sliderguy35

its really easy man, the reason they acquired him is that they think he can play CF defensively, he has a full set of options & MAYBE they can coax some more offense out of him. straw's got a team option that they probably don't want to pick up & clase's only got 1 more option to the minors, otherwise nobody in the org is a viable big league CF defender. i think you're getting a little caught up in thinking that every acquisition a ML org makes is intended to move the needle, arm-chair fans fall victim to this all the time. nobody was claiming that some random poster on a blue jays message board has more insight than the front office does. the entire conversation started w/ people on the board talking themselves into bateman as a starting CF option & I (maybe ill-fated at this point) felt the need to be a bit more realistic & it kinda devolved from there.

LD rate has very little year to year correlation at the big league level. The reason for this and the reason i always quote GB% is that hitters are able to control whether or not a ball is on the ground or in the air, but have almost no control over whether a ball in the air ends up as a LD or a flyball. minor league pitching and defense are just so much worse that stats like babip and walk rate should be discounted. Term brought up straw, whos a good minor league comp here, minor league babip god who walked a ton. You look under the hood and the walks were just a result of being passive (incredibly high called strike rate) and as soon as he got to the big leagues, they challenged him in zone and he couldnt do anything to punish them. Is he a myles straw level defender? Probably not! Since the latest fangraphs report said his reads off the bat were questionable at times. In general when looking at minor league hitters, the things to look at are: batted ball profile (GB vs in the air / pull vs oppo) Exit velocity / barrels swing decisions (do they chase? if they dont chase, are they just passive or are they aggressive in the zone too) Its like how ERA doesnt matter when trying to project pitchers long term. If you do all the things above well, you'll probably have good results based stats, but the results stats themselves like babip & wrc+ just do not matter in AAA. (Defense also obviously also has a huge impact on how to value guys, but from the public side we have to rely on prospect sites)

You misunderstood the entire point of the post i made lol. Its not a "here are weaklings without power who made it" list, its a list of guys who never made it b/c having a high walk rate at AAA cant be your only offensive skill, otherwise it doesnt mean anything. Bringing up ernie who a) doesn't walk & b) has a valuable offensive skill (pulling basically every ball he hits in the air) doesn't make sense at all in this conversation. When I pulled that list, i already factored in the lower bounds (batemans GB rate is 52%, i set the bottom bound at 50%, his walk rate is 16%, i set the bottom at 12%), so "centering it" is just reducing the sample size for no reason. But since you asked, heres the list with the groups centered around batemans stats. Hope you kept your canaan smith-njigba & mark zagunis stock!

i really don't understand all the love for bateman, he'd need to be a jacob young / kyle isbel / brenton doyle level defender to even sniff big league relevancy, the offensive profile he brings just does not play at the big league level at all. guys who juice their obp in the minors through passivity without having some other kind of carrying offensive tool end up as bench players or out of the league sooner rather than later. I looked at the last 15 years of AAA minor league data (min 250 PAs) for guys who had a 50+% GB rate, a 12%+ BB rate, and an ISO under 0.150 so essentially, guys who walk a lot but don't have power or the ability to lift the ball. out of 93 seasons, there are 2 guys who you'd consider good major leaguers: yandy diaz & ivan herrera (both of whom have ++ bat speed) it's hard to have confidence that this is the center fielder of the future for a contending team

Overall a good deadline, hill especially is a lot of fun and keeps in line with the type of guys theyve been targeting recently (high release point guys who throw hard with gyro breaking balls). Young guys like hill with super long levers seem like theyd be really helped by the jays elite strength & conditioning program. Its strange that the jays are so much more willing to bet on these flawed guys with elite traits on the pitching side & are so boring / safe with the hitters they tend to acquire. They must think they've got a competitive advantage with the combination of elite catcher defense locked up long term at the ML level & a great strength program that helps the younger arms they acquire Also shoutout to the giants, they had the best deadline by FAR imo. I've been critical of the posey FO, but they crushed it today

frias AND ragsdale for rental dustin may and jojo romero????????????? Thats criminal, this deal compared to the gausman deal makes it look like the worst of the deadline so far

Hate to say it but that was the fan proposal section of the mlb network broadcast hahaha

Giants have had a nice day so far. They havent given up a whole lot, but marquez & mendez are both arms that i really like and joniel hernandez is a fun toolsy upside play whos had an arrow-up season.

