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I guess this largely depends on how many wins a fully replacement level team is expected to generate. I've seen anywhere from 40 wins on the low end up to 50 wins on the high end so the readily available information is highly variable.

I quickly added up the wins and it amounted to nearly 37 total wins above replacement. That seems like a team that can compete for a wildcard spot, but then the Blue Jays have largely seemed to underperform compared to the projections in recent seasons.

Bringing in AJ Cole was not a logical move as he was probably 4th or 5th in the pecking order for the Blue Jays pen. Obtaining ace level results from piggybacking the two largely struggling starters that led up to that point was an excellent move. That should be an easy concept to understand as the bad move in brining in Cole doesn't change how one should view the previous moves that led to a very favorable outcome.

I apparently have an entirely different recollection of that particular game than you do. I think that was brilliant strategy as Matt Shoemaker was hardly some kind of ace pitcher that should be given extended rope in a playoff game. Ray came in and pitched a great 3 innings, and the team obtained 6 innings of 1 run ball combined from these two pitchers, that's a fantastic outcome as neither of them were having very good seasons in 2020. The mistake was bringing in a middle reliever in AJ Cole in the late innings of a close playoff game, not the pitching strategy that led up to that point.

I believe the Blue Jays were hovering around the .500 mark right until early June, which still had them within a stone's throw of a wild card spot. I simply don't get comparing Vlad's month of May last season to Luis Arraez. That would be a great comparison if Arraez was capable of running an average exit velocity of 95 MPH in a singular game, let alone over an entire month of play. It was apparent at the time that literally all it was going to take for Vlad to go on a massive heater was an incremental improvement to his launch angle as he was regularly crusing line drives off of the outfield walls.

Black kinda looks like a more athletic version of Spencer Horwitz to me. He's potentially a nice piece moving forward but not a particularly exciting return for Bo.

One of Ross's bigger weaknesses has been his inability to clearly communicate to the media and apparently this extends to his players as well at times. I can see the argument for this being grounds to eventually lead to his dismissal, but I was always more concerned with how the team was performing on the field and judging the man based on the success or failure of his attempts to improve his squad. After the disastrous 2024 showing of the team I was more than happy to see him shown the door, but I still believe him when he said he wasn't aware of when Berrios was going to be pulled in the playoffs. Everyone involved has been saying the same thing in that it was fully up to Schneider regarding when to make the switch, so I see no benefit for Atkins to fall on his sword to placate an angry fanbase when it wasn't his decision that had the fanbase so angry in the first place.

This argument doesn't make a lot of sense to me either way. Vlad has performed up to his peak level when surrounded by a juggernaut team (2021) and when on a poor offensive squad (2024). The team didn't really hit the skids until early June as they were hovering around the .500 mark until then, and Vlad started performing very well towards the end of April so his turnaround largely started happening before the season was effectively over.

He was great at acquiring stars through trade but he was absolutely awful at producing his own home grown players. I think that's a primary gripe of mine of his time at the helm, as he attempted to take short cuts to contention by shipping out prospects and never really built a cheap home grown base for his team first. I don't know if the new group that takes over will actually be in worse shape than the current group was when they took over for AA. By that time the Tommy John brigade should largely be working their way back into competition, and if a few of these high ceiling arms take a step forward that will give the overall system rankings a sizeable boost. The team also stands to choose high in the upcoming draft, and depending on how the rest of the offseason unfolds in terms of signing any qualified free agents there should be a nice infusion of talent through the draft. Finally if the club flounders again this season there will more than likely be another sell off at the trade deadline. The team received some nice pieces last trade deadline, and this time they would stand to have higher quality players to offer on the trade market.

The club still had a top 5 system by Baseball America in 2020 and 2021 after Vlad and Bo debuted.

The Vlad is only good when it doesn't count theory is great until you remember that Vlad's best ever season came in 2021 when the team was in the thick of the playoff hunt under maximum pressure due to how close the race was.

I really don't understand the continued consternation over the quick pull of Berrios in the playoffs. The team failed to score any runs after the early season RISP issue reared it's ugly head again in the playoffs.

