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The dude is a slap hitter with nearly no power and he's a terrible defender on top of that. Surely you can understand that a player who primarily hits a bunch of singles while doing very little else on the diamond just isn't that valuable of a player.

That sounds an awful lot like last offseason when the team was trying for the likes of Soto, Ohtani and Chapman and ended up with KK, IKF and Turner.

This deal on it's own isn't particularly egregious. I think where the impact likely starts becoming more apparent is when you tabulate all of the combined luxury tax savings the Dodgers are enjoying in totality with all of deferred money they have on the books. Someone more versed in calculating the savings than myself can hopefully add this all up, but between Freeman, Betts, Ohtani, Snell, and Glasnow as well if I recall correctly there has to be a rather substantial sum that the Dodgers aren't having to pay towards the luxury tax.

In actuality that's a 42 year old vs a 37 year old so not nearly as ridiculous and staged primarily for spectacle.

I had zero issues logging in personally. The quality was up and down throughout and it buffered occasionally but no issues with the stream otherwise. I can't say you missed much though as the main fight was a dud.

Except Bautista was 10 years older than Vlad at that point and already declining.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=martin001ore

I don’t believe he played enough innings in left field to qualify.

That sounds more like a shot at Mattingly to me as those areas were directly under his purview.

In a way he had the same issues as the Blue Jays front office. He couldn't convince any of the true premium free agents of the sport to take their money (Judge, Ohtani etc.).

I think it's time to get Vlad signed long term. I believe he finally proved he deserves this type of deal. I fully believe the best is yet to come for Vlad offensively. He just ripped of a 5 month stretch where he was the second best qualified hitter in the sport ahead of guys like Soto and Ohtani. He had a two month stretch where he even produced a higher overall wRC+ than Judge and reached offensive heights he didn't see even in 2021. I don't think Vlad was ever going to sign a team friendly deal in the first place or it would have happened by now. We have literally no idea whatsoever what kind of deal Vlad has even been looking for to start with. This entire window was basically predicated on Vlad producing elite offensive seasons, and now that it appears as though he may be fixed/hitting his stride there is still time to build around the guy. Springer only has two more years remaining on his deal, so by the team a potential Vlad extension kicks in he will only be around for a single season at that point.

What about the other 21 hours of the day when there isn't a game happening?

So in essence you are saying that literally the only thing a manager does is in game substitutions so you could hire a tv sideline host. That's so dumb I don't think there's any point to discussing this any further.

Huh? Who are the major league managers that aren't baseball people?

I actually don't think Judge was that big of a factor. Soto actually tied the meatball percentage from the season before at 7%. The second best full time regular for the Padres produced a 119 wRC+ so he didn't have much in the way of "protection" on that team. Pitchers don't intentionally throw pitches down the middle ever to hitters like Soto, so having Judge behind him had no noteworthy improvement to the numbers of good pitches to hit that Soto received. Soto took a massive leap forward in his quality of contact metrics with an overall xwOBACON of .519 over a full season compared to his previous best of .465. He actually performed a tiny bit better with the 2020 Covid shortened season's .527 xwOBACON, but that season was all of 2 months long. In this instance I think Soto fully earned all of the improved offensive numbers due to an improvement to his relative skill level. I averaged out the expected home values for all 30 MLB parks, and Soto actually largely suffered a bit in total home runs at Yankee Stadium compared to the MLB average. He hit 42 home runs this season, and the MLB average is 45 home runs. One thing I noticed is it appeared as though Soto changed his overall approach to take advantage of the short porch. He posted a career high in pull rate to 42.3% vs 35.5% from the year prior as evidence of the altered approach.

Given the lousy year Jansen produced offensively and behind the plate I think you could add his name to the list as well.

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.