Theres some pitch classification weirdness at play here. He tightened up the curveball to have a bit less drop & sweep this year, which has helped him locate it a lot better below the zone (look at the heatmaps of the pitch location in 2025 vs 2026) but it's also turned it into more of a slider/sweeper than a curveball. If you grade it on the scale of being a curveball, it looks worse b/c it doesnt have the depth or the raw movement. However, sonny gray basically throws the same pitch (velo / movement / release height all similar), but he calls it a sweeper and it has a 122 stuff+ compared to other sweepers b/c it still generates a ton of sweep and depth at velocity. He's also throwing his 4 seam more this year (which is bad & the models hate) & thats bringing down his overall stuff+ score. If the jays elect to make pitch mix changes, it'll be more favourable to him

dont love that the mets got a better package for 36 year old middle reliever huascar brazoban than we did for kevin gausman

absolutely hate this return 2 slap hitters that are fringe up the middle defenders. just take the compensation pick from the QO if this is all youre gonna get

it feels disingenuous to compare bloss to ryan. Ryan throws 2 ticks harder, has 3 really good fastballs & an elite breaking ball package. He's consistently had better command & whiff numbers throughout the minors, hes just a better prospect. Yes he's old for a prospect but thats honestly probably a benefit for the tigers since they can cheap out and get his prime years cost-controlled and then not have to pay him when he's 33 and hits free agency. I 100% get hating this trade because of what it represents for the game but really dont understand the stance that the return was bad. They got a fully cost controlled mlb ready mid-rotation starter, a guy who looks a lot like riley greene did at 21, and an upside arm who's K-ing the world in the minors this year. This is a good return for like 10-12 starts of skubal

29th in runs scored

piv was a 22% K-BB guy in the 2 seasons before his free agency. mize has a good 19% K-BB this season but its 3% better than anything hes ever posted before. i think brownie was tryna make the point that his HR/FB rate being under 5% despite having one of the highest FB%s in the league is the red flag here, his market is gonna be limited to teams with big ballparks most likely

Because it's the friday before a long weekend and i dont want to work, i decided to put together a list of my favourite under-the-radar prospect from each "buying" team, with the caveat being that it has to seem reasonable that the player might get moved for a rental. (we arent going to get anyone on the top 100 for gausman or varsho, sorry people) Parameters i set for myself are no 50 FV guys from fangraphs, & nobody on the mlb pipeline top 100. (the majority of these guys are arms b/c the data we have available to scout hitters on the public side is really lacking): Pitchers: Junior Ciprian - ARI Zach Royse - ATL Dylan Brown - BOS Brooks Caple - CHC Gabe Davis - CHW Franklin Gomez - CLE Bryce Mayer - HOU Manuel Genao - MIA Merit Jones - MIN Henry Lalane - NYY Brad Pacheco - PHI Jesus A. Castro - SD Yhoiker Fajardo - STL Ty Johnson - TBR Dalton Pence - TEX Jackson Kent - WAS Hitters: Zach Ehrhard - LAD Josiah Ragsdale - MIL Easton Carmichael - PIT Juan Rijo - SEA Praying that the jays end up with 1 or a few of these guys. Side notes: the houston and white sox systems were the hardest to find guys for. I like the top 100 guys they have, but otherwise its DIRE over there) dylan brown is probably my favourite find from doing this list, he didnt even make the red sox top 48 on fangraphs but i think he has real juice