Random Bluebird Droppings
Have you guys ever tried Real Fruit Gummies? They're pretty incredible. It's like eating a gummi bear. And by gummi bear, I mean the genuine article. Not one of the jelly candy ones. I'm talking about snacking on the last remnants of the once great civilization of gummis who fled Earth centuries ago.
Imagine pouncing on Gusto Gummi in a small forest in Drekmore and devouring all of his delightfully gummy flesh in one tantalizingly sweet bite. Absolutely outstanding.
Speaking of delicious, a funny thing to do if you have a lot of time on your hands is to make up fliers to post in your neighbourhood that say, "Missing: Fluffy." Provide a description of a cat with a little picture of him or her on a sheet of paper, and place them on all of the hydro poles on your street. Then, all around the poster, put up additional fliers that say, "Mmm. Fluffy was delicious."
Chris Gomez Still Alive And Working
The Baltimore Orioles signed former Jays shortstop Chris Gomez to a Minor League contract today in hopes that the utility infielder can provide backup services to Cesar Izturis, another former Jays shortstop that was not a part of Ricciardi's five-year plan. If Gomez can't make the Orioles out of Spring Training he will be forced to face the biggest decision of his baseball career: just how far can he fuck off.
B.J. Ryan Loves Freedom
The Beej has decided to put his name in the running for a spot on the American roster at the World Baseball Classic, and I don't want to sound like Bolo from The Mighty Boosh, but I have a bad feeling about this one.
The problem is that the term "taking it easy" seems to apply to B.J. Ryan about as readily as "sobriety" and "abstinent" apply to me. Do you honestly expect The Beej to opt out of a high leverage situation if he feels a twinge in his arm? It would be like putting a Twinkie in Stoeten's hand and not expecting him to eat it.
Of course, Roy Halladay has already decided to opt out of The Classic, but there's been no word from Vernon Wells yet who participated for Team U.S.A. in 2006.
Ice Cold Beer
Remember when everyone was all up in arms for about two weeks last season when Wayne McMahon of "Iiiiicccccceeeeeee. Cooooooooooooooooooold. Beee-eeeeeeeeeeeer." fame was unceremoniously fired by the shittiest of shitty corporations Aramark.
Well, after finding some part-time work at Ti-Cats games and on MTV Canada, McMahon was honoured by RotoRob today with the 2008 Vendor of the Year Award. I guess like a broken clock, even a shitty website can be right every once in a while.
Baseball On TV
I know I'm supposed to get excited whenever baseball coverage increases, but with Rogers involved, a 24 hour baseball channel in Canada seems more like a cash grab than anything else. I'm honestly in no rush for those bullshit eight hour cycles on digital cable television where they end up airing a heavily-edited 88 minute version of Bull Durham three times a day for two weeks. The movie will then end up airing six times a week when Rogers realizes that Tim Robbins likes hockey and the movie can somehow then be considered Canadian content.
The Shit Contest Is On
The Los Angeles Dodgers recent one day signing of more shitbags than you can shake a shit stick at should settle the idiots who are actually upset over Ricciardi's spate of Minor League deals.
Offering a Minor League contract and an invitation to Spring Training to a player unlikely to make the team isn't stealing an ounce of sweat off anyone's sac. If anything, Ricciardi has found shitbags with a higher upside than most of the other GMs out there.
Finally
Our friend Lloyd The Barber has a few choice words for all the complainers out there, and he manages to control his head shaking and tsk tsking to put forth an excellent explanation as to why blaming Ricciardi or even Rogers for the lack of free agent maneuvering is missing the point entirely.
STOETEN HIJACK ALERT
Hey, sorry to disrupt Parkes's post here, but I was about to write a similar thing, which would now be pointless, but there's an item he didn't hit that I'd like to mention. Brandon Heikoop used to be at Baseball Digest Daily, but apparently was dropped recently. I don't know the story there, but it seems he's maybe a little bit pissed right the fuck off that someone who's been brought in, ostensibly as his replacement, is churning out hackneyed shit like this steaming pile right here.
