max silver

If that means you'll stop looking to pick fights at every possible opportunity then thank you very much. You aren't looking for reasonable conversation, you are obviously looking to post a bunch of "gotcha" hindsight posts attempting to pump your own tires. If anyone dares to disagree with your points then you instantly start with the name calling. I'd be happy to have a reasonable conversation but it's apparent that's not what you are looking for.

Come on man, I'm sure you can understand the difference between supplementing your own team with free agents vs spending real prospect capital on trading for expensive veterans on the second year of their free agent contracts. When you sign a free agent there is an expected decline in production over the course of the deal. The Blue Jays did not get to enjoy this first year as it had already passed but they still had the privilege of paying full freight for the rest of these years. The organisational depth at the moment is dramatically better than what was left after AA decided to move on.

It's revisionist history to place all of the blame on the Edwin fiasco on the Blue Jays as his agent is easily as much to blame if not more so. Edwin turned down the best offer he ended up seeing in free agency at the behest of his agent. I don't see where the rush to sign Morales in his place came from but that doesn't change the fact that Edwin's decision to turn down the offer ultimately led to him switching organizations. The 2017 team had enough issues that keeping Edwin wouldn't have been nearly enough to extend the window of contention. Tulo predictably broke for good, Baustista literally became old overnight, Sanchez's career was ruined by blisters, Donaldson started breaking down, Martin was beginning his decline phase etc. The team didn't have a lot of resources left in the minor leagues to trade, there were no young prospects ready to take over for aging veterans, and the payroll was already maxed out so adding more dollars through free agency wasn't much of an option either. The writing was on the wall and the team should have been dismantled then and there.

Sarcasm? Aside from selling his soul to the devil I don't think there's much more AA could have done when it comes to pushing in chips at the trade deadline.

Why would you even give half a f*** about this?

I don't raise pitchforks or become irrational when someone criticizes the front office with legitimate criticism, that's just nonsense and you know it. I challenge you to find a single post I've made to prove this is true. I've called out posters who post over the top ******** about this being the worst team in baseball, Shatkins should be fired etc. as this does nothing to contribute to baseball discussion and is nearly 100% trolls attempting to stir s*** up. I am a supporter of the front office and don't deny it, but I fail to see why you feel the need to constantly criticize me about this. I'd hope you could do better than the rinse and repeat homer/apologist commentary but given how completely you've fallen off the rails and subjected the board to a constant stream of troll and bait posts I kind of doubt it. I think the front office has been very solid in their history of trades and free agent signings since the team hit their competitive phase with a few duds here and there, no different than any other front office. The organization needs to make strides in their amateur acquisition and development if they are to reach the stated goal of sustained contention, but in the mean time they've built a solid major league squad which needs to eventually get over the hump in order to have success in the post season. Give the cherry picking nonsense a rest, I don't hide when I use statistics to show trends, who's hot/who's not etc. Sometimes I like to think a little outside the box as well and use statistics to support my argument, is this really such a problem for you? I'm more than happy to sling mud with you if you want to continue to call me out every time somebody disagrees with you on this forum, but at the same time I'd be perfectly fine with you leaving me out of arguments with other posters instead of wasting both of our time with stupid arguments.

I guess I'll take that as a compliment and it's nice to see I've made a lasting impact on you since you keep bringing me up in discussions I'm not involved with. You should consider developing some new material though, the constant "DUH you're a HOMER!" schtick is really stale. It shouldn't be a crime to support moves that the front office made instead of trying to be edgy or whatever assorted trolling techniques you are utilizing.

I had a bone bruise on my kneecap and it took months to get rid of. Hopefully with the advanced treatments Ryu will have available to him this won't be something that bothers him for the rest of the season.

Yeah it's almost a given Green is being retained past this season. He's put up great results in his rehab stint so far so hopefully that continues once he's activated. It just remains to be seen how many years of control the team retains over Green given the complexity of the contract.

