max silver

Yeah it seems like that is what led to the disastrous 2019 season. He said he really likes to tinker with his swing, but the changes he made that year were hard to undo and he was a mess with trying to revert to his prior swing. It's looking more and more like the 2019 season is the outlier in an otherwise solid minor league career. The addition to his walk rate is the thing that's most encouraging to me, he's never walked at a pace like this previously, and he's also trimmed his strikeout rate to a more manageable level as well.

Ryu is prone to bad stretches as well unfortunately. Just think back to how badly he was hammered in the playoffs last year. He had another bad stretch this year where he was getting lit up. So I guess that only leaves Ray who has been consistently good.

There really isn't anything to lose by giving him a chance at some point. At worst you end up losing somebody off the fringes of the 40 man roster once Smith gets his initial chance. If he struggles he has all of his options remaining and you simply option him back down.

It seemed like with AA as long as he had some vetrin presents type guys in the locker room that would cancel out the issues that the team dipshits ended up causing, then it didn't matter how many clowns he had on the roster at any period. There was a parade of awful veteran players who were paraded out, washed up players like Kevin Millar, Omar Vizquel and Mark DeRosa were supposed to hold the clubhouses together. Vizquel was supposed to mentor Yunel Escobar, and we all remember how his tenure with the team ended.

Sounds an awful lot like Charlie with his justification of using Chatwood and Dolis.

I'm a little torn as far as what I would prefer Smith to be used for. He has turned himself into an extremely valuable trade chip. A 140 WRC+ MLB ready shortstop who is a very capable defender and provides value on the bases is a very enticing trade asset. On the other hand he might be able to take over the third base position for the Jays and allow Biggio to move into more of a fulltime super utility role. The recent surge at the plate of Espinal complicates things even further.

If you're happy with the boom bust method of team building then more power to you I guess. AA trading the bulk of his prospects away is part of the issue with not being able to build a sustainable winner under his tenure. The organization's failure to develop quality major leaguers is a separate issue, but this doesn't really validate the philosophy as a good one to employ.

Vlad is the one of the few prospects he didn't trade away. Anthopoulos was on record that he viewed the minor league system more as trading currency to supplement the major league roster and that really shows. That regime saw very few minor league prospects directly contribute to the Jays in a meaningful way.

That's good facial hair growth for an Asian dude in only 10 days. It would take my brother in law several months to grow a beard like that one . 😋

That should be scored an error all the way

Another bonus is that this regime isn't going to treat the minor league system players like Pokemon cards and trade all the good prospects away for expensive aging veterans.

Gallo was better than Biggio at third base in his small sampling, but he still grades out as a very poor third base defender. It would pretty foolish to shoehorn him into the position when he's a plus defender in the outfield, and repeating the Biggio mistake of forcing a player into a position they aren't suited for.

You are undervaluing Gallo by quite a bit. Gallo's half season results in 2019 (he was injured to end 2019) and 2021 each basically match the WAR output for Gurriel's entire career. Gallo is a player capable of producing 140 WRC+ offense while providing plus defense in the outfield. Gurriel looks like one of baseballs best hitters when he goes on a hot streak, but he's frustratingly inconsistent to the point where he can quickly become a sub-replacement level player when he goes on one of his extended cold streaks. He's somehow gotten far worse in the outfield in 2021 than he displayed in 2020 to the point where he's become a defensive liability. Adding Gallo to the outfield is a massive upgrade, the defense is improved dramatically, and a much needed quality left handed bat is added to the lineup.

Yeah it's the best possible scenario really. Hopefully over time the capacity will be increased as a larger percentage of the population becomes fully vaccinated.

Thanks a bunch, I didn't realize it was possible to sort this way for minor league players.

If Milb.com had plate appearances listed in their monthly splits listed it would be very easy to calculate, but unfortunately it looks like only at bats are listed. The values I've calculated should still be close though, for plate appearances I have added at bats to walks. This will miss things like sacrifice flies, but I don't think that will affect the final results too much. May BB% 9.9 K% 23.8 June BB% 10.1 K% 29.6 July BB% 9.6 K% 32.7

With how Orelvis is performing recently he might be experiencing that kind of breakout right now. His May OPS was .772, June was .802, and in July he's rocketed up to 1.354.

Gallo would be awesome. He would require some serious prospect capital going back the other way though. Grichuk wouldn't be of much interest to the Rangers as they are rebuilding, but I wouldn't hesitate moving out Gurriel or Biggio as MLB pieces.