Posts
36 rational and reasonable comments:
Alright Parkes, are you a hipster now talking about 80's cartoons ?
Fuck off Parkes. There are no words to describe how much I hate you.
I love the addition to the Fuck off Parkes comment.
there seems to be no shortage of people wanting to chastise fans for criticising management's response to a disappointing season. i don;t get this.
the offence was not good last year, both collectively and individually, and the response so far has been to bank on a complete lack of injuries and a return to career highs (Wells, Rolen, Overbay) , continued growth from younger players (Hill, Lind, Rios) and impact play from rookies (Snider). This is combined with some proven to be very average talent at catcher and SS.
To add nothing and yet hope for better results seems pretty misguided, which is what fans are upset about. Signing a bat of any kind from a DH rich market would go some way towards encouraging people to show up at the Dome in April, May and June of this year.
I was wondering if you guys were going to comment or even knew about this...
http://toronto.bluejays.mlb.com/media/video.jsp?mid=200901073736314&c_id=tor
I live in upstate, NY so I saw it on the MLB Network. It was preceded by an interview with JP but don't worry, there was nothing new. Thanks!
No! Not Hector Luna!
Mike, I know what you're saying, but Rogers doesn't appear to be interested in whether or not the team competes in '09, or whether or not people show up. I'm sure the Jays FO is very interested in that, but with the attitude coming from the people who hold the money, there's just not much they can do but hope for those things. No, it's not a good strategy if they want to be competitive in 2009, but they seem to believe it would be a waste of resources to try any harder, and given the lack of funds, they're probably right.
Fuck off Parkes. I don't hate you, though.
Mike, the same offence performed significantly better under Cito/Tenace (4.7rpg) than under Gibbons/Denbo (4.2rpg). Getting rid of chaff helped too, but the chaff is still gone. (More of it, in fact.) We're not "adding nothing and hoping for better results", as you put it. We already added something--we added it mid-2008, and it worked.
if you go back and look at the stories and comments around the time when Cito was brought back you'll see a bunch of things written about how hitting is cyclical and how Cito should not get full credit when the hitting improves. I don;t really know if i buy that argument but the RPG number is, i think, misleading since the team was radically underperforming -- far beyond what any manager/hitting coach could affect -- at the time Cito was brought in. that being said, i'm glad that Cito is here. After all, he talks to hitters ...
I agree that the team got rid of some dead weight last year but lots of it lasted through the season. Mencherson was still gettings ABs in September.
The fact still stands that the Jays lacked a 20HR/100RBI hitter at the end of the '08 season and have not added one. In the AL that is not going to cut it. I stand by my assessment that the team has added nothing to address their hitting woes and yet are hoping for better results.
Can you quantify any of those claims? How do you know that the underperformance was more than a hitting coach could cause? How do you know that having a 20/100 hitter is important to a team's performance independent of runs scored?
For that matter, since Mencherson was wasting at-bats under Cito, wouldn't we expect further improvement from ditching him? And unless you're penciling Wells in for another broken wrist, why shouldn't we expect him to get 100RBIs in 2009? He would have had them in 2008 if not for an injury which is not indicative of an underlying condition.
yes: every AL team in the playoffs last year had at least 2 players with 21+ HRs. The Jays had none. Is this a necessary connection? Of course not. There are teams in the AL with multiple 20+HR hitters who did not make the post-season. Still, the lack of a big bat hurt the Jays' chances in '08 and i believe it will again in '09. Maybe VW will be that bat, but then again maybe not. His 2007 numbers were nothing to write home about, and he played 149 games that year.
no: of course i can't quantify how much better Rios would have hit under a full season of Cito. We'll see. All i am claiming is that the team was due to rebound from lousy hitting, Cito or no Cito. I do not believe that the team as currently rostered will greatly improve in '09 on its offensive output from '08 (as an average of the Cito and pre-Cito era). That spells another frustrating year, and likely fewer than 86 wins. Any claim by JP or Cito or Beeston that this time will be good next year is highly contestable, given the facts.
