max silver

I'm not sure if Horwitz even has the necessary foot speed to handle left field. His sprint speed is surprisingly only a touch above Alejandro Kirk (24.8 ft/s for Horwitz vs 24.7 ft/s for Kirk).

Come on man you've been obsessing over the dude for months so it's only fair he returns fire every so often.

I think Pop needs to go something like 50/50 sinker/slider. His fastball command is just awful and he tends to leave a ton of his sinkers up in the zone where they are hammered.

That was a really fun series. It's too bad it's ultimately too little too late but this felt like the 2024 Blue Jays world series this weekend.

I don't think Gurriel had a ton of trade value even discounting the lack of power output in 2022. Even in a good season he was basically an average MLB corner outfielder with a league average bat. He had a single year of control and made $7 million, there just wasn't much in the way of surplus trade value in Gurriel.

What's your issue exactly? Varsho is streaky and prone to prolonged periods of struggles, yet he's also had longer periods of above average offensive production as well.

The issue with this line of thinking was that Gurriel was never in the same tier as Teoscar as he simply didn't offer the same kind of offensive upside. It's key to remember that he was coming off of a season where he hit all of 5 home runs and that likely factored into the type of trade value he had to offer.

I recall Varsho had a stated goal of reducing his pop up rate but that's been an abject failure as he's hitting them at the highest rate of his career. Assuming he's not already doing this he's a guy that needs to spend an offseason at Driveline or somewhere similar working on his swing as what he is doing presently isn't working particularly well.

Varsho is coming off of a 4 month stretch where he was a 115 wRC+ bat (August of last season until mid June of this season). He's a streaky hitter and prone to stretches where he's legitimately awful at the plate. He was sitting at 115 as late as June 16 and then ripped off a two week stretch where he lost the ability to even make contact and puked out a -38 wRC+. He had a similar stretch last season but it lasted about 6 weeks in totality. He's shown signs of turning around his fortunes in recent games so hopefully he can go back to producing at the plate again as the 6 week mega slump last year essentially ruined his overall numbers.

He's likely stretched athletically to remain their over the long haul but I've been pleasantly surprised by his glove work up to this point.

It certainly changes the conversation if Horwitz can remain at second base and offer that kind of bat.

I'd guess the offending post has been erased as none of the recent posts indicate anything ban worthy. He received enough warnings about the types of posts that would eventually earn himself a ban so it's not a total surprise.

What does last year's team have to do with the monstrosity that is the 2024 edition of the Blue Jays? That was a very solid team whose primary Achilles heel was an inability to score runs at home as they were very good to great at everything else. This year's team is awful in every regard.

Even if you think the smart move is to trade Vlad I think it ultimately makes more sense to hang onto him for the rest of this season and see if he sustains the type of offensive output of recent months. Having Vlad fully reestablished as a star player should help to establish a stronger relative trade value for him vs having teams looking to buy him for pennies on the dollar hoping they can be the team to turn him around at the plate moving forward.

Super small sample size alert but Kloffenstein scored an overall 61 Stuff+ rating including a 48 on his sinker which appears to be his most commonly used pitch.

Lighten up Eyeore. Vlad has been mashing for the last two months now so he very well may be fixed at the plate. He hasn't approached anything close to this level of sustained success since his 2021 breakout. He'll need to prove he can keep it up but I am very encouraged as even when the batted balls weren't leaving the park in May he still produced a monster 166 wRC+ month at the plate. The actual on field results are nearly matching up with the top of the scale expected results over recent months. Now that he's seemingly rediscovered his power stroke he's re-emerging as exactly the top of the order power threat that the club has largely been missing in recent seasons. With regards to Springer check out this recent Chris Black Twitter/X thread outlining recent mechanical changes he made. It appears as though he's unlocked more bat speed which seems to track given how he was able to turn around upper 90's fastballs from Rodon. April 71.0 MPH May 72.1 MPH June 72.7 MPH His athleticism was still present given how well he's been running and defending, and with the recent improvements to his overall bat speed he at least has a shot to give the club a boost of offense as well. All that really seemed to be missing was George finally rediscovering his timing at the plate as he's improved his swing decisions allowing him to cut his strikeout rate and boost the walk rate this season.

Maybe the offense should tell Gausman to stop pitching like a mid rotation pitcher and he'll start working harder to regain the feel for his splitter.

Kiermaier's bat has been so bad he's nearly unplayable even as a part time bench player. If he were primarily used off of the bench for late inning defense and pinch running I'd have fewer issues with keeping him around but he still receives semi regular starts despite seeing his bat completely disappear for a month at a time.

So the offensive players didn't care enough to try the rest of the season to make the necessary adjustments? That's an incredibly simplistic viewpoint. The fact that the fanbase wasn't booing Springer as much as you'd prefer shows that they are actually decent humans that can recognize he's been trying his hardest at the plate and not mailing it in. He's been busting his ass on the bases and in the field despite the offensive struggles. I have no doubt these guys have been working hard behind the scenes to turn their offensive seasons around and it appears as though some of these dudes have finally found the necessary tweaks with the coaching staff to unlock better results. They know that the fate of the team and their chances to avoid seeing it blown up largely rest on their shoulders and shouldn't need any extra motivation from frustrated pitchers talking to the media to motivate them to try to do better.

Yeah I'm getting close to the point where I'd be fine with a few mid range relievers at this point. The offense has finally been showing enough signs on life recently that it could be worthwhile to grab some bullpen help to see what shakes out.

These guys are just too talented to produce the types of numbers from early on over an entire season. Springer has made adjustments to unlock more bat speed, but I'm not sure if Vlad has done anything mechanical with his swing.

Green is one of the few good stories from the pen this season. I'd be perfectly on board with something similar with Romano but I don't know if he would command the same type of dollars.

Chris Black had a thread outlining some tweaks recently that unlocked extra bat speed. Springer is up several MPH in June seemingly as a result.

Kirk has saved 4 runs in 1053 pitches (3.8 runs per 1000 pitches). Moreno has saved 2 runs in 1565 pitches (1.28 runs per 100 pitches). Kirk is accumulating framing runs at nearly3 times the speed of Moreno. That feels far better to me, but maybe your standards are different.

Kirk is a far better blocker and framer. Unless you think that framing is somehow not important for some reason that's two key defensive skills where Kirk is far more effective, and Kirk even has really solid throwing metrics this season as well so he's closed the gap in nailing baserunners this season as well. It's a shame that the bat has gone backwards but he's shown improvements in his batted ball metrics that have yet to materialize into more hits, and he's arguably the best overall defender behind the plate as well. I still hope he can regain a bit of offensive output in the future, whether it's this season or in the future with a new coaching staff.