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I think you may be missing a key point in the first paragraph that could open the door for Yesavage to be added to the post season roster despite not being on the 40 man roster. The bolded sentence shows that players can still be added to the post season roster as an injury replacement even if they aren't on the 40 man roster or 60 day injured list on September 1.

After your Oscar worthy sky is falling performance earlier in the season you are just going to have to continue to take your lumps. It's like there's a dark cloud constantly following you and there's always a crisis lurking around every corner at all points of the season. We can all see that this team isn't perfect but there is still a lot of talent on the entire roster including the pitching staff. We've seen at various points at the season that this bullpen can be highly effective and completely shut down the opposition as it's staffed with a lot of filthy arms but unfortunately most of these dudes tend to go through periods of struggles as we've seen over the last month. The starting rotation is rounding into form as Gausman has been pitching like a borderline number 1 over the last few months, Bieber is looking like an ace so far and Scherzer was performing very well recently as well prior to yesterday's game where his back was acting up so hopefully this continues into the post season and lessens the relative load on the bullpen a touch.

Having one such player on the roster that's pencilled into the lineup no matter what is bad enough though let alone two of them. It's crazy but IKF has actually outperformed Ernie against RHP this season, albeit with a still really bad 87 wRC+.

Does it matter how recently the injury occurred? Yimi Garcia and Nick Sandlin have each been out long term but aside from another reliever going down due to injury it could complicate matters.

My fear is that he does nothing but serve to cannibalize playing time for other more deserving players. From the manager's comments it doesn't sound like he's going to play every day but given John Schneider's seeming love affair with Ernie Clement and IKF largely fitting the same mold as light hitting speedy utility player who knows for certain.

Things aren't nearly as dire as you are making them out to be (surprise surprise). Despite the relative struggles of the pen over the month of August the club finished the month with a 15-12 record which is a pretty decent result all things considered.

Yesavage is still getting his feet wet in AAA at this point. He's experienced a bit of an adjustment at every level along the way this season and it appears as though he may be nearing MLB readiness based on his last few starts.

That was a much needed bounce back game for the bullpen. Little made some great pitches but got himself into trouble with the keystone cops defensive routine. Little owes Tommy Nance a nice Swiss Chalet gift card after bailing him out of trouble. I never thought I'd utter these words but it appears as though Nance is a stud and easily deserving of more leverage innings as he keeps completely shutting down the opposition. It was great to see Varland with a nice bounceback outing and Dominguez brought the filth as well. This pen will likely never be a true shutdown unit as they tend to walk too damn many batters but hopefully this game can act as a bit of a stepping stone to a more effective month of September. I also have to give props to Myles Straw. He's enjoyed a huge month of August and he's up to 96 wRC+ for the season as a whole. It doesn't appear to be an unsustainable fluke either as he was sitting with nearly identical xwOBA/wOBA splits heading into today's game.

I don't recall anyone saying the drafting has been exemplary so there's no reason to go there. The current front office group built a solid core largely on their own so they can receive credit for that. You are jumping between him and them in your discussion of firing people, so I don't really know if you are referring to completely cleaning house, or replacing only Atkins etc. Once again I don't see why the deciding factor between keeping jobs or not is winning the division regardless of post season results unless you are the type who gets sentimental about division title banners hanging in the stadium. It's a pretty weaksauce critique to not give full credit to the current front office pick for the Bichette pick simply because there wasn't 100% consensus in the draft room. This wasn't a J.P. Ricciardi situation where he overruled the scouting staff and drafted Ricky Romero instead of Tulo so it's pretty dumb to send out criticism towards anyone in this situation. Literally the only thing that matters was that Bichette was picked, everything else is essentially meaningless. If you examine the Blue Jays draft picks in AA's last few seasons with the club they are legitimately awful so let's not pretend like the team had a top notch scouting department and draft process at that point. With regards to the guy who signed Kirk I don't see why we should care if the person that banged the drum for this has since moved on. There is a lot of movement in baseball circles over time so I don't see how this is relevant to any kind of meaningful discussion. Both of Boston and Baltimore are on different portions of their respective win curves so comparing their current cores in terms of long term value is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison. The Blue Jays were largely in a similar position in 2021 or so if we are to compare front office quality in terms of long term core potential.

