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I don't think that MLB pitchers ever intentionally throw pitches in the middle of the plate to the elite sluggers as it's something that happens when they make mistakes. Despite the largely mediocre hitters surrounding Vlad this season he actually received the highest percentage of meatball pitches in his entire career. This season he was actually able to take advantage of the mistake pitches and simultaneously lay off of more of the pitches around the edges of the strike zone and wait for pitches he could hammer.

Soto's strike zone and meatball percentages were essentially identical to the year prior.

I believe Fangraphs has fully switched to Statcast defensive metrics and this was applied retroactively.

From reading between the lines from Vlad's offseason comments it appears he wasn't particularly close to fully healthy in 2023. He was healthy enough to at least take the field but played through a lot of pain from lingering issues that was partial motivation to revamp his offseason training routine with an eye towards injury prevention.

Vlad's season should be all the proof you need that protection doesn't really matter with the truly elite hitters.

It's a scary thought how bad the Blue Jays catching situation would be if Kirk were to suffer an injury and miss significant time.

I certainly didn't foresee Boyd having a better career than Daniel Norris.

Yay more surface level evaluation. Lose the wrong players that you don't have the necessary depth to cover (Romano nearly full season, Swanson early on, Garcia and Green at times) and it can quickly bury a season. Combine the loss of these players with unexpected underperformance on top of that (Romano when healthy, Swanson early on, Mayza and Richards) and you have the recipe for the disaster the Blue Jays bullpen turned into. The front office is absolutely responsible for the complete inability to produce their own relievers but at the same time I don't know if a single team in the sport could have replaced nearly a full leverage relief group from within.

Come on man, The Pujols deal was a recipe for disaster from day 1. Guaranteeing a 32 year a 10 year contract coming off of the worst season of his career was never going to end well. Add in the concerns about whether he misrepresented his age when he was a teenager if you like and that adds even more disaster potential. This isn't exactly a good faith example for this discussion and I'm sure you are fully aware of that. Pujols deal ended up providing 6 FWAR for the Angels at a cost of $40 million per win. Rendon's deal was bad luck on the part of the Angels pure and simple. He was one of baseball's best players at the time of signing, coming off of the best season of his career, and was very durable up to the point of signing. He was quickly ruined by injuries which is not something that could have been foreseen unless you had a crystal ball. The Angels received 3.5 FWAR so far after the first 4 seasons, or an average of about $43 million per win factoring in the shortened covid season and prorated salary. Springer's deal was sort of similar to Rendon's, albeit a year shorter at a significantly lesser AAV. He was still an impact level of player for his first two seasons, but unfortunately missed a large chunk of time due to injury. He declined very quickly starting in year 3, but has still managed to provide far more value to his compared to the Angels examples. Up to this point of the contract he has provided the Blue Jays with 9.7 FWAR over the first 4 years at an average of $10.3 million per win up to this point. This is going to get worse in the last few years, but it will still prove to be a far better deal in terms of cost per win compared to the other examples you have given. In the end the Blue Jays will be far happier with the results of the Springer deal than the Angels will have been with their two marquee free agent signings and it won't be particularly close.

Yeah it's become all too common to completely ignore the actual result on the field when evaluating pitcher performance. Like if Jose Berrios provides 192 innings of mid 3 ERA in a season that's a fantastic result and did not hold back the team in any material way. This would be like if position player WAR was calculated solely based on xwOBA and entirely ignored the results on the field of play. For instance if a Statcast based xWAR existed then the 2023 version of Vlad probably provided something like 3.5-4 wins in this and therefore he had a good season, despite the actual results being awful compared to the inherent talent level.

I recall Shapiro also mentioned Atkins would not be held back from pursuing anyone in free agency due to budgetary restraints, but there wasn't really mention of whether available payroll had the necessary flexibility to pursue the top free agent and still fill the other remaining holes.

Jaysblue is quietly weeping in the corner.

Snell was pretty much screwed over by Boras who refused to budge off of his ridiculous contract asking prices until spring training was approaching or even underway in some instances. Who knows what his actual offers looked like but I'm sure a helluva lot better than 2 years was on the table.

I think the offers for Soto are largely going to fall into the same general range as was the case with Ohtani. I fully expect that something other than money alone will end up being the key determining factor. The Jays don't exactly have a competitive situation to use as a selling point and I expect that would be a primary factor that may leave them having a hard time attracting quality free agents this offseason.

I think Vlad has generational levels of talent, but it hasn't shown up in the results every season up to this point.

Oddly enough Gurriel ended up developing into a solid defender in left field. It's too bad for him that at the same time his bat was downgraded to just a shade above league average as well.

His great season kind of came out of nowhere. I recall he was a top ranked prospect at one point, but when checking his minor league numbers they were rather pedestrian once he hit AAA in particular.

Yimi kind of feels like an elbow operation waiting to happen as I believe he had several elbow related injury list stints during the season. If he's cheap enough I'd still bring him back though as he was downright filthy this season when healthy.

Both of these guys may need to be full time DH only types 4 or 5 years from now but that would be a an issue down the road. The offensive upside would more than make up for it.

In that case I would sign both of them if possible. The Yankees have shown this season how it's possible to build a great offense by having two elite hitters, and having two of these guys for their respective primes would set the team up offensively for the long term.

Vlad's natural talent gives him a shot to eventually become MLB's best hitter. It's far from a given that will occur but elite offensive performers don't grow on trees and Soto aside there simply isn't comparable talent available to spend the money on in free agency this offseason.

A lot of how that trade looks long term will depend on how much Murphy bounces back with the bat. It was pretty shocking to see him produce a 76 wRC+ this season as he came into the year with a 119 wRC+ average for his career. I can only assume he was greatly affected by injuries to have suffered from such a drastic reduction in all of his quality of contact metrics and batted ball variety.

I wonder who would have been included in a trade package?

Yeah I agree fully. It was the perfect opportunity to allow some of these guys to get their feet wet and see if there were any pleasant surprises among the bunch of MLB ready prospects. It's a shame that Orelvis was busted for Clomiphene as this would have been a great chance for him to get his first taste of MLB pitching. It's generally taken him repeating a level in the upper minors before he fully hit his stride and I suspect he'll have the same type of challenges initially in MLB. It's a bit of a blessing in disguise to finish with fewer wins given the chance to pick higher in the draft while enjoying the increase in budget that comes along with the higher draft slots.

Yeah I was thinking about how much the trades likely affected the overall quality of the team. Several of the pieces that were moved weren't exactly lighting the world on fire. Clement provided a lot of the value that IKF did as a Blue Jay, losing Kiermaier was likely a net positive given how poorly he hit this season, trading Kikuchi opened a spot for Francis who was a revelation out of the pen etc. At any rate the team was running a lot of rookies in the last few months who didn't necessarily fully deserve MLB playing time (guys like Loperfido, Del Los Santos, Berroa and others) and this absolutely cost the teams the chance for more victories. They actually went on a bit of a run in August based on the offense heating up but after guys like Bo and Varsho were completely finished for the season the offense completely ground to a halt.