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When it came to the Lindor deal the jays missed out (thank f*** for that) as the Indians preferred to receive more immediate help vs a higher ceiling future package. Maybe Groshans and Kirk are still a good starting point, as you get a blend of present and future potential. Would including Biggio and perhaps Gurriel to the offer entice Cleveland a little more in that this package would help to bolster their current roster in several areas with young cost controlled players.

During the time frame from May 1-Aug 1 the starters had a collective ERA of 3.75. During this same time period the bullpen ERA was 4.54. Perhaps there was a bit of a balancing act that could have been utilized in attempting to push the starters a little further and limiting the bullpen innings a bit more. I don't know if Charlie would have the necessary acumen to pull this off anyway, but using the lesser relievers less in favor of the starters may have allowed the club to keep the score a little closer in games, particularly when they were behind. This could certainly prove to be a thankless task however as if/when starters were to end up getting tagged we would inevitably complain that they were left in too long. When the club was at it's best the starters were being allowed to go further into games and the bullpen had far fewer innings to cover, leading to less innings being pitched by the less reliable members of the pen and allowing the relievers to receive more appropriate amounts of rest. This also coincided with a stretch of games where the starters were all rolling outside of Ryu, so it's possible that the pitchers going deeper into games was something that happened organically based on performance rather than a pre-defined plan. This certainly wouldn't have been nearly as much of an issue if Charlie would have had a more reliable pen to start with, but he really didn't have a handle on putting the right relievers into games given the situation. He refused to use his best relievers in games where the score was still close with the club trailing, and many games quickly spiralled out of control as a result. Then there was the stubborn refusal to remove struggling relievers from leverage opportunities, with insisting that Dolis was good last year so he had to be good this year, and Chatwood was good earlier in the season so he had to be better later in the season. Then Thornton was thrust into leverage situations despite not showing the ability at any point to retire major league hitters consistently out of the pen and so on and so forth. Later in the year he started using his leverage relievers in games which were well out of reach in the Jays favor. It seems that Charlie is learning how to be a manager at the major league level, and that's the last thing that a club with aspirations of contention should be willing to put up with.

Ray and Matz had each failed to the degree that their previous organizations gave up on them. Turning each guy around to near career best levels is a huge victory for the entire organization no matter how hard you try to discount it. Each player still had the underlying talent to be an effective major league pitcher. There is the old expression that you can't polish a turd. Guys like Roark, Anderson are likely each finished as effective major league pitchers. I don't see how you can blame the organization for Pearson's string of injury issues, the guy is just seriously injury prone unfortunately. Stripling actually went on a very nice run of effective pitching before the oblique injury so I would count that as a victory as well. When it counted in 2020 Ray put up a great outing in the playoffs. It is a real testament to Pete Walker that he was so quickly able to turn Ray around to the point that he could pitch effectively in the playoffs against a great team. 2017-2019 were years where everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and if you are to look back you can see that the team wasn't all in on competing, as they refused to sign major long term deals or give up draft picks for qualified free agents. This ended as a rebuild behind the scenes while attempting to remain semi competitive at the same time. I'm not thrilled about the Adams trade either, as Hand was terrible for Washington after the sticky stuff crackdown and was predictably terrible for the Jays as well. In the grand scheme of things Adams was likely the 5th best catcher on the roster at the point so he likely needed to be moved out sooner rather than later. I just would have preferred he not be essentially thrown away.

The numbers as presented don't really paint the whole picture, I suspect the end result would look different if you were to split things up more effectively. The rotation was pretty damn bad the first month of the season, where the bullpen was actually pretty good in comparison. This ends up skewing the overall first half numbers to a great degree. Given that the bulk of the gut wrenching losses occurred in May and June before the Cimber and Richards acquisitions the first half numbers as a whole misrepresent what happened to a large degree. In April Ray missed time due to injury and Manoah wasn't up yet. The likes of Zeuch, Kay and Roark all received starts, and the results were unsurprisingly bad. Stripling really struggled in the early going as well. The bullpen during this period was awesome in comparison. The starters ended up pitching to a 4.26 ERA for the month, vs 2.52 for the bullpen. Moving to May we see the starters start to improve with a 4.15 ERA for the month, with the relievers starting to really struggle to a 4.54 ERA. When me move to June the starters are really starting to rock and put up a 3.89 ERA, vs the relievers who once again struggled to a 4.47 ERA. In July we see things really moving as the rotation put up a 3.30 ERA vs 4.70 for the bullpen. During the months where the bullpen was actually the issue the rotation's ERA was quite a bit better in comparison for both of the months. It is very possible that leveraging the more effective rotation vs the inferior bullpen as much as possible would have led to better results in the win/loss column.

