AMS528

With the exception of last year Jose Berrios has pitched like a very steady #2-3 pitcher for 6 out 7 seasons of his career. Maybe that one season is enough to give that much skepticism, but this year he's 28th in pitching WAR next to Aaron Nola, Charlie Morton, and Ohtani. He's fine. He's a very solid option, and very much back to being the guy who is worth the 100 million dollar deal. You have Gausman and Berrios as your first and third best pitcher and the expectation reasonably would have been that Manoah would have been your #2. I can't really see Manoah's implosion as a failure of the front office. He pitches well again and that would be three three caliber of pitchers you'd want to go into the playoffs with. We literally have the guy who statistically been just about the best pitcher for two seasons. Manoah finished 3rd in CY Young voting last year. Even including his really s***** last year Berrios is 15th in the league over the past 5 years in WAR. Gausman is 8th. https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=pit&lg=all&qual=y&type=8&season=2023&month=0&season1=2018&ind=0&team=&rost=&age=&filter=&players=&startdate=&enddate= They may need to pick up a guy like Stroman because of Manoah sucking (although they can hope he bounces back like his last start), but that does not look a rotation that coming into this season that wasn't properly constructed for the playoffs.

I think there's even more added difficulty when you factor in the backlash from Angels fans that would miss out on Ohtani chasing 60 HR's.

Didn't see the start but some mixed responses here which feels surprising cause 8ks with 0 BB's can't really be anything but great. Especially given what came before.

There's no diminishing a BB% of 14 with a K% of 19 that comes with a lot of power. That's a substantial change to his batting profile. He's also hitting more line drives and popping the ball up less. Everything about that breakdown looks super positive.

Looking back at that season is the most frustrating thing. That team was amazing. They underperformed their differential terribly. They should have been at least a 95 win team. We had 6 position guys who were performing at a 4 WAR level. Springer, Semien, Bo, Vlad and Teo were a literal murderers row to face as a pitcher. Ray, Berrios, and Manoah were great and importantly super steady. I said it at the time as well, that this was a season they might really regret in a few years.

Atlanta is ridiculous. Even the guys who were struggling hard like Harris have bounced right back to being good. Wild how all these AA trades and extensions continuously work out. They're carrying less payroll than the Jays which is just frustrating. Their backups are even great. D'Arnaud, even Pillar is hitting. I forgot he was even in the league still. They've been doing it without Fried. Albies is probably going to be worth his entire contract from this year alone and Acuna is somehow going to probably be worth 75% of his extension in just this season. Just unconscionable stuff. He's gotten some luck, but I do wish AA had stuck around under Shapiro.

So it seems like he'll probably be worth about 5 bWAR this year as a pitcher. Last year was 6, and the year before was 4. That honestly means he has Gerrit Cole value as a pitcher. Cole signed a 9 year 324 million dollar deal. He's also been worth 5, 3.5 and this year it honestly looks like he could wind up with 7 bWAR as a hitter. But even conservatively at 6, he's pretty much a 4.5-5 WAR batter. Similar guys in terms of 1B/DH types Olson and Freeman signed 8/160 and 6/162. Ohtani and is younger than Freeman and is probably worth more than Olson as a hitter and is just going to get paid more as a hitter. If his arm ever falls apart and you really have to decide to make him a hitter, he'll gain value cause he can play in the outfield again. It's really hard to quantify what an Ohtani contract should look like cause 500 million does seem to be what he's worth. He'll undoubtedly increase the number of fans watching games, and sales of merch as well. The otherside of it is, because there's never been anyone like him, there's no way to no how long he can do both without deteriorating health wise. He hasn't so far, and for three years has been remarkably solid. But whatever contract it is, is probably going to contain some incentives that kick in for both managing to pitch and hit in the same year maybe? No idea honestly, it's also possible a team just says screw it and gives him the 500 million without any of that, but for say 10 years and 500 million that could feel a bit risky even for Ohtani.

3-3 2HR, 1BB and 6.1 IP 10k and just 1 ER. Ohtani is currently tracking for like a 12 WAR season. Completely bonkers. They'd never do it, but I'd love to see what his numbers would be if he played a passable LF for like 4 out of every 6 games.