Firing an entire front office right now would be a total panic move, the time to do this would be at the conclusion of the regular season so a proper search and interview period can be conducted. Like it or not we are likely stuck with this group for at least another season if not longer.

Dealing with people on Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace is totally the worst. I priced all of our old stuff well below market value so that it would move quickly as we needed to get our house back in order after full interior repainting and adding a bunch of new furnishings. Despite this people kept insisting that I should sell my stuff for even lower than the way below market value prices and that they were doing me a favor by making lowball offers to me. And to top it all off there are a million scammers out there now who give you a story about how they are too busy to pick up your item right away, and offer to pay for it right away and pick it up within the week. I had a multitude of fishy looking/almost certainly fake E-transfers that link to suspicious looking external sites come my way to the point where I had to insist on auto deposit e transfer or cash only.

This offseason has been depressing so far but aside from last offseason the front office made meaningful additions every single offseason since the 2019 period. And if I'm not mistaken this included a qualified free agent every offseason as well prior to last year. The worthwhile additions are drying up in a hurry so hopefully the team can grab a few decent upgrades before the season starts.

This video is painfully accurate. I just went through all of this when selling a bunch of our old home furnishings as we recently redecorated. The worst I encountered were potential "buyers" who asked if I would be willing to deliver stuff to them that I was giving away for free. FFS.

You know you aren't doing a very good job of using the ignore list if you continue to try to pick fights with posters that you are supposedly ignoring.

I think it was perfectly defensible to hang onto Bassitt, at least until they acquired an appropriate replacement for him. Moving him at the deadline would have created another hole in the rotation, and would also remove the possibility of upgrading two positions at once with a new rotation addition as Rodriguez would be needed in the rotation vs being available for shifting to the pen.

LOL, I am going to lose a lot of sleep if you add me to your ignore list.

I don't delineate my own opinions down to a binary yes/no black/white 0%/100% type of ranking as I believe that's far too simplistic of a method to evaluate a front office. I think for the most part they have done a decent job, and the situation has quickly gone downhill in recent seasons. They quickly rebuilt the club once the previous group passed it's best before date. They produced one of the better runs of regular season success in club history, while never quite being good enough to win the division when most years would have required 99-100 wins to take the division. I believe the team had enough talent to win games and even series in the post season if the players on the roster elevated their games at the right time, but unfortunately that didn't happen. The current group built up a farm system that was around top 5 in MLB for a 4 year stretch from 2018-2021, but it's gone downhill in recent seasons due to a number of factors, including poor drafting and/or development, the best prospects in the system either graduating or being dealt to supplement the major league squad, and losing draft picks and associated draft budget due to regularly signing qualified free agents most offseasons.

Do you have anything of worth to add to the discussion instead of a bunch of childish insults? You are making it increasingly difficult to take any of your opinions seriously.

That exciting team didn't win the world series in either season, and the GM at the time going all in at the time and selling the farm is arguably the biggest single reason that turned into a short term window team. Maybe you believe it was worth it, but I often question whether it actually was as the team needed to be rebuilt shortly afterwards. So many of the moves were incredibly short sighted in nature and had zero view towards the future. That's nice the team was left with a single top prospect in the system to go along with the one year window team, that totally changes the discussion. That's exactly the same as the situation a certain GM we love discussing ten years after the fact found himself in when he took over a team with MLB's best farm system and a stacked young MLB team that was just hitting his stride. The rebuild basically lasted three seasons as the team was back in the playoffs in the 2020 season. I don't know how much faster you think a rebuild needs to be, that's pretty damn fast in my view.

There has been plenty of speculation that the team was not allowed to do a scorched earth rebuild as Rogers wouldn't allow it. I'll avoid taking utilizing your tactics and making this is a definitive statement that Rogers 100% didn't allow the team to rebuild. Not everything is so perfectly black and white you know, and a lot of situations are very nuanced.

There are likely less painful ways to remove a tattoo you know.

Are you Steve Simmons burner account? You are using the same tact as the likes of Steve Simmons, Cathal Kelly, Rosie D'imanno etc. of cherry picking small bits of information that are technically true, but then completely twisting the facts into a fake narrative that's tinged with emotionally charged opinions that are easily refuted with basic logic.