When given a choice between the starters and most of the relief options that the club rolled out during the first half I think the starters likely win every time. The bullpen consisted of pitchers like Chatwood, Dolis, Thornton, Barnes, Murphy etc. Outside of Mayza and Romano there was literally nobody in the pen that could be reliably counted on for outs so in that instance unless the starter was getting rocked it very likely would have worked out better to give them a shot to work out of trouble.

I really don't think that the club was all in on competing yet in 2020. You can see a marked difference in off season spending when you compare the offseasons of 2019 and 2020 when spending was really ramped up in 2020 in an obvious attempt to compete. Prior to the 2020 season Atkins mentioned specifically that they wanted to provide opportunities to the younger rotation options such as Pearson, Hatch, Manoah and likely Kay as well. Unfortunately two of those options were hurt and missed much of the season and Kay ended up flaming out as a starter, but a young team with multiple young starters in their midst needs to eventually provide opportunities to that group to see what they can do at the major league level. Ray and Matz didn't turn their careers around magically, it was under the tutelage and guidance of the coaching staff, strength and conditioning group and analytics department. Give credit where credit is due. After the trade deadline the club had a borderline elite starting rotation, I would tend to think that would lend an awful lot of credence to the theory of the front office group being good at putting a rotation together. The season prior they made mid season additions of Ray and Walker which greatly boosted the rotation over the final month, yet another example of the front office strengthening the rotation as needed. 2016 saw a pretty decent rotation put together as well for that year as Happ was brought back. There's plenty of instances to see that this front office group can put together effective starting rotations, the poor start to the 2021 season doesn't somehow erase all of the successes. You would have to think that the bullpen is going to be a big focus yet again this offseason. Yes they had to send out some assets to strengthen the bullpen midseason, but are you really going to lose sleep over losing Rowdy Tellez, Riley Adams, Joe Panik and the likes? I certainly hope not.

Donaldson is a little tricky to evaluate, but I don't think he's as mediocre as Fangraphs makes him out to be. When you look at strictly WRC+ he only posted a 124 which is very good but not necessarily great, but his expected stats show a player who had a fantastic season swinging the bat but may have been a bit snakebitten. His xWOBA of .385 is over 30 points above his actual and places him in the top 8% of the league. For comparisons sake that's in the same ballpark as the xWOBA that he produced in his heyday as a Jay. By UZR alone his defence looks terrible at -19.4 UZR/150, but DRS and OAA both paint a different picture as he produced 1 DRS in his 761 innings and 1 OAA as well. The baserunning is unlikely to improve as Donaldson is currently slow as s*** with a way below average sprint speed of 24.5 ft/second. In both recent series against Minnesota it looked to me like Donaldson was intentionally shortening his strides and only running at something like 75% effort on the bases. I would guess this is an attempt to avoid further calf injuries as he has been plagued with those over the years. I think as a part time third baseman and part time DH Donaldson would be a great fit on this roster if the Jays and Minnesota could come up with a way to lessen the financial burden of taking on his contract.

I still really like the idea of a healthy Biggio in the super utility position for 2021. It remains to be seen if he can fully bounce back offensively but even if he doesn't there's still plenty of potential value in Biggio as he can play a pretty decent second base, a passable first base and not look completely out of place in the corner outfield positions while running the bases effectively. Third base is a different matter entirely however.

I am in full agreement. That would be a rather significant downgrade to the infield. Both Espinal and Biggio in combination are unlikely to provide the same type of value that Semien does on his own. This could likely be partially offset by having a healthier Springer and continued improvements from Bo and Vlad, but that fearsome top of the lineup that the Jays rolled for the final months of 2021 just wouldn't be the same.

