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Does that maybe signal the Mets are ready to move on from Alonso?

Arden's head alone weighs more than 200 pounds.

Quantril was better on the road than at home but was still pretty bad with a 4.93 FIP/4.59 xFIP away from Coors Field. It's possible he's simply not very good at this point of his career. I just don't see a lot of upside personally but he was a league average starter as recently as 2022 with even worse stuff metrics compared to now so perhaps he can bounce back a bit.

I had a look at Quantril's stuff metrics and Statcast numbers and it appears as though he only has a single good pitch in his splitter. He already threw that 32% of the time so I don't know if it's realistic to throw it even more.

I think Burr has potential to be a key piece for the pen Green should have a realistic shot to bounce back if he can recapture the form on his breaking ball to garner more whiffs. They definitely need to add more arms for sure though as the pen is very thin at present.

I'm cool with signing a starter, but he needs to at least be better than the in house options in order to push Rodriguez to the pen. That could improve the team in two areas at once. I think the only free agent starters worth acquiring are Pivetta and Flaherty though so there aren't a ton of options available.

Yeah he's not great in center field at this point of his career but he still appears to be approximately average in right field.

Grichuk is far from exciting but he would fill a role that's needed on the Blue Jays. They were 25th in MLB against left handed pitching with an 88 wRC+. Grichuk has a career 121 wRC+ against left handed pitching and has managed 151 and 157 wRC+ outputs the last two seasons. He's a quality 4th outfielder type of player on a team that has little in the way of right handed outfielders on the roster or upper minors as nearly all of the better prospects are left handed hitters.

Yeah he's another guy who could fit as he's still a pretty solid defender and is a great 4th outfielder. Compounding matters for the Blue Jays is the fact that Springer was horrible against LHP last season (74 wRC+). Having all of Varsho, Kiermaier and Springer needing to be shielded against tough lefties made it impossible for the team to receive favorable matchups at times.

The Blue Jays outfield players and prospects are primarily left handed so a guy like Hays makes a ton of sense. The team hasn't really had a right handed lefty masher in recent seasons after trading Gurriel and Teoscar away and this is something that's been missing.

I have no issue with JDM as a target for DH. He was very solid for the first 5 months or so until he hit a rough sled in the last month of the season. A lot of that appeared to be related to bad luck as he drastically underperformed his expected statistics.

It's a low risk/medium reward signing for sure. Torres is getting worse season over season in the field and on the bases so there's a lot of pressure on the bat to provide any value. If he's a 1.5-2 win player that's not exactly much of a bargain all things considered. On top of that Comerica Park looks like a poor fit for Torres as his 2024 expected home runs drop from 17 in Yankee Stadium all the way down to 9 in Detroit.

We shall see. It took a big month of September to even reach the mediocre end of season numbers he ended with so there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. He produced 1.0 FWAR of his end of season 1.7 FWAR total over his final 24 games based off of a .395 BABIP so it's very possible it was a short unsustainable hot streak.

I've no doubt that cushioned the blow but the Red Sox certainly would have garnered a better return had they held onto Price.

The Red Sox got nothing out of the Mookie Betts trade because they shot themselves in the foot by insisting that David Price be part of the deal as well. This would be like the Blue Jays attaching George Springer to any Vlad trade, and there's nothing to indicate Rogers is going to cut costs in that fashion at the moment.

The present discussion is primarily about the amount of risk involved in a Vlad long term extension. I simply provided a player that I think is actually a low risk candidate, vs a player who I believe is a very high risk candidate. Vlad has kind of been like a box of chocolates in that you don't know from season to season what version of him is going to appear at the plate, but you can bank on him being one of MLB's least valuable defenders and baserunners year over year. I'd like to see him played more at third base as he posted positive numbers in his short stint last season. I don't know if playing him in the outfield would be the wisest choice given the fact he's dealt with knee issues in the past and the extra running could potentially be problematic as a result.

Vlad's body isn't that bad *right now*. Don't pretend this hasn't been an issue in the past or doesn't have very realistic potential to become an issue again in the future. As a natural heavyset player Vlad needs to bust his ass in the offseason to maintain appropriate conditioning to allow him to perform to his potential and he's shown up in suboptimal condition more than once already. Despite Vlad featuring his highest ever sprint speed on the bases he just posted the worst baserunning metrics of his entire career. His issues stem from between his ears as he's just incapable of making good decisions on the bases. He's already played over 800 games in his career so you can't just assume this is something that's magically going to improve. It's entirely possible that Vlad will post fantastic offensive seasons for the next 6 seasons, but if he's looking at a deal of 12 or more years the back half of that deal has massive landmine potential. A player like Bobby Witt Jr. is a low risk signing as he has elite tools across the board, is capable of providing elite defense at a premium position, posted elite offensive numbers in his 3rd major league season and provides elite production on the bases. That dude has a ridiculously high floor on top of one of MLB's highest overall ceilings. All that Vlad has to offer is elite offensive potential to go with MLB worst baserunning and bad defense at one of the least demanding positions, and he's only produced elite numbers in 2 of his 6 seasons up to this point. It has to be rare for a player to simultaneously feature such a high ceiling and low floor over a full season of play, particularly at such a young age in a player that doesn't tend to miss time due to injury.

