mvp 78

He was planning on retiring this year, but Cora convinced him to come back.

How would a new manager change this team? I always thought the Blue Jays played bad baseball under Montoyo and the team (specifically their young stars) underperformed because of him. Turns out, many of those guys were just kind of overrated.

5.51 career daytime ERA

Uh oh. Bello at 1:10!

That's the sign of a mediocre team. At least you get pitching or hitting at some points. I guess for Sox fans, mediocrity is bad. Well, it makes for a bad summer.

There was an inundation of JBJ is the greatest CFer "of all time" posts on here whenever he'd make an above average play. This was while he was playing in the same division as Keirmaier who was as good if not better. Even Pillar had years with the Jays where he looked as good as JBJ from what I remember.

I think the bad starting pitching and injuries dragged the team down.

Some of those 78 win teams felt pretty bad.

Most importantly Raffy: no communication about DH, no communication about potential need to move to 1B

That's most likely the same with other teams though.

If this is the route they go to fill 1B, I'm fine with it. I don't see them sticking with Casas long term. Next year, is Refsnyder retired, Duran traded and Masa the 4th OFer?

Looks about right to me. I haven't seen enough of Taylor over the years to comment on his play.

It was so that the A's could get him before another team claimed him for free.

People said the same thing about JBJ.

This team feels like 78-84 to me. It just has that vibe.

I agree that a change won't make a difference. I think there is horrible communication between Cora and Breslow. They are either not on the same page or just not communicating effectively somewhere. We just don't have insight to know where the breakdown is.

He'll most certainly struggle at some point. However, there's no reason to hold him down at this point. They are floundering and don't look to be holding onto any playoff push. May as well play the kids and work on the future.

I don't believe he was necessarily "dominating." Before being called up in '22, he hadn't even reached 60 innings in AAA. His bb/9 was 3.68. He had a successful half of a season. The year before, he had a 3.87 ERA between A/AA. I think he was called up too early, under a bad pitching coach and wasn't quite ready to be the guy they wanted him to be. He went from a 12 k/9 in MiLB to 8 k/9 in MLB while keeping a high bb rate. He just never really learned how to pitch. Whenever he gets into a stressful situation, you can just stick a fork in him. At some point, it's no longer on the coaching, but on the pitchers themselves. Fitts, Dobbins and Buehler have all been more impressive than we thought they'd be, but I don't see many people jumping to give Bailey credit there. I'd say the same with Chapman, Weissert and Wilson. Maybe Bello stinks this year because he's just not as good as we thought he was going to be. Maybe he's just a #5? Maybe Houck is just the starting rotation/reliever question mark that we had him pegged for going into 2024 and not the All Star we saw last season? We're lucky Bailey was able to get that half of a season out of Houck. Coaches are fungible. Fire Cora, Bailey and Fatse if you really want. However, I don't think it'll change the direction of this team in any positive direction this season. It's almost always on the players and who picks the players. The coaches are just low hanging fruit IMO.

“You’re not going to find a bigger Bello guy than me. If Bello is struggling, it’s because of the pitch mix called by Bailey or Narvaez. Whoever is calling the pitches needs to go.” Awful take. Can’t Bello just be not very good? None of his pitches have a positive run value. He has no out pitch right now.

DFA Mayer

It's not the definitive valuation of anything. Yes, it's convenient to site for our purposes and that's all we use it for. Same with a lot of the other advanced stats. We know where generally how they are calculated and what they say about a player. It's just "what can we talk about more that our own personal eye tests and how could we back it up?" In the end, it doesn't really matter too much. Some people go over board with it. Some people hate it.

For example, it helps to quantify the differences in value between '24 Abreu and '24 O'Neill. Offensively, O'Neill is ahead, but Abreu had a much stronger defensive campaign. Which player provided more value to the Red Sox? How could you quantify it? Is it a perfect system? No, but I think it works well enough for our nonsense.

The problem is that they wait for a solution to present itself (i.e. Bregman gets hurt) rather than creatively finding a way to get the player on the roster.

A healthy Chris Murphy could be pretty huge as he can go multiple innings.

Newcomb traded to the A's for cash considerations.