Coincidentally Chapman is rapidly approaching a similar description of having a ceiling that is not that far away from his floor given his rapidly deteriorating offensive output from the last four seasons. I too have a hard time seeing Espinal keeping up his current level of performance, but despite that when you compare his expected stats with Chapman there really isn't much of a gulf separating the two. Chapman produced an xWOBA of .320 vs Espinal at .311. I don't have to squint very hard to imagine Espinal producing 2.5-3 WAR in a full season of play. He didn't benefit from just one hot streak as after puking up a horrific 28 WRC+ in May he proceeded to produce a very solid 139 WRC+ over the final four months of the season. If Semien goes elsewhere and another big fish isn't acquired as an infield replacement then Espinal should absolutely upgraded upon. But if the lineup is another absolute juggernaut again for 2022 then I think Espinal is likely perfectly fine to man third base and bat down towards the bottom of the lineup.

It's a total surprise but that's what the Jays received in the relatively small sampling of innings this season when Espinal manned third base. I was curious how his defensive numbers stacked up so I compared him to two current defensive stalwarts in Matt Chapman and Nolan Arenado. The results are certainly interesting. In 1314 innings Chapman produced 10 DRS (10.27 DRS/150), an 8.8 UZR and a whopping 17 OAA (17.5 OAA/150) In 1312 innings Arenado produced 6 DRS (6.16 DRS/150), a 4.9 UZR/150 and 10 OAA (10.27 OAA/150) In 551 innings Espinal produced 8 DRS (19.6 DRS/150), a 13.9 UZR/150) and 5 OAA (12.25 OAA/150) When Espinal was in the lineup he also produced plenty of value on the bases and with the bat. Espinal's 2.3 BsR is tied for third on the team with Teoscar who had twice as many plate appearances. His overall FWAR was 2.2 in only 246 plate appearances. Let's say that Espinal is in the starting lineup over an entire season and he earns 550 plate appearances, which is right around what Grichuk was given in 2021. That would put him on pace for 4.9 FWAR over an entire season. There is obviously no guarantee that Espinal would be able to replicate his success at the plate as he outproduced his xWOBA by 33 points. If this were to normalize it would likely take Espinal to below league average with the bat. He would still have the elite defence and excellent baserunning to offer which when combined with an almost average bat is still a fine player. Matt Chapman is almost certain to outperform Espinal over the course of a full season, but I don't know if the difference between the two is going to be large enough for it to expend the type of resources required to obtain Chapman. There's the possibility that Chapman rebounds offensively and becomes a borderline MVP candidate, but that seems unlikely as he has seen his WRC+ decline from a range of 9-15 points in each of the last 4 seasons. A crazy thought would be to offer up Espinal in trade as a main piece. He's shown that he has potential to be a low cost Chapman replacement if he were able to continue this type of performance over an entire seaon.

I don't expect Ray to fully recreate what he did in 2021 either but I still think it would be in the team's best interest to sign another top starter if they fail to retain Ray. Whether it's someone like Rodon, Gausman, Syndergaard etc. it is apparent that another quality starter is needed as once you get past the first 3 in the Jays rotation the remaining options are underwhelming to say the least.

From a quick glance it appears as though the qualifying offer system was first implemented in 2012.

I just far prefer the idea of concentrating the available dollars into true impact players instead of small upgrades. If the team loses Semien that's a massive loss of overall value in the position player core that will be hard to make up by making small upgrades with the likes of Kyle Seager and players of his ilk. Most of the position player core is pretty solid outside of a potential 3rd base upgrade and impending hole at second base, so it will be hard to replace the massive value of a Semien level player with small upgrades unless you start making wholesale changes throughout the roster. Depending on how you view Gurriel perhaps left field could be one spot to upgrade as well, but other than that the rest of the starters should be set in stone heading into 2022.

Ray is seriously underrated if you look at Fangraphs WAR only. He is penalized very heavily for home runs allowed even though they were frequently solo shots due to the lack of baserunners he allowed. Baseball Reference paints a very different picture with 6.7 WAR placing him third in baseball.

