happen as you getting struck by lightning.

That's far from a given. Both guys have pretty similar projections for the rest of the season and 3 year Zips projections as well.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

I don't recall seeing a team so completely incapable of hitting a mediocre fastball. Even dudes with below average stuff can just pound fastballs to this club and they are completely incapable of doing anything against them.

These dudes are acting like it's their opinions that are getting them banned. It's not that hard to avoid these kinds of bans, if mods repeatedly warn everyone to stop using words that some members find to be offensive and you refuse it leads to a temporary ban. If you get banned for using offensive words, and then upon your return call out the mods while acting all indignant and pretending like it's some sort of attack on personal freedoms then it's just going to lead to another ban.

The Jays have had quite a bit of success with struggling MLB starters (Ray, Matz, Stripling etc.) but haven't had much success with scrap heap types.

I would expect that Kikuchi would likely be interested in remaining with the team but I don't know if there will be available payroll to make this happen. It's not outside the realm of possibility Manoah could make a late season return much as Ryu was able to make about a year after his own Tommy John surgery.

Hopefully he gets more of a shot than Barger did.

Unless he reins in the extreme 50% chase rate the better hit tool won't matter. If you combined Clement's hit tool with Biggio's plate discipline you would have a tremendous hitter, but each of them are so extreme in their weaknesses that it greatly limits their offensive performance.

Bo has been shockingly bad since he came off of the injured list last season. Over his last 87 games/374 PA he's produced an 85 wRC+ and 0.5 FWAR. He's been a lot better over the last 3-4 weeks but he's yet to hit a peak Bo Bichette kind of hot streak.

IKF is projected for 0.9-1.0 wins for the remainder of the season by Steamer and Zips. The primary reason he was only worth 0.6 WAR last season was because the Yankees inexplicably stuck him in left field where he really struggled. He was a butcher in left field to the tune of -3 DRS/-3 OAA in only 248 innings which had the effect of tanking his overall defensive value. It's entirely possible IKF produces close to league average offensively the rest of the season, but even if he takes a mild step back the rest of the way and is closer to the 90'ish wRC+ projected for the rest of the season that would still leave him with a career season with the bat. He's obviously not going to have much in the way of surplus value to even make it worthwhile to trade him to someone else, but he would likely be a pretty easy guy to move in trade if the team decides they want to attain a lottery ticket type of prospect in return.

IKF specifically stated he was surprised how much interest he drummed up in free agency. There's just no way he would have been signed for the type of money he received if there wasn't actually a bit of competition for his services. He signed well before the free agency freeze kicked in where the remainder of the free agency market was essentially frozen out and forced to accept bargain basement deals nearing spring training just to get jobs. I share a similar sentiment in that I had no issue with IKF as more of a utility player. Even now I'm fine with him playing every day as he's been a pleasant surprise up to this point. I do question the wisdom of how the team spent their offseason budget, and wonder what their preferred spending even would have looked like. I assume Green is someone they always intended to sign given the various available permutations of his contract, it was just a matter of choosing how long to sign him for. If they managed to snag Soto in trade would the available budget been increased to account for his addition? He would have taken up $30 million plus all on his own. I think the team was seriously interested in signing the likes of Chapman and Bellinger, and these guys would have eaten up over half of the available budget on their own as well. Perhaps Rodriguez wouldn't have been signed in this case, or the budget could have been stretched a bit further if a more expensive free agent was added. At any rate it's apparent that it was a disaster offseason. It's too bad Boras refused to move on his salary demands until well after the Jays had essentially moved on to other options to fill the roster. The offense would look a lot better with a Bellinger, JDM etc. on the roster compared to the likes of Kiermaier and Turner.

This shouldn't come as a surprise that you don't understand what a salary dump is. That's when a team sends out an overpaid underproducing player in trade with remaining dead money on the contract, often needing to either pay down remaining salary or include prospect value in addition to the overpaid player in order to remove him from the roster. Kiner Falefa is producing value commensurate with his salary and won't need to be dumped. He's paid relative peanuts relative to MLB salaries as well, and the team might actually want to keep him for 2025 depending on what direction they decide to take (retool vs rebuild).

You missed my key point that a huge chunk of AA's successful picks were chosen with extra supplemental picks that don't exist anymore. He was gaming the system to the degree that MLB completely overhauled the compensation system. We can definitely give AA credit for making good picks on a lot of these guys, but at the same time the organization shouldn't be receiving a lot of credit for actually developing these players as the organization was actually pretty bad at developing players during his tenure aside from a few starting pitching success stories, and the only position player the system produced that helped the team was Pillar.

IKF had multiple suitors in the offseason which drove up his eventual signing price. He's also on pace for a 3 win season at the moment. If he keeps it up he'll be a relative bargain all things considered so there should be little issue moving him in trade.

One really important key to remember was that AA was a master at gaming the free agency compensation system so he received a boatload of extra supplemental first round picks in his earlier years. I don't think it's a coincidence in the slightest that his later drafts were much worse than the earlier years once MLB reworked the compensation system. Some of the guys drafted in the earlier years of the current regime are still working their way through the minors as well. It's too early to place a final grade on some of these drafts as the book is not closed on players like Barger and Tiedemann eventually making an impact. Also of note is that there was no minor league baseball in 2020 which greatly hampered the development of a lot of these players. On top of that the 2020 draft year was only 5 rounds with teams having really limited ability to lay eyes on the eventual draftees.

It's not hard to envision a sell off starting earlier if the team completely craters during the tough schedule in June.

Perhaps Atkins could have scored some relative deals in free agency if he played a game of musical chairs and waited until spring training was nearing. By that time he had already spent his available money on players that were willing to sign for reasonable contracts and weren't holding out for much higher money and/or term. That strategy could have also failed leaving the team without players to fill the holes on the roster.

It wouldn't have likely taken $40 million over two seasons to sign Teoscar in the first place. I bet something like $35 million over two years with the second year being a player option would have gotten it done. I can't say I particularly understand why you are taking such a massive dump on Teoscar, unless it's because he wasn't signed by the Blue Jays this offseason or something. Teoscar's 127 wRC+ adds another power bat to the lineup, and would likely allow Schneider to primarily man second base. This has the effect of removing some of the weaker bats in the lineup such as Biggio and Clement and even Turner on certain days and replacing them with a middle of the order power bat. That's kind of a big deal. If you don't think that would help the team score more runs then I really don't know what to say at this point.

Just because there were only two elite bats this season that shouldn't completely excuse the failure to add more mid tier bats to the roster. There's no need to be so insulting to those that thought Teoscar was bound to rebound when he was rescued from Seattle. Or to insult those that saw the plethora of DH bats that were available and didn't want to bring in a 39 year old Justin Turner to be the primary DH. It's not hindsight when someone far preferred other players to be brought in and then saw them succeeding elsewhere.

The team has been hitting much better over the last month or so as they've produced 117 runs over their last 25 games. This is while Turner has been absolutely horrible at the plate. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to see that a more effective DH bat would help a tremendous deal. I think Vlad is going to be good the rest of the way, Bo was hitting much better over a 3 week sample before going cold again in the Pittsburgh series, and Kirk has rebounded nicely after a really bad two week stretch to start the season. I have confidence in each of these guys to continue to hit closer to their capabilities the rest of the way, but Turner has been so awful for the last 5 weeks or so that I'm legitimately becoming a little concerned about whether he'll turn things around before he's totally relegated to the bench.