Which hitters did the Blue Jays "ruin" from 2022-2023? That's a pretty dumb narrative that places all of the blame on the organization and none on the players for having bad seasons. Expected statistics are far from ironclad, and simply looking at Vlad's xwOBA and making a grand declaration that he was completely unlucky isn't a very effective analysis. Vlad tended to hit far too many of his barrelled baseballs to the deepest parts of the park and this had a dramatic effect on his overall results. I also recall reading that his batted balls tended to have more topspin that a typical hitter and this had a sizeable effect on how far these traveled. I don't know of any way to look this up however. I completely disagree about Vlad not being a risky sign. He has elite natural levels of offensive talent, but he's been maddeningly inconsistent. He wants to be paid like an elite player/hitter, but more often than not he simply hasn't provided that type of value on the field.

Vlad has held all of the leverage the entire time he's been employed by the Blue Jays. He comes from an extremely wealthy family and has likely lived like a king for his entire existence. He had absolutely zero reasons to ever agree to a team friendly contract or even one that felt fair for both sides. It appears as though it was always going to take a contract that felt like a gross overpayment to get him signed long term as he's been remarkably inconsistent in his career, ranging all the way from barely above replacement level to near MVP level seasons even in a two year span. The only thing that's changed is the amount of money it's going to take to sign him long term based on the changing economics of the sport. Vlad is among the riskiest players in the sport to sign long term as a direct result of the inconsistencies and body type and it's not exaggerating to suggest that signing him long term could easily become one of the worst contracts in the history of the sport. It's not remotely fair to pin all of the blame on the front office for not getting him signed because this is a special situation in which there is plenty of blame to spread around to all parties. The smart thing to do could very well be trading the guy if the two sides can't come to some sort of agreement.

You can find AAA Statcast numbers really easily in Fangraphs now. It appears as though his power numbers have been improving during his AAA stint so at least there's hope of a useful bat at the major league level.

Yeah I'd tend to think the thousands upon thousands of swings these guys take year in and year out is a huge determining factor in developing cervical issues.

Fielder suffered a neck injury that ruined his career, and we always much rounder than Vlad was even at his worst. I do agree however that 1B types haven't experienced the most gradual of aging curves among the heavyset crowd.

It seriously sounds like this guy needs to revamp his swing. It appears as though there is plenty of juice in the bat but his launch angle is completely ****ed at 2.8 degrees. leading to a flyball rate of only 17.3%.

Yay a bunch of semi coherent rage posts. I probably shouldn't waste my time as much of this is false and/or completely illogical but here goes nothing. You are making an assumption that's incorrect. I've actually gone back and looked and JPR's teams would not have made the playoffs based on the current format and end of season record. Perhaps they could have added at the trade deadline if there were more spots available, but you can't simply assume they would have made the necessary additions, especially with how cheap Rogers was early on. Apparently I need to explain to you that it's bad business to trade real assets for players on expensive free agent contracts. The team trading for these players wouldn't even get to enjoy the first and most likely best season of the entire deal as that had already passed. Compounding the fact that this was an awful trade was something that came out years later in that the centerpiece of the trade failed his physical, and unsurprisingly provided essentially no value to the Blue Jays. That's nice the Blue Jays were world series favorites, but we all know how badly that trade actually turned out in reality. I've been a fan for approximately the same period of time as you as I believe I started following the team closely in 89. I simply don't share the same viewpoint that this is the worst period of their existence. You must have been asleep for the entirety of the interbrew years when the budget was slashed, or missed the horrible period where Gord Ash was GM, or been stuck under a rock in the early Rogers years when they refused to even let the team add at the trade deadline when they were semi competitive. There's no need to be so melodramatic. Team ownership has opened up the pocketbook for the team to spend up to the luxury tax and beyond. That's cool your grandmother could have built a competitive team and that doesn't feel remotely like a gross exaggeration like your silly opinion that this is the darkest time in the team's history. Maybe she plays fantasy baseball or something that gave her MLB GM chops. You don't seem to realize that it takes the players actually being willing to sign a team friendly deal for it to occur. There is literally nothing to indicate that either of Bo or Vlad were remotely interested/willing to sign these types of deals in the first place or it would have most likely happened by now. This may come as a shock to you but teams can't force their players to forego free agency and sign team friendly deals, some players simply aren't interested in doing so. Vlad seems to be similar to Soto in that he was always going to be on his natural talent. Perhaps the team should have taken the same tact as Washington when they traded Soto, but the Blue Jays were in the midst of a competitive window so it's understandable they chose to hang onto their best player in hopes of getting him signed long term. That's cool that you thought that the organization was in a better place for the entirety of the mid-late 90's, entire decade of the 2000's and first half of the 2010 decade based on having some good prospects in their system. That's obviously far more important than actually building teams that were competitive and qualified for playoff spots.

AA wasn't able to simultaneously have a competitive team and a good farm system at the same time, which is exactly the same issue the current front office has eventually ran into. It's pretty disengenous to suggest they never built a good farm system as it was top 5 or so at peak and still in the top 10 as late as the 2021 season. AA left the team with a bottom to mid 20's rated farm system after the 2015 trade deadline, so don't pretend like he was some sort of drafting and developing genius either, aside from astutely gaming the compensation system to the point that MLB changed the rules. If you think the disastrous Marlins deal is some sort of feather in AA's cap then I don't know what to tell you. It's not hard to make a case that the 2015 trade deadline acquisitions were the primary reason the team turned into a short window team. It was a massive gamble that ultimately didn't pay off. Trading Reyes for Tulo was fine in the short term but ultimately traded one long term problem for a different long term problem. Trading the type of assets it took to acquire Price could have likely returned a longer term asset to the team as well. The team just made the playoffs 3 times in 5 seasons in the current window. In the stated timeline you listed starting from 1988 the team didn't even sniff the playoffs for something like 27 years, yet right now is the worst time in the franchise's history after a single bad season? Okie dokie then.