max silver

From a glance it appears as though a Dexa scan measures lean tissue. If I recall correctly each pound of muscle also holds 2-3 pounds of water and glycogen, so it's not outside the realm of possibility he added something like 5 pounds of actual muscle and the corresponding 13-14 pounds of water+glycogen.

This isn't the reporter making things up as Tiedemann himself stated that he was tested using a DEXA scan and it showed that he had gained 19 pounds of muscle. It seems that lean body mass and muscle mass are often used interchangeably, but I don't think it's out of the question for a young elite athlete to add 19 lean pounds (muscle/glycogen/water) over a 6 month offseason.

But why? The team already has Vlad and Turner as two right handed defensively limited options who will be sharing DH/1B duties. Maybe the club intends to use Turner at third base a little more frequently than the Red Sox did but it's hard to see much of a fit for Vogelbach.

That's a tricky scenario. It seems like these conservative treatment options almost never work, but at the same time not everyone fully recovers from Tommy John surgery either. Look at a guy like Syndergaard who simply wasn't the same after his own surgical procedure.

I don't recall him ever looking like the recent photos. Hopefully it helps prevent recurrence of the wrist and knee issues and allows him to return to peak production.

I'd say it's more like the jacked version of Vlad vs the skinny version of Vlad.

A good chunk of that pouch could very well be loose skin due to the year's of featuring an oversized belly.

I'm fine with IKF if he's more of a Merrifield replacement/Espinal upgrade, but as a primary starter I dislike this signing as much as everyone else. I surmise that other front offices were also intrigued by his offensive improvements as there actually seemed to be a bit of a bidding war for his services.

He'll more than likely settle into the same offensive output as prior careers but he did manage to produce the best quality of contact metrics of his career. This includes an increase of 1.6 MPH over his previous best exit velocity, a career best hard hit rate, career best barrel rate, and career best xwOBACON. A lot of this was undone by the spike in his strikeout rate, but at least there is a bit of a silver lining in that he managed to produce at a pretty decent rate for much of the season vs simply being bad right throughout as has generally been the case.

I was looking at Kiner Falefa's splits from 2023 and comparing to his previous seasons and he actually had the best 3 month stretch of his major league career up to this point. May 119 wRC+ June 98 wRC+ July 127 wRC+ Digging into the game logs shows a sustained run of success where he produced better than league average offense. Over a nearly 4 month stretch from about April 20 until August 9 Kiner Falefa managed to produce a 111 wRC+ so he's not completely hopeless with the stick. His splits were perfectly acceptable at .271/.347/.404 .750 OPS 10.0% BB rate 16.9% K rate In mid August the wheels completely fell off as Kiner Falefa went into a deep funk at the plate. The strikeout rate skyrocketed up to 29.1% for the rest of the season. From August 21 until the end of the season IFK only appeared in 15 games, and I'm not sure if he was completely benched with spot duty only or if he was dealing with some sort of physical ailment that limited his availability.

Those developments must have played a part in the Orioles pulling the trigger on the Burnes acquisition.

So you want to see the likes of Francis or Parsons getting starts to begin the season? That sounds awesome.

I'd be thrilled about 20 pounds of weight loss in a single off season personally, the key would be keeping the excess weight off and improving further in subsequent offseasons. The last thing I want to see a major league player is crash dieting and losing a bunch of lean muscle tissue and strength as a result. A loss of around a pound per week is sustainable and would allow Kirk to continue to get stronger in his lifts.

I see very little chance that Kikuchi returns to the 2022 scattershot control. He spent last year's offseason working at Driveline and I think the type of command he displayed for last season is more likely what can be expected of him moving forward.

That's exactly why it's such a massive stretch to suggest that Parsons will be starting games in May. The team would need to suffer catastrophic levels of injuries to the rotation and depth options for this to even be a possibility.

In place of who exactly? Despite Manoah being baseball's worst starter last season the club waited until the final day of the season to give Parsons a major league start so he can't be particularly high up on the totem pole of depth starter options.

And options as well so he could be shuffled back and forth as needed.