The only Seager I would be interested in for third base duty would be Corey. There's a very good chance you would receive equal if not better overall production from some combination of Espinal/Smith/Valera for league minimum salaries vs paying Kyle Seager 15 million per year or whatever it would take. I don't think the Jays should be paying real money for marginal upgrades and would be far better off aiming for impact players given where they already fall in the win curve.

JD would be an awesome addition but I don't see it happening. I don't necessarily think there's a lot of lingering ill will between JD and the front office but I suspect it's more due to lack of fit in the ingrained culture that would prevent a reunion. With how desperate the front office was to move out Donaldson for peanuts instead of simply offering a qualifying offer and hoping for a bounceback shows you exactly how interested they likely are in having him around the young players on the team. Maybe it's possible that they really liked the potential upside that Merryweather could bring but that whole trade just reeked of desperation and trying to get literally anything they could while removing Donaldson from the picture.

I agree with most of this but calling Joe West a small man is probably the last way I would choose to describe the guy.

Good riddance.

Semien is saying all the right things in that he's open to returning to the Jays next season. That would lead me to believe that he's not dead set on returning to short stop. It was obvious how much he means to the team and Bo in particular. Remaining a key part of the best offensive middle infield combination in the sport would have to hold a lot of appeal.

It will be interesting to see how things end up shaking out. The Jays have 4 major league quality catchers on the roster, with 3 of those looking to be starter quality. McGuire should be the first one moved as his upside is the lowest of the 4, and hopefully he has built a bit of trade value as he could likely start on a lot of teams and looks to be a fine backup even on good clubs. I'd like to see Jansen as the starter with Kirk as the backup/DH going into next season, but Charlie seemed to be hesitant to use Kirk at DH when there were only two catchers on the major league roster.

Semien was given his choice of second base or third base and ended up choosing second base. Given that he provides Gold glove quality defence there I just don't see how it would make sense for him to switch positions again.

I certainly don't expect Jansen to rock a 151 WRC+ over the course of a full season, but that is what he was able to produce over his final 54 games/156 plate appearances in 2021. That's certainly starting catcher material and at the very least should have earned him the spot to start 2022. The reports of Moreno being a premium athlete with a strong arm make third base sound like a very realistic option.

Biggio had success in 2019 and 2020 with the same skill set that he brought to the majors in 2021. He's only 26 and should be at the age where he is hitting his physical peak, not at an advanced age where you would expect to see a sudden skill deterioration. I refuse to buy into this narrative that he is suddenly finished because Keith Law refuses to admit his mistakes and spent hours digging through data to come up with some sort of fatal flaw that somehow proves that Biggio has no major league future. Biggio didn't really face a significant increase in fastballs against in 2021 so I don't really think you can use the weakness against velocity to explain the struggles during the most recent season. When you examine his numbers you quickly see that he struggled against all manner of pitches in 2021 including some he previously had some success against such as cutters and change-ups. He has been tinkering with approach but it really hasn't been working for him so far. He stated wanting to be more aggressive at the plate but this has been at the expense of his walk rate as his chase rate has increased by several points. Interestingly he hasn't always struggled against fastballs, when he first came up it was actually the pitch that he created most of his value against. It's been 2020 and 2021 where he started to struggle somewhat against the fastball with this peaking in 2021. There is an obvious attempt to use the whole field as he was previously pretty pull heavy, but this certainly hasn't worked out in his favor up to this point. His best results in far in 2021 were to the pull side, with a 174 WRC+ on balls that he pulled, vs 63 WRC+ when going up the middle and 119 WRC+ when going to the opposite field. It appears to me as though the approach changes in 2021 really didn't do him any favors and he would be far better off reverting to his old ways of trying to hit the ball hard to the pull side and working walks.

Far from it. Biggio just suffered through an injury plagued season which included several hand issues, various back issues, a neck injury and an elbow injury. I am having a hard time seeing how any player would be able to play up to their capabilities if faced with the same injuries that Biggio was forced to endure. Maybe he doesn't fully reach the previous heights that he rose to during his first few seasons but that's far from a given.