'nuff for a friday night. happy weekend.
The Angels didn't have a 20/100 player, and they had a cakewalk to the playoffs ahead of two teams that did. If Wells had driven in 22 more runs that would instead have been unscored, of course the Jays would have better--22 runs scored would have amounted to a little over 2 Pythagenpat wins, but 2 actual wins wouldn't have pushed them past the Yankees for third. But if Rios, Rolen, and Overbay each drove in 10 more runs, the team would be 30 runs (and about 3 wins) better but still wouldn't have a 20/100 hitter. If Wells stole 20 RBIs from other hitters in the lineup, then why should we expect that to have helped the Jays win? But that seems like what you're saying: concentrating the runs that we did score in the bat of a single player would have won us more actual games than distributing them among the lineup. If you think that's true, then you (or someone better at it than you who's willing to entertain the idea enough to put in the work) will have to actually compare teams that did have a 20/100 hitter to those that didn't and see which group performed better compared to their pythagenpat projections. Even a negative result would be interesting.
So, DJF, are you still taking the line that the Jays have a fighting chance in 2009? Even given the following off-season (so far):
NYY: Sabathia, Burnett, Teixeira, Swisher
Boston: Smoltz, Baldelli, Penny, Bard (+ new catcher TBA?)
Tampa: Burrell, Joyce
Toronto: Clement, Maroth, Barrett (+ a bunch of minor-league filler guys I can't recall)
I would grade out these moves something like this:
NYY: A
Boston: A-
Tampa: B+
Toronto: D+/C-
But that's just me. I don't have a blog that depends on attracting Jays fans to generate revenue...
Most cynical thing ever said about us! Thank you. If you're actually fucking serious, I'm pretty sure you don't know much about how ad revenue on the internet works.
Anyway, um... how would you have graded the moves of the teams in the AL Central last year, and how did that work out? January grades of moves mean shit. The Yankees still have a shit bullpen beyond the big two, and they didn't upgrade as much as you think: Sabathia and Burnett are better than Mussina and Pettitte and Teixeira is better than Giambi, but the difference isn't monumental, plus, Swisher won't produce like Abreu, and Jeter, Damon, Matsui and probably Posada are on the decline-- in some cases, very seriously. Boston depends a ton on Ortiz, no? Is that not a little troubling if you're a Sox fan? Baldelli is a fourth OF, Smoltz won't pitch until June at the earliest (and then who knows?) and Penny blows. Joyce? Very good half season last year but hardly a mind-blowing track record in the minors, Burrell won't be much better than Floyd/Hinske, and while Price will be better than Jackson, their bullpen has 05 White Sox written all over it-- shitbags who had great years and will probably go back to being shitbags.
The Jays, meanwhile, get Hill back, plus a full year of Lind and Snider, so it's not like they've exactly done nothing, it's like Parkes said, they made their move in mid-08. Now, I guess it depends on your definition of "fighting chance", but absolutely, with that improvement from the hitting, the back end of the rotation really only needs to be average for the Jays to be about as good as last year, and if someone steps up in a big way, who knows? Do I think they have a good chance? No. Do I think they have a fighting chance? Absolutely? Do I think you're a fucking dick who can go fuck himself? You goddamn well better believe it.
Did Parkes say the mid-2008 thing too?
You mean January moves that don't mean shit like, say, the Rays acquiring Garza, Floyd, Bartlett, Aybar, and Percival last off-season?
Yup, the off-season is pretty much irrelevant.
Anonymous, nobody thought those offseason moves would mean jack for the Rays at the time.
For some perspective, if the offense, the bullpen, and everyone else in the rotation performed the same, do you know how bad Burnett and Marcum's replacements would have to be for the Jays to be a .500 expectation team? 6.25 ERA. That's worse than 2007 Tomo Ohka or Josh Towers. Actually it has to be even worse than that, because if Purcey's matching his 5.5 ERA from 2008 then there's no reason McGowan replaces him instead of one of the over-6 schmucks.
