max silver

The front office is going to need to carefully thread the needle during these next few seasons. They obviously need to maximize the current roster as much as possible while the young core is still relatively inexpensive, but also need to keep an eye on the future given how expensive these same players are going to become in the not too distant future. I see a need to hang onto the truly elite talent in the minor leagues as these players are going to need to be retained to have an opportunity at maximum production levels with low salary cost. I wouldn't move out players like Moreno and Martinez unless it were for similarly talented pre-arb players at other positions of need. While the idea of trading for players like Jose Ramirez holds obvious appeal for the short term, it would likely come at a very high cost in terms of future sustainability.

I actually think the new slimmer Vlad would likely make a very good third baseman. He is very agile for a big man, his hands are good and the plus arm is perfect for the position. I wish the club would have given Vlad a longer look at third base last spring to see what he could do, he 100% would have been more suitable for the position than Biggio at the very least.

A key difference is that the Anthopoulos didn't have any elite young talent on that team to begin with, and all of the top talent aside from Stroman were of the 30 year old+ variety. There was always going to be a short window on those teams given the nature of acquisition of the stars and the lack of a talent pipeline to replace them. This current Jays club has two franchise players, a largely young lineup, and more potential elite position player talent in the minors.

His xWOBA was right in range with his career best seasons. He really seemed to have a s*** luck season as historically his WOBA and xWOBA have tended to follow within a few points of each other, but in 2021 the spread was 32 points. Another point is that he put up the 2.2 WAR in only 135 games. With a little better health (maybe a tall order given his chronic calf issues and extensive injury history) and a bit more batted ball luck there is definitely potential for him to provide a lot more than the 2.2 WAR. I don't think a 4 win season is at all out of the question for Donaldson.

Donaldson was only bad as per the UZR metric. By both DRS and OAA he was right around average. We obviously can't ignore UZR completely but there is certainly food for thought when two other metrics show completely different results. I think as a part time third baseman and part time DH he could be a very valuable addition. If the club were to utilise Donaldson and Kirk primarily in the DH spot the lineup would really benefit greatly.

I guess upon further reflection I certainly have other concerns. My other concerns with this plan also include the uncertainty of sustained performance from Scherzer and the crazy amount of money that would be tied up in the starting rotation, particularly with several pitchers who are aging with potential to decline very quickly. Scherzer has a good chance to be great for several more seasons, but at his age I wouldn't at all surprised to see him hit a wall very quickly and find himself out of MLB in short order. Would this leave any money for upgrades to the rest of the roster? Would there be any money left over to improve the bullpen or resign Semien or find a suitable replacement? I would honestly rather the club simply resign Ray and offer a qualifying offer to Matz, the rotation from 2021 was a real strength of the club as it was constructed towards the end of the season, I see no need to do something so drastic in signing three guys with as many question marks as your proposed trio presents. Ray and Matz are no sure things but should come with fewer concerns than bringing in two Tommy John recipients who would potentially each only be good for 100 or so innings a piece.

I was stunned when Semien ended up signing with the Jays as I recall the statements from his agent that he was looking for a 9 figure deal for his client. I recall reading that the front office tried to sign Semien to a multi year deal before the season started. That would have been a real coup had they managed to pull it off, but good on Marcus for betting on himself as he will be rewarded richly.

My biggest issue with signing all three is that it would likely force Manoah to AAA as there would be too many starters on the roster with the presence of Ryu and Berrios in the rotation. Who knows what you would even get with Verlander though given the advanced age and long layoff.

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.