jays @ Twins, Today - Sept 17th

[Mehar]

Takeaways from the series-

1. Jays fans across North America are great. Not many teams with a road following like Toronto.

2. Donaldson is driving up his value big time.

3. Big holes throughout the Jays lineup are more apparent than ever, even with Josh on fire.

#2 is important. I was an advocate of trading Osuna in July when he was named to the All-star team. That was the highest value for Osuna. This off-season, i would trade Donaldson. It is pretty much a done deal that he will walk as a free agent after next year. Other teams out there will outbid the Jays. This organization will have egg on its face if they let Donaldson walk, and can show nothing for him. I would not be comfortable giving him a 5 year deal at 125 million or so, at his age. This organization needs to think long-term. I know it is hard for Rogers, but the fans will understand. The fans are more intelligent than Rogers gives them credit. They would understand a rebuild is needed. This organization does have many holes. Might as well tear it down and rebuild for a couple of years.

[Schad]

This sounds great, but in practice, it is not that easy. Replacement scrubs are like lottery tickets. There's an outcome distribution range; they aren't all exactly 0 WAR. Some will be worth around +1 WAR (2016 Jason Grilli, Dominic Leone, etc) and some will be worth -1 WAR or so (2017 Jason Grilli, Salty, etc). You can't simply remove the negatives and keep the positives, because you don't know ahead of time which players fall into which group. You can reduce the number of lottery tickets, sure, but that's very expensive to do. There is no way to regain that -8.8 WAR with a group of replacement level players.

The depth of awful of our 'replacement' guys is definitely a bit unusual, but yeah: that's also what happens when you have no cheap in-house options worth a damn. We went into 2017 with a SS who always gets injured, a catcher who increasingly doesn't spend that much time behind the plate for injury/old-related reasons, and no quality upper-minors depth at either position. Both MI/C are among the hardest positions to find reasonable backups at, given positional scarcity, and lo when we had to start trawling the waiver wire (or our own benighted bench), and turn over a tonne of ABs to guys who can't hit, we got terrible results.

[Lateral Quicks]

There's a lot of low-hanging fruit that shouldn't be too difficult to fix:

- Bautista -2 WAR
- Goins/Barney/Refsnyder combined -1.8 WAR (all negative)
- Maile/Montero/Salty combined -2 WAR (all negative)
- Morales -0.7 WAR
- Coghlan -0.5 WAR
- Latos/Bolsinger/Tepesch/Grilli -1.8 WAR (all negative)

If we replace all those guys with replacement level players, that's 8.8 wins.

This sounds great, but in practice, it is not that easy. Replacement scrubs are like lottery tickets. There's an outcome distribution range; they aren't all exactly 0 WAR. Some will be worth around +1 WAR (2016 Jason Grilli, Dominic Leone, etc) and some will be worth -1 WAR or so (2017 Jason Grilli, Salty, etc). You can't simply remove the negatives and keep the positives, because you don't know ahead of time which players fall into which group. You can reduce the number of lottery tickets, sure, but that's very expensive to do. There is no way to regain that -8.8 WAR with a group of replacement level players.

By definition, replacement-level players would have led to 8.8 more WAR than those above. That's how bad these guys have been. Yes there is variation in replacement level players, but I'm not advocating those kind of replacements. A healthy Sanchez, Travis and Tulo are well above replacement (yes, even Tulo). A mediocre hitter with good speed and defense in RF (my early assessment of Hernandez) is a better than replacement player. Etc.

A large majority of major league players are above replacement. It really shouldn't be that difficult to find significant upgrades on most or all of these problem areas, especially when some of them look be coming internally as prospects mature.

[Skin Blues]

By definition, replacement-level players would have led to 8.8 more WAR than those above.

That's only because you omitted all of the replacement level players that provided positive WAR.

It really shouldn't be that difficult to find significant upgrades on most or all of these problem areas, especially when some of them look be coming internally as prospects mature.

It's not hard, as long as you're willing to spend $10M per WAR in free agency, which is $90M on top of our 2018 commitments. You can't add 8.8 projected WAR by adding replacement level players.