What mid 08 thing?
After we brought in Cito at the end of June, we scored a half run more per game on average. A move worth that much in the offseason would be huge (almost as good as trading Overbay for Pujols straight up), but since it happened in the middle of 2008 people forget about it and complain that the team isn't doing anything.
Torgen, you're making the classic error of assuming that everything else will hold constant while the weaker elements improve. That almost never happens in baseball. In fact, that's exactly what's been happening to the Jays over the last few seasons. The offense improves, the pitching deteriorates. The pitching and defense improves, the offense falls off.
For example, do you really think that Downs, Carlson, League, and the rest of the 'pen are going to have minuscule ERAs again?
Few things stay constant in baseball. That's why you have to be aggressive about improving your team. Yes, some good things are likely to happen next year. It might be Lind, Snider, Rios, or Cecil. But bad things are going to happen too. Unless you have enough talent, depth and resources to prevail over a 162-game season, you're going to settle back into mediocrity. Which is almost certainly going to happen to the Jays next season. It's not the end of the world. But thinking that two or three players are going to have step up, have massive seasons, and save the Jays...well, it just doesn't bear up to any kind of realistic analysis. Not with two excellent, and improving, teams ahead of them (and a third team, the Yankees, that isn't excellent but is still better than Toronto).
anon -- the red sox are neither excellent nor improving. their bullpen is still lousy and their rotation is shaky (Beckett took a step back last year, Dice-K needs to average more than 5 innings a start, Wakefield is still in the running for a starting job ...). Also, as someone above pointed out, we'll see how fatty Ortiz fares with over a whole season without Manny batting around him. They still need a catcher. Their 3B is old and busted. Youkilis is a douchebag. JD Drew gets injured a ton ...
The Red Sox are no sure thing for '09.
p.s. WEEI is claiming that Smoltz will be ready for May.
Well, it is true that the Jays offense was improved in the second half of last season, 4.7 runs per game would still have been near the bottom of the American League, ahead of only Kansas City, Oakland, and Seattle. 2 of those teams played in pitchers parks and were awful last season. The Jays were winning because their pitching was incredible and their hitting improved from awful to mediocre but still pretty bad. If the Jays can keep their pitching anywhere close to as good as it was last season, 4.7 runs/game would be fine. But if the pitching declines as folks expect, I don't think that's going to do it.
Torgen: After we brought in Cito at the end of June, we scored a half run more per game on average. A move worth that much in the offseason would be huge (almost as good as trading Overbay for Pujols straight up), but since it happened in the middle of 2008 people forget about it and complain that the team isn't doing anything.
if i understand your logic correctly, Cito has added the equivalent of a power hitter to the '08 line-up simply by talking to the existing hitters, thereby bringing the RPG up by half a run. I'm sorry i just don't buy it. Why? Here's why: under Gibbons in '05 the Jays averaged 4.78 RPG, in '06 4.99 and in '07 4.65. The 4.2 number you keep bringing up is not a fair point of evaluation. Further, as brought up by a previous poster, the RPG number under Cito is still uncompetitive relative to playoff contenders.
as for your other post in response to me, i must confess that i find counterfactual individual statistical arguments intensely boring. There is certainly someone better than me at it -- you, for starters -- but my only point was that the absence of a proper DH hurt the Jays last year. The '09 team needs to figure out how to get 7-10 more wins than the '08 team did. In my opinion, it is unreasonable to believe that those extra wins will come from the team as currently constituted, even with Cito at the helm. You clearly disagree.
One reason for optimism though is that if this team can stay within striking distance through the summer then there will certainly be room to add prorated salary for the stretch run via the trade route, given the dearth of signings this off-season.
Cito at least stopped playing Zaun and Eckstein, and went full-time with Lind. Add in Snider's call-up a return from Hill, a healthy Wells, and (fingers crossed) September Rolen instead of May-August Rolen and the offence should clearly be better than even the Cito half of last year.