It's not a complete disaster, and there are some bright spots, but from like a entire organizational perspective the lack of potential call-ups with the combination of no real pieces that can be dealt to improve the big league team sucks. Long term hopefully more pieces pan out, but obviously the minors act as a tool with multiple purposes for the big league team. And the minors this year are, in the two biggest ways they potentially could be, not helpful at all for the Jays. There's no one knocking on the door to help with the pitching since Tiedemann has lost some significant time to injury. And I'm not sure I see guys like Schneider, Palmagiani or Leo Jimenez being particularly enticing to other teams if we were looking to trade. It would hurt less if the Jays were having a more successful year. Then it's fine if you're going to have a barren year, like the Braves currently since they both graduated a bunch of guys, and then dealt the rest to max out the roster.

Fair enough. I was responding to someone calling it generally right wing politics, but it was probably too much.

It's incredibly valuable to have a guy you can reliably pencil in for 6-7 innings allowing 2-3 runs an outing. It's why Buehrle was so valuable (not that Stroman is at that level). If he stays reasonably steady for the next 4 years, he could finish his career with like 35 WAR. Maybe even 40. That's great.

Stroman has picked a great year to have a Cy Young finalist season. If he finishes strong, I wonder what kind of contract he can get for next year? He's reasonably safe to sign since his floor has been pretty stable. He won't be as good as this season, but he's generally always pretty good. 4/100? 5/120?

It has been a very low BABIP and should be expected to, but even then not this low. He's hitting less infield fly balls than he did last year. Some of this probably is a bit of bad luck.

That's fair. Not really a lot of ways to make any kind of big move. This isn't a team with the prospects to add some real move the needle pieces. It's more just hope things start working better internally. Kirk hits better, Vlad hits better. The pitching is less volatile. That either Manoah or Ryu come back and provide some positive value. The roster really is mostly set, it's just going to be about those pieces working better. And that RISP regresses back to a reasonable level.

I mean I certainly have, but I've managed to keep it away from being publicly visible. I didn't go search this, it's already out there because of him, which was then amplified by others on social media. It's not avoidable, it's a different world with social media and it's going to come up every time forever. You can say who cares, and you don't need to, but people will and already have.

Oh come on. Don't call election denial stuff general right wing politics. Have some more respect for them than that, unless you figure that's standard and normal for them, which frankly that seems like taking a pretty dim view of them. Also it's his likes page that people found, and I cannot imagine a way in which to see that Mel Gibson one as normal haha.

I mean simplifying it to that doesn't so much sense to me. Taking his numbers as a whole and not just from the hot streak, he's walking way more, and striking out significantly less in the 230 PA's. Going from a 8/28 K%/BB% to a 12/20 K%/B% is a big change. Without a historically low BABIP, even if the BABIP was like .217 the way it was last year makes his numbers pretty impressive.

I see Twitter and Reddit have discovered Dave Hudgens (Jays bench coach) twitter likes. That may not go down great for him, since beyond the usual type of anti-pride month stuff, he's got a good mix of denying elections, anti-vax, BLM, Tucker Carlson supporting stuff. And also some weird about Mel Gibson related post, that's definitely on the questionable end of things. I gotta say looking through it, whatever you think about any of the individual topics, taken as a whole this man is like a grade A moron. Anyone like him who genuinely really believes like Kari Lake was robbed of an elections is a remarkably stupid person.

Love seeing Votto come back with a big night. One more decent half season to really lock in the HOF.

I forgot how highly touted he became that one year. Top 50 prospect across the board in 2015. https://www.thestar.com/sports/bluejays/2022/08/20/its-the-fall-for-dalton-pompey-the-former-blue-jays-outfielder-who-is-leaving-baseball-on-his-terms.html Seems like he's got a solid perspective on things though.

I'm aware, but also he was ok with the Dodgers. And he's been terrible since. So the hope was maybe he'd recapture whatever form he'd had while with the Dodgers.

Dropped his strikeouts a lot as well over the past two years. He just kind of seems to do things to improve his game all the time. He might already be worth half of that contract by the end of the season (he'll blow past that according to bWAR which loves him). I figure even if his hitting drops off, his smart baserunning and solid defense means he'll eke out positive value for at least couple of those seasons and be pretty close to worth the entirety of that contract.

Good point. Very unfortunate thing to happen twice in to start a year, especially when you're relying on one of them to replace the other in that kind of situation (really the expectation would have been Mitch White replaced Kikuchi who is the same as last year).

Looking at the unsigned former MLB pitcher pile you have Michael Pineda, Mike Minor and that's basically it. It's uh not good. Can't believe that Mitch White went from being ok, to literally worthless in less than a season for no particular reason at all.

In non Josh Towers starts that year we were on a 93 win pace. Second best offense in the AL and pretty solid pitching outside of him. We were 3-12 in those starts. 84-63 otherwise. That was a really good team.