I think the Barger breakout is completely for real. Even if he's a strong side platoon player in the end that's still a really valuable piece as he'll received 500+ PA per season. Gimenez has been really unlucky with the bat this season. He's matched his best ever .326 xwOBA up to this point of the season, and it appears as though the primary reason he's underwater in terms of expected performance is due to stellar defense on his batted balls in play. Gimenez is tied for the major league lead with 9 fielding runs saved on his batted balls despite receiving 150+ PA less than the other guys he's tied with. I don't think the Santander signing was desperate in the slightest. The team waited him out for a large portion of the offseason and once you factor in the deferrals he's essentially being paid as a 2 win DH. It seems silly to me to fire an entire front office for not winning a division title regardless of what happens in the playoffs. Let's say in a perfect world that the team makes the world series this season, but as a "reward" you would fire the lot of them? That's just illogical in nature. I think it's high time for Atkins to show that he can get his team over the playoff hump and failing this he should fully be on the hot seat, but at the same time I think Shapiro has accomplished more than enough to justify a contract extension. I don't see how AA is relevant to this discussion. His primary failing in my view was that he never properly built the bones of the team from the ground up as he largely built his team by acquiring veteran players and was downright terrible at developing his own core from within. Literally the only home grown position player of any note was Kevin Pillar. He had a touch of success on the pitching side, but once MLB closed the draft pick loopholes for qualified free agents he had no success in the draft and that led to a sadsack farm system when he decided to depart the organization.

I wonder if this means no Loperfido call up is coming tomorrow. Or perhaps Ernie could be headed to the IL to let his hand heal up a bit and IKF could replace him

If I'm not mistaken he just needs to be added to the 40 man roster by midnight tonight to be eligible for the post season.

You seemed to have either missed or ignored the existence of all of Barger, Gimenez and Santander in your long term Blue Jays prognosis as they are all long term assets. Both of Santander and Gimenez had rough first seasons as Blue Jays but I believe each of them were adversely affected by injuries to a large degree and with better health I expect each of them to perform better in future seasons. I'd like to believe that a Varsho extension could be a possibility but as a Boras client that is likely a tough hill to climb. I think that aside from the wayward 2024 season that regular season performances have largely been in line with payroll allowances, with the lack of post season success being the major failure of this group. I can agree that pitching development has been the major deficiency that's led to a very expensive pitching staff, and with all of Bieber, Bassitt and Scherzer scheduled to depart in free agency it will continue to be a necessity for a large chunk of payroll to go towards the rotation. The Blue Jays actually featured MLB's highest payrolls in their world series years so this years team isn't the best supported team in the club's history. The team did recently fire the minor league pitching coordinator and head of scouting, and the large number of pitching breakouts this season has me hopeful that the team is finally cracking the pitching code.

Of course banked wins are a thing but at the same time there's no sense in hitting the panic button in the first month of a 6 month long season.

I'd bring him up as well. He's had a chance to adjust to the major league baseball as that's the ball they use in AAA, and having him throw to one of MLB's best framers in Kirk could potentially help bring the walks under control a little bit. Aside from a potential Yesavage Fisher should be brought back up as soon as his 15 days are up as well. I always felt that it was a mistake when the team chose to send him to AAA as he was arguably their best/most reliable reliever since his initial callup.

