Ray

Would be interesting to see how someone like Boras would've approached this. He's relentless in trying to extract every last dollar for his clients.

Well, he wasn't exactly around this time to record a new one for them.

Looks like they weren't even given a chance to. Doesn't seem like there was much back and forth on the dollar figure at all Ohtani was basically like I want $700M, make it happen however you want, and teams agreed to it. That's what maximum leverage as a free agent looks like.

Guess we have Ryan Pepiot and Jonny Deluca to deal with in the division for the next 2-3 years until the Rays inevitably trade them.

There probably were deferrals in the Jays deal, but this is kind of ridiculous. Like 97% of his salary is deferred. 50% I get, but Ohtani is making just over league min the next 10 years lol

Why the hell did Cleveland extend Myles Straw?

Jose Ramirez is an even better fit on this team now than he was years ago. If the Guardians really need to move him to shed salary due to their TV deal, I would essentially just tell Chris Antonetti to name his price.

Wonder if the Dodgers are open to trading Max Muncy now that they need DH AB's entirely open for Ohtani. Otherwise, not sure it makes sense for him to play 3B everyday? He's quite obviously declined from his heyday, but honestly not that much worse than that whats out there in the free agent market at this point.

Here we go. Ohtani jet part 2: Electric Boogaloo

Bright side maybe - redistribute the $600M between Bo and Vlad and extend this window so the Davis Schneider era doesn’t go to waste.

Entirely possible that Jays actually made a better offer to him in terms of net present value. Looking more like he basically wanted to be a Dodger. Can’t entirely fault him for it tbh, but it’s still painful to think about.

Almost a billion CAD $ Jesus Christ hahah

Bob Nightengale’s latest tweet… Uh…..

I mean, it's gotta be verbally done and just leaked early, right? Chances are Ohtani's camp probably want to break it themselves. Like with all that's transpired today, it would be maybe the biggest blue balls on earth if he doesn't sign with the Jays at this point

He has a very sly smile in that Twitter video as well, almost like he was hiding something. Christ, I can’t believe I’ve become one of those people during this whole saga, but it’s fun to speculate I guess. Momentum is building for the Jays in a very weird way, even though literally every shred of info uncovered is completely circumstantial. It would still be blue balls to the max if we don’t sign him at this point though.

How did a thread discussing the Blue Jays having a legitimate shot at signing one of the biggest free agents in the history of the sport become like this lmao. I swear some of y’all are joyless.

The f*** are the Mariners doing? They need any offense they can get. I’m not the biggest fan of Kelenic either, but he clearly made some adjustments this season and is still only 24. They literally just traded him away for the middest of mid pitchers in Kowar and a prospect that has yet to pitch in the minors lmfao

Wow. 80-82 Pythagorean record in the regular season, and now they’re in the World Series. Good for the Dbacks. The prime example of just get in and hope your team gets hot for years to come. Were they even trying to compete this season coming in?

And they fleeced the Guardians for him. For what ended up being a nothing SP prospect (Tobias Myers) in return who they traded for cash considerations like 6 months later. Insane

Just want to give a shout out to David Howell who I think deserves a lot of credit for our pitching staff performing the way they are. For those who don’t know, David Howell is a 26 year old Assistant Pitching Coach for the Jays who worked at Driveline and at LSU Shreveport and has worked for the Jays since 2020. I remember reading his research back in 2019, and it was some fantastic stuff around how to optimize one’s pitch arsenal. Like as soon as he started posting, the likes of the Dodgers, Guardians, and Yankees tried to recruit him. The Jays immediately scooped him up and this year he’s rocketed up to being an assistant pitching coach and in the dugout. I believe there was an article not long ago about Kikuchi’s success largely attributed to Howell encouraging him to change the release point on his slider, and that’s paid dividends this year. More in depth article on him: http://www.hjblogs.com/an-incredible-journey-to-the-show-david-howell-joins-toronto-blue-jays-organization-as-a-pitching-coach/

He’s had a 1.84 ERA his last 6 starts and was up to 97 mph apparently. In a notoriously hitter friendly AAA environment too. Mitch White was the worst pitcher on the 40-man and decided to figure out what was wrong and make adjustments instead of refusing to report to AAA and sit out because you think you’re entitled to big league salary and service time. Manoah should take notes.

Tampa is the ultimate proof of this. Time and time again, they get players on other teams that absolutely nobody is even thinking about acquiring and turn them into valuable contributors. For example: Did you know 36 year old Jake McGee has a 2.50 ERA with them this season? Clearly they're identifying the right changes that need to be made for each player and then successfully communicating that to that player. But it's a super delicate pipeline. You could have the right information and wrong relayer, or vice versa and it just wouldn't work. Which is why it's hard to replicate even if you know to do it. The super puzzling thing with the Jays hitting process is that it was paying dividends with this same core of players for the past 2 years (#1 in OPS in 2021, #2 in OPS in 2022). Like clearly something was working there. So what the hell happened in such a short period of time that things changed so drastically? Honestly for the life of me cannot figure it out, and nobody will know until there's some expose that comes out on what they were doing internally this year.

There's probably multiple points of failure that led to this team where it is. I don't blame faulty roster construction as much. The front office set out to improve pitching and defense and were incredibly successful in that. Other than that, how could the front office have possibly predicted that a team with a high-contact rate and that hits the ball as hard as they do would be the 2nd worst slugging team on middle middle fastballs? No model or traditional scouting would be able to predict that. They literally ran into the top percentile outcome for underperformance for so many position players + bad luck with RISP. The more interesting question is why are these things happening. Is it coaching? Yeah, maybe. But presumably, the same hitting coaches/game-planning/strategy were responsible for literally the best run-scoring team the last two years, so why adjust how you approach gameplans and analytics when there's a long sample size of things clearly working? It's honestly one of the more baffling baseball seasons I've ever experienced. So many unexplainable things that go against reasonable thinking + a touch of bad luck that I find it hard to fault any single individual or department. I expect we will see some changes because it's a results driven business, but it's so hard to logically describe what went wrong this season.

This team is lol

Szymborski was on Jays Talk Plus today and said ZiPS already liked Davis Schneider coming into the season (1.6 fWAR projected for 2023), but now he’s being projected for like 3 fWAR in 2024. Massive W by player development to get a 26th round pick to this point.