The initial accuser made the s*** up about Bauer but there will still other accusers interviewed by MLB. Bauer was never completely exonerated as his suspension was reduced rather than completely thrown out, so while he appears to have been not guilty of the accusations from the primary accuser there were others who testified against him as well with very similar accusations. This is far from a black and white case at this point and given the sealed nature of the investigation we very well may never discover the full truth of the reasoning behind his suspension being upheld.

With performances in line with expectations with the power on the 2023 roster I think the Blue Jays should have hit 15-20 more home runs than they did if not more. I have suspicions the team approach was off last season which led to some of the power outage compared to projections. The 6 consecutive post season losses are comprised on 3 completely different teams which lost due to different reasons. I'd view these as more of the 3 separate series losses in 2 games a piece vs viewing this as a singular entity. For instance the 2020 likely wouldn't have made the playoffs in the first place over a full 162 game season so it really shouldn't be lumped in with the losses in later seasons.

It sounds like arbitration hearings still largely rely on traditional stats and Vlad's were still decent last season.

Yeah given the constant thorn he was in the commissioner's backside (admittedly largely deserved) it's not terribly surprising he's not receiving any favors from MLB.

What do you think should have been done differently with the Bass situation? It appears to me that the organization went out of their way in trying to save the guy's job, but then Bass signed his own death warrant when he doubled down on the type of comments that got him in trouble in the first place. If other players want to respect a player's right to openly promote bigotry I really don't know what you would expect for a team's management to do to smooth this over. The fact that nobody else in baseball was willing to sign him for the rest of the season shows how much of a headache Bass created for the team all of his own accord. Manoah reportedly refused to report to AAA later in the season, and I can't see how that's any fault of the general manager. Maybe you can explain that to me what should have been done differently. Should Manoah have been suspended without pay or something? That certainly would have sent a definitive message to the player and his management but with talk of an already fractured relationship that would have been throwing gasoline onto the fire. To my eyes the timing of the early Berrios pull was entirely in the hands of John Schneider. Both Atkins and Schneider have been saying essentially the same thing in the media so I don't particularly understand the outrage placed at the feet of Atkins for this. There seemed to be a general organizational strategy put in place to pull Berrios at an opportune moment to get the Twins left handed bats out of the game, and Schneider implemented the switch very early in the game. I can agree that there should have been better communication with the players with regards to this scheme, but I'm not sure who the responsibility for this particular bit of communication should fall upon. I'd expect this is more of a responsibility of the coaching staff vs front office but I'm not that familiar with the inner workings of a professional baseball team with this particular issue.

Because they saved a few million bucks? Given your obsession over budgetary matters I guess that checks out fully.

I don't think Atkins really actually receives a ton of praise on here, it's more that he's defended against some of the criticism that he receives for s*** that's ultimately out of his control. Like how half of the team simultaneously had bad offensive seasons in 2023, that s***'s bad luck beyond his control. Or that his team was bad offensively but primarily only at Roger's Center. It's pretty hard to blame the GM for an almost random occurrence of his team not being able to perform with RISP at home. Or the criticism that he didn't add an offensive difference maker at last season's trade deadline, except the issue with that particular bit of criticism is that no difference makers were even traded or seemingly available in the first place beyond massive overpays. He's made his share of mistakes along the way particularly in his early years when the team was being torn down, but for the most part he's been a solid GM who makes good trades and free agent signings during the team's competitive phase. There is criticism over the team trading prospects when there was a statement that the team wanted "waves of prospects", but for the most part the right players have been traded as very view of the higher rated prospects who were traded have amounted to anything anyway, and for the most part the players who were brought back in trade for higher ranked prospects have been key contributors and the trades have been easily worth the price that was paid (Berrios, Chapman etc.). The organization needs to do a better job attaining above average amateur talent as the lack of potential impact players is the primary issue with the farm system at present. The lack of home grown starting pitching is a primary concern and is largely why I would have no interest in seeing the team trade away the likes of Tiedemann and Manoah as seeing each of them become regular rotation members is key to sustained contention as the rotation is eating up a huge chunk of the available payroll.