A lot of this criticism in pretty myopic and isn't really looking at the entire picture. Like saying that the front office should have won the division twice in ten years, but they inherited an aging/injury prone/expensive team that was good enough to challenge for a wildcard spot but not the division for a single season. The years from 2017-2019 were largely spent rebuilding the team behind the scenes as the previous GM left a terrible farm system behind on top of the team that was post apex. The core from this front office didn't start to reach the majors until the end of the 2019 season, and was a surprise post season entrant in 2020 in the covid shortened season. That's essentially 5 years into their tenure where this group had very little chance to win the division due to no fault of their own as they had to clean up the mess the previous guy left behind. This team started to hit it's peak from the 2021-2023 seasons, in which winning the division would have required between 99-102 wins. This would have required the greatest single Blue Jays seasons in team history as the division was stacked with very high quality teams. You can certainly fault the front office for the failed 2024 season and it would have required a more reasonable 94 wins to take the division. You are pretty dramatically overstating the length of time the payroll has been upper tier as well as they didn't even pay up to the luxury tax for the first time until the 2024 season so let's not pretend this team has been some massive spending behemoth in the upper echelons of the sport until very recently.

Varland's career reliever numbers are pretty solid. He's produced an overall 3.36 FIP as a reliever in his career as he was generally decent in his prior seasons in a small sample of innings. It's really only as a starter that he's struggled to any degree as evidenced by the 5.46 FIP out of the rotation. It's literally a two week sample where his command has faltered that he's experienced struggles out of the pen, and it's incredibly presumptive to declare that he has a legitimate chance to be DFA'd when he runs out of options.

Where did I say any of that? As it stood the Blue Jays only had a handful of open pen spots to add to the pen to the point where it was necessary to move one of Fisher or Fluharty to AAA to avoid losing Nance. This type of criticism is made completely with the benefit of hindsight in which you pretend you knew that all of the leverage arms would simultaneously struggle to produce outs after largely being very effective over the previous 65-70% of the season.

That's cool that you place far more emphasis on the 2 weeks of this season where Varland struggled vs the 4.5 months where he was a really effective pen arm. This is his first season of strictly relieving as he was bounced back and forth from the rotation and pen in prior seasons, and up until the last few weeks he was firmly in the midst of a breakout season. Even with the rough 2 weeks his season numbers are still really good. That's cool that you would try to make the point where it's more likely that he's going to be DFA'd in 2027 instead of getting himself sorted out because of these 2 bad weeks. I always find it fascinating how some of the fanbase chooses to ignore the more successful portions of a players career before they become Blue Jays and become hyper fixated on the initial portion of struggles in a Blue Jays uniform. This was the case with Varsho, Gimenez, Santander and now apparently Varland as well.

I can only guess that the front office was hoping that Garcia would have been able to make his way back by season's end and this factored in to not bringing in a third relief option. As it was the emergence of Nance made it necessary to send a completely undeserving reliever to AAA and this would have been compounded further if another reliever were brought aboard. I think far too much is being made of a short term struggle for Varland vs looking at his entire body of work this season, and with appropriate adjustments to allow his command to return to previous levels he can return to being a highly effective reliever for the rest of the season and moving forward.

Dominguez is a rental and is running a nearly 30% k rate as a Blue Jay.

The bullpen is certainly a concern at the moment, but I think a large part of this is just unfortunate timing of all of the leverage arms slumping at the same time. There is too much talent in the pen for this level of struggles to continue for the rest of the season as a whole but it’s absolutely a massive concern in the short term. This kind of reminds me of the excessive level of doom posting in April with the offense when a nearly team wide slump led to some awful offensive numbers over the first month of the season before they collectively reversed their fortunes over the next 4 months.

That's wild that the Pirates traded a legitimate prospect to bring in IKF on a free agent contract level of salary. The front office really made some hay as they enjoyed a fantastic half season from IKF and brought in a slugging prospect to add some depth to the system.

I didn't think Tommy John was going to be in the cards as Yimi's issues were nerve related and not ligament related. I think Romano's surgery was also minor in nature and he didn't bounce back particularly well so hopefully Yimi experiences more success.