I would tend to think it would be considered indoors as well to determine seating capacity. As a domed stadium where it is possible to convert from an outdoor facility to an indoor facility based on weather, there would be a very strong possibility of the facility changing from outdoor to indoor on a game to game basis. If seating were based on outdoor capacity requirements and it were to start to rain, what would you do with the excess capacity that suddenly becomes an issue? Would half the fans be required to leave the stadium so that it would now meet indoor requirements?

Dan Schulman has the innate ability to raise the level of his broadcast partner. He's an amazing play by play guy in how he's able to incorporate well thought out opinions, relay stories, call the game at a top notch level, elevate the overall broadcast by carrying his partner as required, has a great voice and smooth delivery, and has a good sense of humor as well. I would be over the moon elated if the Jays could somehow convince him to do Jays games full time, but even having him call half the games at least avoids us having to listen to the doofus and dingus combination of Buck and Pat.

This is awesome. The Jays are getting a guy who likely would have gone top 10 if not for the Tommy John surgery at 19, and saving over $100,000 on an underslot deal which may allow them to pull off a tough signing at other points in the draft.

Damn that sounds like it could be a deal killer. With players having to quarantine inside their hotel I really don't see why they can't be allowed into the country in that scenario.

1. I really like some of the Statcast based metrics which have become available recently. Both xWOBA and xERA are very handy tools to use for evaluating player performance. These tools are able to remove defence from the equation similar to metrics like FIP, but also incorporate batted ball data into the final result. One good example of the utility of these tools is apparent with a player like Marco Estrada. During his Blue Jays tenure he ran low ERA's, but high FIP values. He was able to induce a lot of lazy fly balls and popups, and a metric like xERA very closely mirrors his ERA results, working as a means to validate the ERA values he garnered as being legitimate and not a fluke. XWOBA is useful for attempting to determine which players have been lucky and conversely those who have been unlucky. Using BABIP alone isn't sufficient as it doesn't directly take quality of contact into account. Players like Santiago Espinal and Reese McGuire have both produced much higher actual WOBA results compared to xWOBA, which suggests they may have been a bit lucky to have the success they have enjoyed up to this point. At the opposite end of the spectrum Rowdy Tellez and Danny Jansen have both dramatically underperformed with much lower actual WOBA compared to xWOBA. This may suggest they have experienced quite a bit of bad luck. XERA and xWOBA can be found at https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/ and fangraphs as well. Baseball savant contains a treasure trove of information. You can find detailed breakdowns for individual players for how they compare in various batted ball metrics against the rest of baseball, player sprint speeds, defensive information incorporating outs above average as well as other information. https://www.mlb.com/glossary/statcast/expected-woba https://www.mlb.com/glossary/statcast/expected-era 2. My favorite website for calculating player values is https://www.baseballtradevalues.com/. This site breaks down every MLB player and each team's notable prospects into a dollar value. Salary and years of control are included in the final values. You can use this site to work out potential trade scenarios which is pretty fun to do. 3. For prospect values I like https://www.mlb.com/pipeline. This site has a ton of prospect lists, and gives full scouting grades to each team's top 30 prospects. Compared to Fangraphs the grades are definitely more on the generous side, but you get detailed writeups as well as the grades for each prospect's tools.

Cavan Biggio has amassed 4.0 career WAR in 939 plate appearances vs. Sogard's 4.2 WAR in 2484 plate appearances. Not exactly a great comparison, better try again.

Biggio's overall second year numbers were better than his first year without the high Bsr value. Take that 40FV nonsense and shove it man, that's just ridiculous. He obviously shouldn't be manning third base as he lacks the explosiveness required to be effective over there, but I fail to see why that's being used to hate on the guy so much. Since his return from the injured list Biggio's offensive numbers are right where you would expect them to be, and are largely in line with the underlying numbers that led to a 124 WRC+ in 2020. I agree that Biggio won't move the needle much for trading towards an MVP caliber player like Ramirez, but I really don't get how it's suddenly so fashionable to hate on the guy because Keith Law is a miserable **** who refuses to admit that he was wrong about a player. I don't necessarily like moving Biggio around so much, as he was much better as a second baseman than any other position that's he been used at. Perhaps next season if Semien walks Biggio gets moved back to second, as that's a much better fit for his defensive skill set. He was improving over time and by most metrics was an average or better second baseman.