max silver

Barriera and Barger both dealt with injuries this season so I'd give them each a pass for their underwhelming performance. I recall it was mentioned that Barger may require offseason elbow surgery. Macko certainly disappointed early on but he seemed like he put things together over the last few months and should be in line for a 2024 promotion, so overall I'd call his season a success.

The team had similar health in 2016 in their rotation. So this "100 year health" was more like once every decade. The lineup mostly avoided major injury for sure but were still hampered by a lot of shorter term stuff in the second half not to mention losing Jansen to end the season as well.

I think this is just such a key point in this whole debacle. MLBPA had a representative sitting on this arbitration panel so it's not like Rob Manfred has the unilateral power to run roughshod and suspend Bauer indefinitely on his own. But at the same time Bauer has largely made his own bed here. Even though he was fully in the right, embarking upon a quest to expose spin rate doctoring squarely placed in the sights of Rob Manfred as Bauer was all over Manfred's case about how MLB was ignoring the rapidly escalating spin rate cheating scandal. The dude has a bit of dark history online in social media as he set him army of twitter trolls after a college girl after she dared to mention online about how she didn't like Trevor him. Then there have various other on and off the field instances of bad behavior so this is far from a guy with a sterling reputation to start with, even before these allegations came out. Whether or not the initial accusations were fabricated there still remained several other alleged victims who came forward to testify against Bauer in the arbitration hearing. I simply have to think if none of these allegations were credible that Bauer would have had his suspension completely quashed rather than simply being reduced, but only to a point that it remained the single largest ever domestic violence related suspension.

So the front office got lucky that Belt and KK performed well offensively, but they should have their feet held to the fire for the underperformance of much of the roster holdovers from previous seasons Come on man, if the front office is to blame for the players they already have performing badly how in the world don't they get credit for the newly acquired players who did perform well? Some consistency would be nice.

Moreno was a fine prospect, but I feel that people get a little hung up on the number 1 prospect rating. He just wasn't in the same class as other recent top prospects, as he's a step below the truly elite prospects the likes of Corbin Carroll, Adley Rutschman etc. I hope Varsho can end up being a little more consistent at the plate. He endured a really bad slump this season in July, but towards the end of the month/early August re-employed a toe tap at the plate and his results took off after that.

Varsho already has a 5 win season under his belt by BWAR (just under by FWAR), do you really think Moreno has a higher ceiling than this? That seems like a more optimistic view of Moreno's realistic ceiling in my view, and that's contingent upon his recent power surge being something that he can repeat.

First half of 2022 Kirk hit 11 home runs in 267 AB, so his power outage started second half of last season.

I didn't think that was necessarily that bad of a bad pitch as it was 97 in on the inner black, but this is Royce Lewis's most dangerous zone by far so it was a bad spot for that particular hitter. The broadcast did mention it was supposed to be on the outer part of the plate so it was definitely a missed spot.

Kirk looked a lot better in the second half thankfully. I just hope that he can shrink the belly down a fair bit in the offseason as it actually might get in the way of his swing.

I'd be fine with an actual opposite field approach vs the rash of flyballs to center field and the center field alleys. I've just had enough of the 390+ foot fly ball outs this team constantly hits. I think this is the biggest thing killing all of Springer, Vlad and Chapman's power numbers this season.

This team's approach seems to be completely f***ed up. They don't seem to be ready to hit the fastball as they are constantly fouling off if not completely missing fastballs in the heart of the plate. And far too much of the team seems to employ an up the middle type of approach which is just asinine as flyballs to center field are by the far the most likely type of fly balls to end up as outs. The best outfielders tend to play center field and thus have the best range/highest likelihood to catch these types of batted balls and this is also the deepest part of the park. Yesterday was a perfect display of the stupidity of this approach as the Jays hit the deepest fly balls of the game to center field which ended up as outs, vs Lewis who pulled one fly ball home run and went the other way with his second.

If Moreno hadn't suffered that hand injury and lost his power for several seasons after I don't think he would have been traded in the first place.

The Twins outfield defence on the other hand was fantastic and very well may have saved the game for them with a lot of great plays. And Correa made a tremendous play to absolutely nail Bo at the plate so they weren't THAT bad.

Wait you are saying Connorp is logical? That's a very illogical statement.

Kikuchi ran out of gas towards the end of the season. His stuff+ cratered to 94 in the last month of the season compared to his season average of 105. Hopefully the stuff plays out of the pen if he's needed in the wild card series.

Berrios had a 3.89 ERA/4.09 FIP in the second half, compared to 3.65/3.99 entire season numbers so he pitched pretty much the same as the rest of the season. You raise a good point about the lefty splits as Bassitt was hit pretty hard by left handed hitters as a whole this season and absolutely torched on the road where he allowed a .427 WOBA.

Dan and Buck were musing about how Jansen could potentially make it back for the playoffs if the Jays won a few rounds but I don't recall anything more concrete than that.

Because he's a walking bad luck omen? It certainly does seem like misfortune follows the poor guy wherever he goes. Maybe next season he can break the curse if he comes back to the Blue Jays in free agency.

I wonder if we will ever find out the rest of the evidence in the Bauer case. I recall there were supposed to be multiple accusers against Bauer but I don't recall any of that information leaking out at any point. The initial suspension was actually reduced by a large amount but this didn't seem to completely exonerate Bauer as his suspension was reduced from 324 games to 194 games which was still the largest domestic violence suspension in league history. It seems likely by that point that there were serious holes in the initial accuser's story and that it could pretty much be ruled to be ******** at that point, but if the 2 other accusers and 20 witnesses called produced zero evidence of serious impropriety it seems more likely the suspension would have been completely nullified. https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/35307636/trevor-bauer-mlb-suspension-reduction-dodgers

Pretty much any team in MLB could benefit from having Bauer in their rotation. We shall see if there are any teams willing to put up with the eventual media circus enough to sign him to a contract.

The Jays are actually a better road team vs home team so playing this series on the road isn't necessarily a bad thing. They have a top 7 run scoring offense on the road vs bottom 8 at home so road games might be a benefit.

Wait the Blue Jays would have been playing the Twins on the road if they won 100 games?

Still beating this dead horse I see. I just can't see how it's worth throwing away several months of development of Tiedemann as a starter on the off chance that he can retire MLB batters out of the bullpen. He would have needed to be called up in August to test this out, and then he would have likely been limited to low leverage spots at first with limited opportunities to actually get into games based on how many close games the team plays. Then he would have eventually needed to work his way into more trusted leverage innings over time with sustained success in lower pressure spots. This could very well remove Tiedemann as a legitimate depth starter option for next season as he would receive far fewer innings and not have a chance to build his innings base for the future, and this could even stretch a further season into 2025 with a further limited available workload. Bringing him up would have necessitated sending down a deserving reliever to AAA or even cutting bait completely and losing an asset from the team as well. All of this would also entail starting his service clock early as previously mentioned as well. This could lead to situations such as Tiedemann becoming a super 2 player and reaching salary arbitration sooner, costing the team a very large extra amount of money for a single season potential bullpen bump.

So a one game sample in a fake simulated game means we should be ultra concerned about Lewis, yet you get your panties in a knot when I use samples of several months in my posts. Totally checks out.

It must really grind your gears to see Cavan picking up big hits and making defensive gems all over the field given how you've been s***ing on him for years now.