Anyway, what's really frustrating here is, how many fucking times do I have to say that I AGREE they're not likely to be competitive, but that it's definitely possible that they could be, only to have nitpicking fucks hold up the second part of that statement like it's the only thing I've said, and then try to blow it apart with, albeit, well-thought out analysis that just refuses to take into account the fact that there are so many variables in play at this point that you just can't-- you can't-- say anything so goddamn definitive. All I'm saying is that I can envision ways that the Jays could have a competitive season-- which I've laid out many times-- and that while I don't think it's likely (at all) to go like that, to keep putting so much energy into writing them off in January, before a pitch is thrown, before the roster is finalized, before we know what the competitions looks like on the field and not just on paper, is SERIOUSLY FUCKING RETARDED.
OK?
You mean January moves that don't mean shit like, say, the Rays acquiring Garza, Floyd, Bartlett, Aybar, and Percival last off-season?
Yup, the off-season is pretty much irrelevant.
No, I said January GRADES of moves mean shit, but I do respect the smug-fuck attitude. Honest.
Mike: all the numbers under Gibbons before '08 were with Brantley as the hitting coach. The first half of '08 was with Denbo. That is a difference. (Denbo was the hitting coach for a Yankees offensive down season too.)
Anon: Downs has been excellent for a few years straight now, and his ERA in 2008 was hurt by trying to come back from that sprain too early. BJ was shaky when he first came back, and we get an extra month of him over 2008, so those are both small improvements. We get to have Accardo instead of Camp, so that's an improvement too. All those things can help absorb some regression by the other two.
Here's a suggestion for you, Stoeten. So you might consider pointing the gun away from your temple.
Put this up on the site banner, if you don't feel like arguing about this over and over again until August '09
"they're not likely to be competitive, but that it's definitely possible that they could be"
Good idea.
All this arguing has been constant for like eight or nine months now. It's draining, yet I can't make myself stop...
Poor Stoeten :(
I think fans are frustrated because the team is cutting payroll and has kind of ground to a halt, while the competition is making a lot of interesting moves (some hugely expensive, some less so). As a result, some people find any optimism sort of pollyanna-ish (aka the "positivity principle"). Others tend to look on the bright side and get irate with the doom-and-gloom crowd. I tend to be more pessimistic than optimistic (for reasons to do with payroll and front office management), but I can see both sides.
The worst thing about this off season is that the Jays are a very good team as they sit, but with the adition of a strong DH, a single proven starter and possibly a leadoff hitter, this team would no doubt be a contender.
All it would take is $100MM, around the '08 payroll.
The fucking worst thing is that all of the vast improvements over the last three seasons could pay off in '09 if Rogers Corp. wasn't so fucking cheap.
Add Sheets, Dunn (just examples FYI), and one/two others and we would be a top contender, and I bet JP is fucking really pissed about that, almost as violently enraged as I am.
PS: Its nice to see people talking baseball on this comment section again, as I think the frustration may have boiled over during the stressful holiday season, when we all wanted nothing more than a couple quality roster additions from Santa, as opposed to a lump of stinking coal from Rogers.
The problem with keeping the payroll at $100MM USD is that the revenues are all in CAD, and the dollar is way down from last year.
Fuck off Parkes
Fuck off Stoten
"Remember when everyone was all up in arms for about two weeks last season when Wayne McMahon of "Iiiiicccccceeeeeee. Cooooooooooooooooooold. Beee-eeeeeeeeeeeer." fame was unceremoniously fired by the shittiest of shitty corporations Aramark.
Well, after finding some part-time work at Ti-Cats games and on MTV Canada, McMahon was honoured by RotoRob today with the 2008 Vendor of the Year Award. I guess like a broken clock, even a shitty website can be right every once in a while."
Wayne enjoyed the article lol - i forwarded him to it
Thanks for the name drop - although you should have sourced my blog rather then BR, would have helped with my google adsense pay cheque.
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