Ray

He made it very clear that there is plenty of payroll room available to add significant pieces. I'm excited to see what Atkins and the baseball ops guys have in store for us this year.

Merryweather isn't elgible to come off the the DL until end of June. I read he was starting to throw on flat ground this week. My guess is we don't see him until post All-Star break just to give him a little bit of extra healing time and proper ramp up. Hatch is ramping up in AAA right now. He's gotten up to 60 pitches. My guess is he's available if really needed, but they want to keep him down and stretch him out as a starter.

Only 1 more year left actually (he's a free agent after 2022). But it's trending towards a good trade right now.

Robbie Ray is such a hard guy to gauge from a contract perspective. I'd be comfortable giving him 4 years, $64M if he keeps what he's doing up. Yet at the same time, you feel like he's a ticking time bomb and he'll forget to throw strikes again. He might just make it easy on us and take a QO to prove this is the new him and set himself up for an even bigger contract next offseason (with the new CBA as well).

Is there any way this nucleus of Bichette, Vladdy, Biggio, Teoscar might take a slight discount to stay and play together in Toronto? These guys have come up together all the way from the lower minors and are now having success in the majors together. I feel like they are pretty tight knit. ....probably not, but one can dream.

CJ Van Eyk: 6IP, 3H, 2ER, 0BB, 8K He has legitimate swing and miss stuff with good velo and high spin. Just needs to find a consistent delivery and release point, and if he does, I really think he’ll be our next great pitching prospect.

Samad Taylor walked 3 times tonight lol.

Wow, I didn’t realize Leo Jimenez was doing as well as he is: .283/.439/.321 Like no power to speak of, but the plate discipline is impressive.

This isn't a negative so long as he's at least average at multiple positions. It probably makes him more valuable if anything. He's listed as playing 2B/CF and I've yet to read anything that says he's not capable defensively. Otto Lopez is intriguing, and clearly the Jays value him because they protected him from the Rule 5 last winter. The contact first profile usually ends up translating better in the majors, and you hope he can tap into more power as he grows older. Probably more doubles/gap power than homers. I've always comp'd him to Cesar Hernandez (even though Lopez isn't a switch hitter). That's a useful guy to have on a team.

I flip back and forth on this all the time. On one had, having too many right handed batters (or lefities for that matter) shouldn't be an issue so long as the hitters can demonstrably hit pitchers from both sides at an adequate level. The clear advantage of the handedness on paper is the platoon advantage it provides, but that shouldn't matter if the hitter mashes both lefties and righties. That being said, I do think there is something to be said for introducing a little variety into the lineup. Lefties and righties are pitched to differently, and if a pitcher is constantly shifting and trying to make adjustments for handedness throughout the lineup, it could provide an advantage, however minuscule it may be. This could be total ******** though. I don't know.

I just watched DeGrom pitch the first inning against the Braves, and there needs to be a new expression for what he just did 8 pitches, 2K's. The pitches to Albies induced some of the ugliest swings I've ever seen. Dude is leagues above any other pitcher right now.

Alec Bohm kinda sucks

If Stripling keeps pitching the way he is, that trade could be looking good too. He's looking like a completely different guy since he found out he was tipping pitches. We traded Edward Olivares who is crushing AAA right now as a 25 year old (.370/.447/.593) for Solarte. But he's yet to really prove anything in the majors. We traded Jon Berti who's become a semi useful bench player I guess. We traded Hendriks for Jesse Chavez, but he didn't really figure it out until much later. Urshela is probably the only one that really hurts, but hard to really fault that one. Who in their right minds expected that dude to break out the way he did. He's never hit anywhere, and some Yankee fairy dust immediately turns him into a borderline All-star. There's no one we've given up that I've thought "wow, that really sucks that we gave up that dude". It's just not Atkins MO. This front office would rather horde and develop their own players, and I'm supremely thankful for that. God knows our player development system has sucked since essentially the 90's.

Red Sox rankings (AL): OPS: 3rd ERA: 8th Blue Jays rankings (AL): OPS: 2nd ERA: 6th Red Sox: 43-29 Blue Jays: 35-35 Pain

When was the last time we've had a major league team team as promising/young as this and also an insanely deep farm system? There are 15-20 names at least that are intriguing to varying degrees. 2016 was our last good team, and our top prospects were Richard Urena, Anthony Alford, Rowdy Tellez, & Sean Reid-Foley. We just graduated an insane amount of young talent over the last two seasons, and yet somehow have a deep system.

Gotta give Zach Logue a shoutout I think. Dude has a 12.4 K/9 to go with a miniscule 1.5 BB/9 across 42 innings in AA and AAA. There's been a couple outings that have been rocky, but other than that, he's been dominant. Trying to find more information on this guy (he was sitting 89-92 mph with his fastball in the past), but no luck thus far. I'm wondering if he's had a velo bump. His slider does look pretty nasty, probably accentuated by his funky delivery:

Also realizing how poorly constructed this bullpen was given their situations: Kirby Yates: poor medicals, so much so that another MLB team pulled their offer after seeing them Ryan Borucki: history of elbow troubles Julian Merryweather: literally bigfoot David Phelps: decorated injury history AJ Cole: decorated injury history Tyler Chatwood: yoyos between being Mariano Rivera and the worst pitcher in baseball Like sure, you may have gotten unlucky with ALL of them getting injured at the same time, but looking back, maybe you should've planned a liiiiiitle bit better for that scenario given their histories.

We're realistically not selling unless we're 10 games under .500 by the trade deadline. Which I guess would be possible if the bullpen keeps blowing game after game, but pragmatically, Springer is coming back within days, and we're going to be going into the easy part of our schedule starting today. There's a high likelihood that we'll be .500 or better by the trade deadline. In which case, buy relievers like your hair is on fire. Relievers who are having good years that shouldn't necessarily cost that much: - Richard Bleier - Ross Detweiller - Casey Sadler - Adam Cimber - Daniel Hudson - Drew Steckenrider - JT Chargois - Kendall Gravemen (might cost you though with the year he's having) Hell, even a reuinion with Anthony Bass could make sense. At this point, you take anyone who actually has had some sort of successful track record pitching in high leverage in the majors . Anthony Castro and Joel Payamps were like the 10th and 11th relievers on our depth charts. The reason they were doing so well in April was because we got to use them in scenarios where we wanted to. They were literal AAA pitchers coming into the season, and now they are being asked to hold AL East lineups scoreless in situations where the game is on the line.

Moreno is mad that he was only ranked #64 in the latest Fangraphs ranking.

He had an uptick in velo in Spring Training and was back to throwing 92 in the regular season. He may just be a guy who takes a while to regain his velo after a season. I remember it was a similar story last season, but he was never throwing 97!

That legitimately might be the best inning I’ve seen Zeuch throw. Sitting 95, touching 97, and with good movement on all his pitches.

Holy s*** Cole only has 1 K??

Coles spin rate on his 4-seamer is down 200 RPM from last seasons average.

Lol of course Blake Snell starts absolutely sucking the moment he’s out of Tampa Bay. Rays with the fleece once again. Albeit not as bad as the Archer trade.

Yasmani Grandal has a .149 batting average and a 127 wRC+ Equal parts absurd and hilarious.