Ray

The sound his BP makes compared to other HS kids is just different:

Absolutely in love with Tomans swing. Geezus. Already really like this draft. Two first round, high end prospects in Toman and Barriera. Some safe college picks mixed in there, but they have some intriguing aspects. Thanks Robbie Ray and Marcus Semien!

Tucker Toman to the Jays Massive W

Lol, Rangers blew up everyones mocks 3 picks in. Leiter and Rocker reunited.

It’s a fractured pinky. He’s definitely out for the season.

My guess is we go college bat early, and use the larger pool to go for injured pitchers who might’ve gone in the first with the latter picks. There’s a ton of pitchers that fell to injury this year.

I’m running out of superlatives to explain Shohei Ohtani. He just pitched 6 innings of 1 run ball against the Astros with 12K dropping his season ERA to 2.38. Also casually has a .841 OPS and is on track for 20 stolen bases. Babe Ruth was doing this against drunk farmers. Shohei Ohtani is doing this against top tier athletes. Just madness.

And Severino is out of the game after a couple warmup pitches. Apparently his velo was down across the board.

99% chance there is going to be little that changes when it comes to in game strategy and lineup decisions, especially considering this:

It'll be really interesting to read the inevitable Athletic article that comes out of this. Seems like everything is pointing to Montoyo losing the clubhouse and inability to rally the troops together during tough stretches. His only strength is managing the clubhouse, and seemed his relationships with the players was irreparably damaged. This regime does not make reactive changes like the Angels and Phillies. They always talk about how good it is to have stability in all parts of the organization. It had to have gotten bad if they made this decision in-season.

How long until people are calling for Schneiders head when they realize that most of the in-game decision making is the result of collaboration from the front office, high performance department, and analytics team? I give it about a couple weeks.

If you were to guess Spencer Horwitz minor league OPS, what would you guess? It's .872! He's always been older for the level/age-appropriate for each level he's been at, so AAA will be the first challenge he'll have. I've always liked him, but I had zero idea how dominant he's been in the minors.

Addison Barger promoted to AA. .924 OPS in High-A Vancouver, albeit with a 26% K%. I've seen him a couple of times live. He is a physical specimen and has absurd power from the left side, but obviously comes with swing and miss.

Getting shut down by Borucki made this loss 1000x worse, even if it was the right decision to DFA him at the time. Bruuuuuuuuutal.

At the very least, there's some very intriguing arms in the minors this regime has drafted/signed that have seen significant upticks in velocity and stuff. Ricky Tiedemann, Hayden Juenger, Yosver Zulueta, Trent Palmer etc. It's possible it's taken this long to overhaul pitching development and we're just now starting to see the effects percolate in the minors. I know that the pitching lab in the Player Development Complex didn't get going until the middle of last year. What hurts is that none of Anthony Kay, Trent Thornton, Thomas Hatch, Julian Merryweather, Nate Pearson, Ryan Borucki, even TJ Zeuch considering he was a 1st round pick have contributed this season in any meaningful way. Some of those guys seemingly have ability and fell apart due to injury (Merryweather and Pearson), but most just outright don't look like major league pitchers due to a skills deficiency. Some were acquisitions from other teams (Hatch, Kay, Thornton), so maybe it's just a matter of scouting and analytics vastly overestimating their ability and misevaluating them? Then again, Hatch and Thornton weren't traded for superstars. Did we end up putting too much faith in fringey pitchers that the Jays hoped would break out and just haven't? Is this just us getting unlucky to some extent since pitching development is kind of a crapshoot? So many questions, and the truth is probably a little bit of everything combined.

I remember there was a rumor in the offseason that the Jays were "very" interested in Tyler Mahle: https://www.si.com/mlb/bluejays/news/report-blue-jays-very-interested-in-reds-tyler-mahle-before-lockout Turns out, he couldn't cross the border when the Reds came to Toronto because he's unvaxxed. In an alternate reality, we might've had Tyler Mahle instead of Yusei Kikuchi. I'm sure there's plenty more examples of how this f***ed us over, as much as the media tries to play up our home field advantage. Shapiro even outright said it's a much larger competitive disadvantage than advantage.

Also, Sandy Alcantara is on pace for almost 250 innings??? That is lunacy in this day and age. What a monster.

Brad Hand in 2021 before we traded for him: pretty good After we traded for him: maybe the worst reliever in the league In 2022: Literally one of the better relievers in baseball with top percentile hard-hit rate Bullpen constructions is what must drive GM’s to madness.

Our pitching is in absolute shambles right now. Yes, there's been underperformances. Yes, there's been injuries. It seems like other good teams can weather it more than us though. The Rays and Dodgers can lose a top of the rotation starter and call up the next pitcher from AAA who will be at worst a solid-regular contributor. We're running out guys who aren't even giving us a fighters chance. I think Ross Atkins has done more good than bad during his tenure. He's built one of the league's more enviable position player cores. But something in our pitching acquisition process, game planning, and/or pitching development, in general, has to change. It just seems broken, and we're 6 years into their tenure. I'm not even going to blame it all on him. There's a lot that goes into acquisitions. Coaching, analytics, scouting etc. all go into making transactions. Something in that process seems broken right now.

You need to take a look at the Rays and Dodgers transaction pages the last couple years. Absolutely blatant IL manipulation with injury labels that will make you laugh.

You learn to live with that plate approach when he’s doing well. Less so when he has a .299 OBP.

They can’t. Time for a phantom IL stint and roll with Maximo Castillo and/or Casey Lawrence.

I’m not sure it’s between the ears. His mechanics seem altered literally every pitch.

Are you dumb? Do you think Ross Atkins called Scott Boras and offered him 3 years from the start? The only reason he got 3 years was because he likely had 2 year offers on the table and we had to go to a third to get him.

It’s absolutely baffling that Kikuchi can go 6 innings with 1 walk literally 5 days ago, and then revert back to whatever the f*** this was. I’ve never seen a starter with such a wide variance of outcomes. How can you not command your fastball even a little bit?