max silver

The Blue Jays bullpen sucked directly as a result of Romano missing the season and Swanson turning into a turd early in the season. Add in injuries/missed time to Green and Garcia in the early stages and Mayza losing his stuff and you have one of MLB's worst bullpens, which is the biggest reason why the team was as bad as they were. The team was awful in one run games, and a lot of this is directly due to not having enough relievers who could reliably retire major league hitters for the entire season.

The Blue Jays traded away basically half of their starting lineup at the deadline including the DH/center fielder/starting third baseman/starting catcher, a middle of the rotation starter and their closer as well. That directly factors into the low win total. Even if they made the foolish decision to load up before the trade deadline the team would have had a tough time even running a winning percentage over .500, but the team as constructed simply wasn't as bad as the final result as the team was largely disassembled. They also weren't a luxury tax team after the deadline either and won't likely be end of season either.

I think the deals were essentially the same, but unfortunately Semien chose the Rangers offer due to personal reasons as well as the fact that Texas has no state income tax.

That reminds me of when AA traded away Mike Napoli for Frank Francisco. Napoli exploded offensively and gave Texas a 179 wRC+/4.3 FWAR season, and Francisco gave the Blue Jays a 0.4 FWAR season. This trade was far worse than the Teoscar trade as it was a straight up 1 for 1 trade, and Francisco only had a single year of control. This was just another example of how AA kept f***ing up and trading away all of the good catchers he had (Napoli, Gomes, D'Arnaud) while keeping JP Arencibia instead.

This might be a good offseason to load up on free agents and start working towards replacing some of the soon to depart players and attempting to acquire some new core players. Bassitt is gone after next season, Gausman and Springer only have two remaining seasons each, Romano, Bo and Vlad each have only one season left under contract etc. I have doubts Rogers would open up the purse strings further for a season or two if the opportunity arises to add impact talent and run a higher than expected payroll for a season or two but it would make a big difference for the front office to have a bit more available payroll space.

Free agent costs from last offseason aren't particularly relevant to the year that Springer was signed.

That's assuming Teo would have been willing to sign a cheap team friendly extension which is something we simply don't know. Some guys prioritize getting paid in free agency and aren't willing to sign bargain deals with their team prior to that opportunity.

Keep telling myself what? That placing an excessive amount of emphasis on the quality of the coaching staff based on a 2 game sample is low key kind of pointless? In the first game Berrios had a rough start and the cavalcade of dumpster diving acquisition relievers were bombed. So that means the coaching staff is s*** for some reason, that checks out for sure. In the second game the largely rookie laden lineup couldn't get any offense going and the dumpster diving relief core was battered again. So of course that means the coaching staff is terrible again.

The final 3 games between two last place teams where a bunch of rookies and cast off relievers are largely playing indicates a weak coaching staff? I think there's enough of a sample size over the other 159 games to make conclusions without needing to place a ton of emphasis on the final series of the season.

It's hard to get a read on what to expect from Berrios moving forward. He had a really bad stretch in the middle of the season but prior to last night was producing one of the best extended strings of starts of his career. Even with the rough start factored in Berrios final third of the season was very solid as he managed an 11 start run of 2.54 ERA/3.79 FIP. The strikeouts were still down a bit compared to his career average during this stretch but he got the home runs allowed under control which was a key factor in the turnaround. In the late season surge he rediscovered the effectiveness of his slurve and commanded the ball more effectively. Hopefully the more effective version of Berrios shows up a little more often next season and he can avoid the mid season slump.

Adames is a great target but the dropoff in his defensive metrics this season is concerning. He's gone from +8DRS/+16 OAA to -15DRS/+1 OAA. If he's more Bo Bichette defensively moving forward that limits the appeal quite a bit, although he'd likely make be a fine defender at third base as well if he needed to move eventually.

Small sample size alert to be certain but all of Vlad (3B), Bo (SS), Wagner (2B) and Horwitz (1B) are +1 by OAA at the listed positions.

That's not really the overall point I was making but nice job taking a small snippet of my post out of context as the entire basis of your usual ******** level of post. Even with the bad week and a half Green has still produced a very solid season and the Blue Jays can be pretty happy with the overall results when Green took the mound this season. People are cherrypicking his FIP and associated FWAR as a primary if not only reason in certain cases to declare that he's been awful this season, yet he's largely kept the opposition off the board which is the primary job of a pitcher as games are won and lost based on actual runs that cross the plate. Given the wild variances in relief performances year over year and the fact that Green is still showing very solid stuff and command metrics there's a very good chance he's going to see his strikeouts tick back up next season

Only because the team made the super chintzy move of DFA'ing him when he was within a day or two of earning it.

He's been awfully fortunate in terms of batted ball luck but I can't get on board with the idea that he's been some sort of disaster. He had a rough week and a half where he allowed 11 of the 19 earned runs he allowed all season, but aside from that the Blue Jays can be very happy with the on field results he's produced this season.

If you believe that Bassitt is as bad as the BWAR value suggests then it seems awfully unlikely other teams would be offering anything worthwhile in return. The Blue Jays would more than likely have to kick in extra money to move him or take a bad deal back so the upside likely isn't there. I think even as he declines Bassitt has value as a starter who has been very healthy, soaks up a ton of innings and can act as a bit of a pitching coach to young up and coming starters (I'd wager he's been a valuable sounding board for Francis in particular given their relative similarities).

Bassitt's 2.2 FWAR this season paint a different picture. I have no issues with simply letting him finish his contract out and trading him at the deadline if the team struggles yet again next year.

I didn't realize he was such a solid defender at second base. No big deal losing a guy like this ultimately as the team already has too many second base options as it is moving forward. I don't think he was really in direct competition with Biggio as he would have been fighting for playing time with the likes of Espinal and Clement. I largely blame Otto's 65 wRC+ over a full season of AAA plate appearances as being the primary reason the team cut bait with him as he simply didn't earn himself an extended look in the majors.

That's not really true. I've been plenty critical of the moves that I disagreed with.

The way this season has unfolded it would feel like the ultimate nut punch for the Blue Jays to completely lose the lottery and drop to 10th overall.

It was already apparent in recent seasons that Kirk had morphed into an elite defender behind the plate, but I didn't expect him to develop into one of the elite throwing catchers in the sport seemingly overnight. He's ranked second overall in MLB in throwing runs by DRS and 4th by OAA.

Literally nobody on here ever said this trade was a slam dunk win for the Blue Jays. There's no need to make s*** up like this to support your argument in bad faith. The Diamondbacks always had a very good shot to come ahead in overall WAR value due to the extra years of control, but the Blue Jays received the best player at the time of trade, and after a tough 2023 season at the plate for Varsho he's returned to once again being the best player involved in the trade in 2024. Just as the much maligned GM stated after the 2023 it's far too early to judge a trade of long term assets after a single season, this trade is looking to be a win/win type of trade for both sides as each club received a player that directly filled one of their needs. I don't know why you keep saying Varsho is like 2015 Kevin Pillar and acting like that's some sort of slight against him. That version of Kevin Pillar was a really valuable contributor to his team, but that version of him only showed up once in his career. Varsho has produced wins at a similar rate in 3 of his 4 seasons as a major league regular and returned to this type of production in the 2024 season.

If the guy the Blue Jays traded starts producing 5+ win seasons you'll have a great point.

AA has a long and storied history of trading away the wrong catchers.

How would Bo or the team benefit from faking a broken finger?