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I think Merrifield could cool his jets a little with the 3rd base stealing attempts. His overall season baserunning contribution is solid but he's been one of the primary culprits recently with making unnecessary outs on the bases.

I suspect part of the reason why Kirk's framing numbers are a little lower this season is due to how poorly Manoah was placing his pitches for most of the season. Kirk was Manoah's primary catcher early on and really didn't receive as many framing opportunities, and with a pitcher locating so poorly perhaps this would lead to receiving less calls on closer pitches due to the scattershot command.

You've gone full Oriole nutsack licker lately. I get it, they went scorched earth rebuild (likely forced into this due to the complete ineptitude of the previous front office and terrible ownership policy) but I don't see why you seem to spend so much of your posting time on here constantly pumping their tires.

Jesus man we all get that the Orioles are a solid team with a very bright future. The constant Orioles worship is honestly getting to be a bit much.

Oh come on man, you should know that if Manoah wasn't fixed by spending a few weeks working out of the pitching lab then it's completely f***ing useless like the really smart posters here are letting on.

Try again. The pitching lab just came online something like a year and a half ago when the new player development complex opened up.

The only thing I hope for is that Alek was intentionally throwing at something like 85% effort to get his pitches into the strike zone more often.

In his first start back Manoah featured really poor stuff but made up for it with very good command of his pitches. Stuff+ was only 82 vs location+ of 112. I'd imagine his stuff metric wasn't any better last night but the location was really bad on top of that. I certainly wouldn't want to bet on him being able to reliably locate his pitches on any given day given what we've seen from him this season.

The results of the bullpen games have generally been fine but the extra strain this placed on the pen wasn't something that could continue forever. If the club trusted Francis to throw more than a few innings at a time some of the extra innings on the rest of the pen could have been mitigated somewhat, but Francis has been giving up a ton of really hard contact so I can understand the hesitance.

Manoah had consecutive good starts before this clunker. Sure the quality of competition wasn't great but his command was much better and the stuff played up to a lot of strike outs. If it's another week or whatever until Ryu is ready they can give Manoah another start before sending him packing back to the minor league complex. If the alternative to another Manoah start is a bullpen day where the pen is blown up anyway I don't see a lot of risk in throwing Manoah out there again to see how he fares.

Kirk may have been able to get Manoah that low strike in the Soto at bat but he certainly wasn't going to coax Manoah into the strike zone more frequently.

The difference to my eyes was command this time around. It's not like the Padres hit Alek especially hard in this start, and with a little better luck he may not have allowed any runs. In the first inning he was shafted in the Soto at bat on a clear strike 3 call. Fast forward to the other inning where he allowed 2 runs a ground ball took a big hop off of third base and turned into a double, and Springer lost a ball in the lights that turned into another double.

Right now Fangraphs gives the Jays MLB's 4th highest odds to win the world series. The one hole I see on this team is a right handed slugging outfielder/DH type, that's a pretty damn solid team in my view.

You would prefer to utilize a AAA depth option instead of Kirk? Then what happens when Jansen gets hurt? Now you are running two AAA depth catchers at the major league level. All so you can trade Kirk at his lowest possible level. Hard pass to that one.

Donaldson is like the MLB version of April Orelvis Martinez this season.

Last year's bullpen was a decent enough pen that had one bad game at a really inopportune moment. This year's bullpen is much better across the board right now. This team has a tremendous bullpen, and you could easily make a case that it's an elite pen. It ranks 4th by ERA, 6th by FIP, 4th by K/9, 3rd by BB/9 etc. The pen was brought down a lot by weak performances by the likes of Cimber and Bass and a slow start from Garcia, but has improved a lot as the season has progressed. The impending addition of Chad Green is going to improve this pen further, as if Green is anywhere close to as good as he has been historically it adds one of MLB's best firemen to a pen, adds another trustworthy high leverage reliever, and removes the weakest link from bullpen at the same time. I hate this type of defeatist attitude that the current iteration of the Jays is only good because the opposition has faced injuries. There is a certain subset of the fanbase that absolutely refuses to give any credit to a Blue Jays team when it succeeds. It can't be because the team is good, it can only be because the opposition has dealt with more injuries than the Blue Jays.

The offense has scored a grand total of 6 runs less than the offense from a season ago. The biggest concern has been weak situation hitting with runners in scoring position, just as was the case a season ago. There are signs the tides are starting to turn with this particular issue. The team's run differential is +44 at this point, vs +24 after 93 games a season ago. This run differential is largely on the back of an elite defence and really good pitching staff. The bullpen in particular is a strength of this club right now. The team has a very solid 1-2 punch at the top of the rotation as well, but the pitching isn't good enough somehow? This team has the 6th best record in all of MLB. They have absolutely clobbered weak teams the way they are expected to. They have obliterated MLB as a whole save for struggling against against the Red Sox and Orioles. The team has dominated the National League, dismantling a lot of hot teams and division leaders along the way. This is a really damn good team that deserves more respect than they are receiving.

Hey now Calgary is a perfectly nice city and typically has nice summer weather. The biggest concern recently is the bombardment of wild fire smoke from the northern half of the province during the spring, and now from BC as their wild fire season is in full swing.

Sounds similar to my setup. I have an LG 77" C1 and Samsung Q950a sound bar. I've really enjoyed 4K Netflix, the shows with Atmos Audio sound absolutely fantastic. I've also found my set has really nice upscaling so even 1080p content looks a let better. Sports are a dream to watch. I made the jump to 4K once Shaw finally offered a 4K Sportsnet package in Calgary so I could watch Jays and Flames games (when available) in 4K. PS5 gaming is a real treat, as VRR does a nice job of smoothing out any framerate variations.

No different than how people are dreaming on Frasso.

I've had enough of the team taking flyers on players having terrible seasons around the trade deadline. We've been subjected to the likes of Brad Hand, Jonathan Villar, Jackie Bradely Jr. etc. For once I'd like to see players brought in who are in the midst of a solid season instead of rolling the dice on guys hoping for a bounce back. It worked out fine with Merrifield last season but this has been more the exception.

I'm guessing the premise here is that Chapman would be the lower cost acquisition compared to Arenado or something of that nature.

A huge portion of the fanbase simply isn't aware there are good things happening in the minor leagues this season. I really think that the injuries to key guys has overshadowed the success stories, particularly on the pitching side. When everyone is back healthy the AA staff is stacked with interesting rotation prospects. The highest ceiling guy is obviously Tiedemann who flashes the makings of a front of the rotation stud, but there are other interesting names like Chad Dallas and Trenton Wallace up from High A Vancouver after very successful first halves. Kloffenstein has been a very nice bounceback story as he's found new levels of success early on, and Robberse is said to be the smartest pitcher in the organization.

Who would be on the major league roster instead of White? Pop hasn't found his form yet after injury, and aside from his there's a load of AAAA types including Hatch, Thornton, Jay Jackson etc. It's not like the team is swimming in more deserving roster candidates at the moment. Had Bass not gotten himself cancelled the White decision would have been a lot harder to make and may have forced the organization to trade or release him, but for now White has actually done a decent enough job in the role he currently finds himself in.

What does the calculation look like for calculating base stealing runs? Is it something really simple like =/- 0.25 runs based on failure or success?