sliderguy35

he's exactly what you want out of a 4th outfielder. he defends incredibly well, is a smart situational player and brings a ton of energy to the field. It's also been 100 PAs without a barrel and a babip over .420. He's also not a freak outlier like a simpson / kwan who can maintain a 90%+ contact rate & <10% strikeout rate. even with fangraphs projecting him for an above average babip (.327) his projected average drops all the way down to .250 b/c of the strikeouts and the lack of homers to buoy it. i pray that the front offense doesnt see him as a long term solution & actually tries to address CF in the offseason. its going to seem a lot less fun when he's a .265/.320/.330 guy in the middle of june next year.

very surprised i havent seen the name andres gimenez brought up at all in this thread. feels like this board has been having the "how good of a defender do you have to be to make up for a bad offensive profile" conversation all season & the connotation of how its discussed seems very different when discussing bateman vs gimenez considering how similar the players are. Gimenez's contract could be a factor, but its clear that bad contracts arent going to stop the jays from spending above the tax. Its hard for me as a fan to care about a players contract if the organization's decision making isnt really being impacted by it. about bateman himself, i would be pretty concerned that based on what hes shown so far, he doesnt clear the 85ish wRC+ threshold that really awesome defenders need to still be valuable everyday players. the data has looked incredibly nasim nunez-ish so far

most good pitching development orgs have a "type" of prospect that they like & think they have an edge on developing: Cleveland is one of the best orgs at velocity development, so they tend to likes arms with + command and/or + breaking balls, and then they develop fastball velocity from there Boston also develops velocity well but they also do a good job of pitch design. they tend to target college guys with outlier release traits & then overhaul their pitch mixes The dodgers are all about elite 4 seam fastballs, they like prospects who already throw hard and/or have elite approach angles & then will teach them how to throw a good breaking ball off of it. The mets like guys who already throw hard & they're really good at pitch design for basically everything else etc, etc It feels like the jays started to find their own "type" of guy in 2024, which is that they love guys w/ high release points & gyro breaking balls from that high release. if you can throw a true gyro breaking ball from an above average release height, the angle it comes in at makes them one of the most effective whiff pitches in baseball (for an mlb comp, think chase burns). the downside to having that high release is that your fastball angles become much more hittable, but there are ways that can you help to "protect" your fastball from taking too much damage (high velo / outlier vertical movement / top of the zone command). cole carlon, jake bloss, dasan hill, khal stephen, carson messina, & trey yesavage (remember trey was mainly fastball / slider coming out of college) are all guys they've acquired since 2024 who fit this profile (King doesn't really fit, but he was a high-school sign. it's clear that they have a type). If you just go back the last 2 years of A ball data, the blue jays have the highest average release point of any team & they throw their sliders 2nd hardest (behind the mets) of any team with publicly available A-ball data. I don't know if I personally agree with this approach (i'm more of an elite fastball release traits guy whether thats low release height 4-seamers or high release point sinkers), but it's encouraging to me that they've at least picked a lane & have done mostly a good job of developing their guys in it.

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

I wouldn't call it random, there's been 64 instances in the last 5 years of AA & AAA baseball of a guy having a 50%+ GB rate and a 20%+ pop-up rate. The reason it seems so odd is because over the same 5 year time period, there's been 0 instances of any qualified 50% GB + 20% PU season in the big leagues. guys with this batted ball profile are either young for the level & figure it out, or get weeded out / end up as AAAA bench players

ramon marquez, brad pacheco and mavis graves are 3 fun arms if they end up making a deal with the phillies. marquez especially, is a helium guy this year, with improved velocity & a bugs bunny changeup. His whiff #s look made up & fangraphs just included him in their top 100 (which you can read about here ) pacheco's an undersized righty but he's got great release traits & has a good mix of swing & miss + keeping the ball on the ground. graves is an XXL lefty who needs to throw more strikes but gets a crazy amount of swing and miss, even at a lower velocity. fangraphs has consistently praised the jays strength & conditioning program as being world class. getting a guy like this in-house and stonger might unlock some extra velocity or command that'd make any deal with him a steal.

id be wary of jay harry. hes a disciple of the lenyn sosa school of swinging at literally anything & he's running a crazy high BABIP / way overperforming his expected slug based on the quality of contact he's making at AAA. I would like to see them give mcadoo some more reps late in the season though. the measurable bat speed from his call-up earlier in the season is plus & the amount of contact he makes with + bat speed is intriguing. He's also been keeping the ball off the ground and making good swing decisions at AAA, feels like he could be a real piece moving forward

the hoerner seasons where he was above a 50% GB rate were in sample sizes less than 130 PAs, he wasnt a huge GB guy in the minors before that & he hasnt been since. If you arent barreling the ball you at least need to be able to elevate it, which kwan, hoerner and arraez all do. And you definitely can't have a 20% pop-up rate when you DO elevate the ball, those are functionally strikeouts. like sure, if he starts elevating more and plays solid defense, the profile can work, but batted ball profile is a pretty sticky thing as prospects age. There's the justin turner / marlon byrd outliers, but it just doesnt seem like good process to think an old-for-the-level AAA guy will be a complete outlier & suddenly revamp his batted ball profile for the better while facing the highest level of pitching he's ever seen in the big leagues

listen to laika guys, i know there's not a lot to be excited about with the big league club, but having a 0.3% barrel rate in that many AAA plate appearances is just abysmal. He's putting the ball on the ground half the time and even when he gets it in the air, he's popping it up over 20% of the time. You pray that he might have a season or 2 of sal frelick type production, but we're probably looking at ben williamson / jared triolo 2.0

the team having a collective offensive xwOBA that starts with the number 2 combined with real, meaningful, patrick corbin innings caused me to go temporarily insane (for real though, got a new job, all is well, just less time for baseball posting)

i like the carlon pick a lot, it's interesting how the jays have gravitated towards these high release point guys, considering the tradeoffs that come with them. Naturally, these high release point guys are going to have issues with 4-seam fastball playability due to the steeper approach angle, but the fact that hes got plus velo from.the left side should buy back some effectiveness and make it at least an average pitch. That high release point creates a steeper angle with his slider which is almost certainly going to make it a ++ whiff pitch. I'd imagine theyll try and add a sinker or change/splitter eventually but he probably wont even need a pitch mix adjustment through the lower minor leagues as long as hes able to remotely command the ball. Even if hes never able to expand his mix or if hes wild, theres a pretty safe floor here as a real nasty 2 pitch reliever.