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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.

Just take the loss and move on man. I love how people instantly throw out the "cherry pick" argument every time they lose a debate. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black, as it's obvious you are massaging the statistics when comparing these two pitchers as the one and only statistic you have been using all along to compare Bassitt and Gibson is FIP. Bassitt has been a FIP beater for his entire career, and that is happening this season as well. Bassitt has a better ERA as well as a better xERA vs Gibson to back this up as well. You can piss and moan all day long about how the front office chose to sign Bassitt instead of Gibson, but the fact is they tried to sign Gibson and he chose a different offer. I just love how you spend so much time bitching and moaning about the front office with all of this hind sight criticism. It would be awesome if the front office could just choose every player they wanted to sign and get them signed at discount rates. I hate to break it to you but there is competition among all of MLB's teams for free agents and sometimes there is a need to pony up and pay market rate to sign quality free agents.

It's been reported on multiple Blue Jays broadcasts that the Jays offered Gibson the same $10 million contract but he chose to sign with the Orioles. Aside from overpaying relative to the competition a Gibson signing simply wasn't in the cards. There's little point to bemoaning how the front office didn't sign him because they made him a competitive offer that he chose to decline.

I have a really hard time seeing the team move Bo off of short stop long term in order to replace him with Paul DeJong. DeJong has a really good chance to revert to the bench quality bat he's displayed for 3 of the last 4 seasons.

Wait, you are saying that a dude who can pull off the splits at first base isn't flexible enough to be an elite hitter? I've seen some really weird takes but that one takes the cake.

At a glance I don't think DeJong has the arm for third base as he's 24th percentile in arm strength. Although he's improved tremendously, Bo at 3rd is also likely a recipe for disaster given his issues with throwing accuracy on shorter throws from short stop.

It would be a really tall ask to call up a rookie to make his major league debut, all while replacing one of a team's most important players in the thick of the wild card race. Barger can compete for a spot on the club out of spring training and not be dumped into the middle of an absolute pressure cooker situation.

I really hope that Seattle decides to sell. Teo would be a perfect fit for this roster.

Prices at the deadline are much higher now than they used to be due to the much larger pool of potential contenders. If the front office moves the likes of Tiedemann and Orelvis for rental players then you can go ahead and bitch about how they emptied the farm like AA did.

It's too bad the Blue Jays have one of baseball's worst minor league systems. They must have had to move several top prospects for Hicks. Oh wait, they moved a few middle of the pack back end rotation options. There is a wave of middle infielders currently filling the roster in Buffalo, but those don't count obviously. The team had a rotation full of legitimate prospects that allowed this trade to be made without touching any of the top prospects, so it's not nearly as dire as you are trying to portray.

Tiedeman is almost certainly going to be a lot more than a cheap back end of the rotation arm.

If he's not healthy he won't even be on the roster to start with.

Yeah it's quite the swing in value adding Hicks to the pen and removing break only in case of emergency option White from the roster.

The potential difference maker rotation options are already dwindling a bit with the Scherzer and Montgomery trades. It also sounds like the Cubs may go for it so that could also mean Stroman may not be available as well.

You are speculating whether Romano will be removed as closer. If he's done nothing to warrant being removed from this spot why would you even bring it up as a topic for discussion unless you thought there was a reason to do so?