max silver

Yeah useless sack of s*** is only on pace for a 7.8 FWAR season. Can't have useless scrubs like that on your team.

I'd rather Manoah just continue to work on things at the major league level. Despite the ugly numbers he's mostly kept the team in the games he's started and mostly avoided total blow out games. I have little confidence that White would be able to perform any better than Manoah, and given how many times each member of the rotation has experienced terrible starts I think White would be far better utilized as a proper long man to alleviate some of the stress these poor starts have been placing on the bullpen.

Yeah I'm not buying the pitch clock theory either. You can tell right from the first few pitches of the game when Manoah is going to be struggling with his command for the game. If the pitch clock were such an issue Manoah's command would improve with runners on base, as he would gain an extra 5 seconds of time between pitches. His results get markedly worse when he has runners on base vs when the bases are empty, so the extra rest time is seemingly having no effect on improving the quality of his pitches. His numbers second time through the order are actually better off than first time through the order. If he was struggling primarily because his conditioning is not allowing him to repeat his delivery/locate his pitches, you would expect that his fatigue would be accumulating as the game continues and he would perform worse over time.

Romero had chronically bad knees which derailed his career. We can only hope something of this sort isn't behind Manoah's struggles.

In a rare occurrence I completely agree with Jonn on something. Atkins is on record stating that the Diamondbacks specifically asked for Gurriel to complete the deal. It's really odd that they would have insisted on a defensively challenged streak hitter, but they must have really wanted a right handed hitting outfielder to balance out their left handed complement they already had.

The 80 grade stache is what matters most.

I think that guys can certainly put on 10-15 pounds of lean body weight in 6 months. Each pound of actual muscle gained also leads to a large increase in intracellular water as well, which technically also counts as lean body weight.

It simply isn't believable. It's very uncommon for a third baseman to have 6 or 7 fielding plays in one game to start with. I realize that MLB and Milb batted balls tendencies would be different, but lets utilize an elite third baseman known for good range in Matt Chapman. His range would allow him to get to a ton of batted balls and hence would receive a lot of fielding opportunities. In a typical season Statcast has him credited for around 530 attempts at the ball. Assuming he started 150 games this is 3.5 attempts per game. To imagine that a third baseman that you are talking s*** about just so happened to receive 6 or 7 fielding (or maybe even more) fielding chances in a game you just happened to be watching, and then proceeded to spike 6 or 7 throws across the diamond is really hard to believe. If you had kept things more reasonable and said you saw him spike several throws across the diamond this would be reasonable and hence much easier to believe.

This could easily change if Bo catches a case of the yips again, but I still maintain that he looks like he's improved a massive amount defensively so far this season. Earlier in the year he was sitting -2 OAA, and through steady play over the last few weeks he's managed to bring this up to an even 0 OAA. The last two years he's ended up at -5 and -7 OAA respectively, so if he can manage to bring this to around even that's a very big change. Last season he ended up at -16 DRS, and he's sitting at +2 right now. I do wonder how much of his poor metrics were affected by the amount of shifting the team employed last season, as a good chunk of the time he was starting on the second base side of the diamond.

I gotta call shenanigans on this post, this has the feel of you trying to save face and basically making s*** up to support your point. I seriously doubt you watched a game where Barger spiked 6 or 7 throws from third base.

Yeah I was also thinking the same thing as Varsho has also needed a recent hot spring to bring his overall numbers back to respectability. On May 1 he was siting with a 65 WRC+ and 0.1 FWAR. Varsho was still providing more value on the bases and in the field, so he has a profile that can provide a bit more value even when the bat is cold. Gurriel is almost completely dependent on his offensive contributions in comparison. If both players were to have an entire season offensively the way they started Varsho likely ends up with something like 1.5 more WAR for the entire season.

Gurriel's has gone on one of his patented super hot streaks recently which make his season look like it's been more consistent. If you go back to May 2 he produced all of an 85 WRC+ and was worth -0.2 FWAR. I was always hoping the guy could find a way to limit the funks he went into as he would tend to run white hot and completely cold after the hot streak ended.

I've seen zero reports that suggest Barger has been a butcher at short stop and third base. If he's that bad at those positions then he has no business at second base either. I have seen reports that suggest he's a bit challenged to remain at short stop though.

Barger has the strongest infield arm in the Blue Jays organization, and the team really has no other available replacements for Chapman if he leaves. It would be a bit of a waste of his toolset to park him at second base.

Chase Field has actually been slightly pitcher friendly over the last few seasons.

Any idea what he's changed for this season? It seems that his batted ball issues have only become worse, with an extremely high flyball ratio with little line drive contact and far too may popups. He's at least cut down on some of the strikeouts though.

I'd like to see Nate receive a little more regular work. He's barely been used since his callup as he's only appeared in 4 games in the roughly two weeks since he's been called up. It would have to be a bit difficult to show pinpoint command with such infrequent work.

I think Bo has improved tremendously defensively up to this point. He'll likely never be an above average defender but he's been very steady for the most part this season and making the plays he's supposed to.

The icing on the cake of misery is the likely Tiedemann injury.

I recall Schneider's explanation for bringing in Mayza was something along the likes of Santana being less likely to hit a home run from the right side, and Mayza was likely to coax a ground ball out of him to alleviate a lot of the pressure. I'll never understand that decision as nearly every other reliever in the bullpen was far more suited to face Santana from the left side than Mayza was to face him from the right side.

Yeah I'd probably flip Kirk and Varsho in the order but that's a relatively minor gripe.

Marcus Semien received a 7 year $175 million contract from the Rangers. I would expect this would make a good starting point for prospective Chapman bids in free agency.

For what it's worth he basically played a full season in 2020's covid shortened season. His contract is a warning sign for the potential downside of signing long term deals with 30+ year old players. You can never tell how a guy's body is going to hold up over time.

It seems to me that Schneider outlines exactly what his thought process was after every game when moves don't work out. I don't always fully agree with his reasoning but there is always a certain amount of logic behind them. It's early in the season, and the team is still trying to establish a pecking order for the bullpen, and determine which players are going to be contributors and which ultimately aren't going to get the job done. It seems that a lot of the moves are taking the long view on a six month season instead of applying the type of pressure that would apply to a post season game. I can get behind trying to save certain relievers for different parts of the lineup, not using relievers when they are in the yellow zone/use only in case of emergency instead of green zone and fully available, and placing a certain amount of trust in players until they show they aren't to be trusted. A manager that manages every single game like it's game 7 of the world series is going to leave a good chunk of his players mostly rotting on the bench and burn out his most trusted relievers by the end of May. Ultimately a team that is on a 100 win pace despite a tough early schedule and not having yet clicked on all cylinders is in a really good place.