The dude needs to figure out how to get off to a better start in the first month of the season. He's rocking a horrendous 43 WRC+ for his career in Mar/Apr. This season he put up a 16 WRC+ in April, but then proceeded to produce 130 for May, 114 for June and 107 for July. He got off to an even worse start last season, with a -6 WRC+ in Mar/Apr, 108 in May, 172 in June, 77 in July, 108 in Aug then slowing to a 67 in September. He might not have a spot on next year's squad depending on Barger's timeline but for now he's a nice contributor on the bench in his limited role against RHP.

I'd be all for bringing Merrifield back but certainly not at the price of $18 million. He's had a nice bounceback season but I'm not sold on him being able to recreate his 2023 success.

Hey at least there's a potential silver lining that Severino can stay in the rotation.

Yeah it would definitely represent a pretty decent upgrade. The team recently gave Luplow the boot so upgrading to Laureano wouldn't hurt. How would acquiring him actually work though? I assume he'd have to first pass through waivers unclaimed, does he become a free agent at that point?

He'd be a good pickup, although I do wonder how much playing time would be available to him. Merrifield has been spending a ton of time in left field and has been hot with the bat lately. Schneider deserves an extended look at second base to find out what he can do at the big league level so that limits how much time Merrifield would play at second base. The team seems to like to run with one of Kiermaier/Varsho in center field at all times so I don't think they would use Laureano there much. I suppose Laureano could spend a bit of time in right field and left field with occasional pinch hit duties sprinkled in to spell Springer occasionally.

It's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison to say AA accomplished more than Atkins in 5 years vs 8 years because Atkins had to rebuild the organization from the ground up after Anthopoulos emptied the farm system on the way out of the door. AA would have been left with the same challenges rebuilding the team and would have been unlikely to make any more post season appearances during his next 3 years as GM had he chosen to stay. Assuming a similar 3 year rebuilding window now you are left with a GM who made the playoffs twice in an 9 year span, which certainly changes the calculus of the overall discussion to a great degree. I think Atkins was in the learning phase in his first few years as Blue Jays GM, and much like Anthopoulos he has made some mistakes along the way which can serve as learning experiences. He really should have gotten more in return for Josh Donaldson than Julian Merryweather, and even qualifying Donaldson and letting him walk in free agency likely would have been preferable to get a compensation pick in return. The Grichuk extension was a mistake as there was no rush to extend the guy as he hadn't even reached arbitration yet. This was a pretty small dollar deal so didn't hamstring the organization to a great degree, but I think this was a learning opportunity to avoid early career extensions before gathering enough data beforehand. This likely helped Aktins avoid making a giant mistake by offering Vlad a franchise player extension after his monster 2021 season. I think some of the early career duds for Atkins were during a bit of a murky period where the team was looking to remain at least semi competitive vs a complete tanking style rebuild, as there were no big deals handed out in free agency and none of the better prospects were traded to supplement the major league team either as the organization chose to build from within. Signings like Pierce, Garcia, Roark, Morales etc. were all ultimately regrettable for the most part but all of these were low value bargain hunting/reclamation style signings which were likely hoping to gather tradeable assets that could be moved at the trade deadline. Ultimately Atkins tenure as Blue Jays general manager is going to be defined by his ability or lack thereof to get the team over the hump to allow them to have success in the post season. He's built a solid window of contention with a homegrown core supplemented with free agent signings and trades. The team has certainly grown expensive and it will be difficult to sustain contention moving forward due to the financial challenges posed by the core growing increasingly expensive. The front office needs to start replacing the aging veterans with younger cost controlled players sooner rather than later if the window of contention is to be sustained past Vlad and Bo's remaining years of control.

I think it's at least up for debate. For every Anthopoulos master stroke you can just as easily point to a complete disaster move including a few that maybe should have seen him fired. He made a great move dumping Vernon Wells onto the Angels and got Mike Napoli in return. He then undid a lot of the good and subsequently made an awful move by trading Napoli for Frank Fransisco. He made a series of moves which helped alter the fortunes of the franchise, when he traded Shaun Marcum for Brett Lawrie, who he was then able to use to swindle Billy Beane out of Josh Donaldson. But then he turned around and traded a top of the rotation stud and top catching prospect for a 40 year old knuckleball pitcher. He was great at extending the right players for bargain prices (Bautista and Edwin) but then also made some awful trades like the Marlins deal where he traded a lot of prospect capital for 2nd year free agent signings, foregoing the initial year of a deal when you expect to receive top value. The icing on the cake for this clunker of a trade became apparent years later when David Samson revealed that Josh Johnson, who was a centerpiece of the entire deal failed his physical, but the trade went through anyway. People seem to conveniently forget that for most of his tenure the team ran with a stars and scrubs approach. We were treated to the vetrin presents era, where barely functional veteran babysitters like Omar Vizquel and Mark DeRosa were brought in to serve as nothing more than solid clubhouse presences despite having nothing left to offer on the field. He managed to build a legitimately great team with a 2 year window that eventually collapsed, and his final gift to the organization was emptying the prospect cupboards on the way out the door. The man did a lot of good for the organization as a whole but at the same time he made a ton of mistakes along the way as well.

For the most part Bassitt has been really solid this season. If you give him a bit of a mulligan for his clunker first start he's been very effective overall pitching to a 3.48 ERA. FIP is higher at 4.2 but even so he's been pitching like a 3 WAR pitcher for most of the season. He mixes in the odd stinker along with some total gems, but I'll take that every day from a team's third starter. The team had some massive question marks in what to expect out of Berrios and Kikuchi so I don't know if going for a cheap bounceback contract option was necessarily the best play for a team hoping to challenge for the division. Who knows if they might have signed multiple starters and stashed Kikuchi in the pen or something but it turned out well that they gave him another shot to stick in the rotation.

Manoah's definitely been a bit of a mixed bag since his return. There have been some really nice starts, such as the dominating start against the Tigers and the start against the Angels where he was in cruise control until the intentional walk, mixed in with a pretty decent start against the Red Sox but combined with a weak start against the Mariners and an absolute stinker against the Padres. His ERA is ok'ish since returning but the stuff has been pretty mediocre and the command hit and miss from start to start, so who knows what to expect moving forward.

I have no issues with calling out the front office, but I just don't think some of it is really warranted. You make all of these simple minded complaints about who the team chooses to sign and act like each one of these individual moves happens in a vacuum without being part of an overarching plan with multitudes of possible combinations to reach the eventual end goal of improving the team. Obviously not every one of these moves is going to ultimately work out, but I've generally been happy with the majority of signings and trades the team has made. The team will need to start developing and/or acquiring more cost effective rotation options if sustained contention is to remain feasible, but in the mean time I have no problems spending money on established rotation options vs rolling the dice on riskier players. In a perfect world it would be great if Bassitt signed for 2 years vs 3, but at the same time I don't pretend I know where he even fell in their order of preference with regards to who they wanted to bring aboard. There were reports of taking a shot at Verlander, Heaney and Gibson as well, so far all we know Bassitt very well may have been plan D or something of that sort. Obviously it would be preferable that they convince every one of their preferred targets to sign with them aside from an obvious overpay, but with the way you've been constantly carrying on about Gibson it seems like you would have preferred the team pony up the extra cash to roll the dice on a guy who has relatively been a bit mediocre for a good chunk of his career. In the end he simply wasn't available to them at market rate, so your whole argument/comparison is built on a house of cards.

This dude posts a stream of stupid s*** so he/she/it or whatever pronoun of their choosing should expect a verbal spanking in return. If it's an obvious troll then so be it.

Jesus are you actually this dumb in real life or just playing the part on the internet? Kirk has won a silver slugger award for full season offensive contribution. He's baseball's best blocking catcher per Statcast, one of the best framers, and approximately average throwing. Smarten up or you aren't going to last very long around here.

I'm not entirely convinced the Jays hitting lab has reached the same level as more established outfits like Driveline as we really haven't seen a lot of big time success stories yet.

Varsho made a nice catch and hit a home run tonight so good think the front office basically does the opposite of what Gruber wants.

Just imagine if Vlad spend an offseason working at somewhere like Driveline. He is one of baseball's most physically gifted hitters and something like this could be the key to unlocking all of that potential for good.

Yeah all he needs to do is learn how to hit and learn how to play an effective outfield as well. Should be easy enough to do.