Moderator: JaysRule15
Schad wrote:TR50 wrote:Just a clarification I was hoping for...Is Donaldson arb eligible after this year, or is he straight into FA?
One more year of arb, FA in the winter of 2018.
ldnk wrote:Schad wrote:TR50 wrote:Just a clarification I was hoping for...Is Donaldson arb eligible after this year, or is he straight into FA?
One more year of arb, FA in the winter of 2018.
Hmm. Thanks for that. That's odd that the Jays set up the deal that way, I just assumed they bought out his Arbitration years rather than doing this.
phillipmike wrote:sharmaraps wrote:yeah for a one year shot. Now it's break up time after this year it'll be a whole different team. Playoffs 2020 hopefully
Again do you even know what you are talking about? You are just making things up. So far the Jays have only lost Dickey and Cecil... But you are speaking in absolutes that Bautista, EE and Saunders are gone because the new FO has an agenda to get rid of them. Jays made Bautista at least 1 offer and EE at least 4 offers - doesnt sound like guys you want to get rid of.
But you can continue coming up with your conspiracy theories to stir pot as you try to trick everyone into thinking you are a "fan."
sharmaraps wrote:Like I said it's my opinion on what is going on. The market for players took a huge dip especially for DH's as you can tell and if you have been listening to shows talking about baseball there saying the same thing. Why wouldn't you sign EE back? Where's the loyalty? Not like he's crap either he can put up 30 home runs in a bad season without a doubt. Not to mention his RBI's. Every time an offer was made to EE it was a low ball offer that he would have beaten if it were in any other market in any other year. Jays lucked out in not looking bad because they offered him the money he got but that's only because of the way the hitters market shaped up this year. Bringing EE would have shown loyalty at least. The dude has done a lot and to bring back such a significant Blue Jay would have shown that in fact Rogers does take care of their own.
sharmaraps wrote:phillipmike wrote:sharmaraps wrote:yeah for a one year shot. Now it's break up time after this year it'll be a whole different team. Playoffs 2020 hopefully
Again do you even know what you are talking about? You are just making things up. So far the Jays have only lost Dickey and Cecil... But you are speaking in absolutes that Bautista, EE and Saunders are gone because the new FO has an agenda to get rid of them. Jays made Bautista at least 1 offer and EE at least 4 offers - doesnt sound like guys you want to get rid of.
But you can continue coming up with your conspiracy theories to stir pot as you try to trick everyone into thinking you are a "fan."
why do you keep saying I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm stating my opinion on the Blue Jays. Honestly if you knew so much you wouldn't be phillipmike behind a computer posting on realgm. You'd be in a front office somewhere.
Like I said it's my opinion on what is going on. The market for players took a huge dip especially for DH's as you can tell and if you have been listening to shows talking about baseball there saying the same thing. Why wouldn't you sign EE back? Where's the loyalty? Not like he's crap either he can put up 30 home runs in a bad season without a doubt. Not to mention his RBI's. Every time an offer was made to EE it was a low ball offer that he would have beaten if it were in any other market in any other year. Jays lucked out in not looking bad because they offered him the money he got but that's only because of the way the hitters market shaped up this year. Bringing EE would have shown loyalty at least. The dude has done a lot and to bring back such a significant Blue Jay would have shown that in fact Rogers does take care of their own.
sharmaraps wrote:phillipmike wrote:sharmaraps wrote:yeah for a one year shot. Now it's break up time after this year it'll be a whole different team. Playoffs 2020 hopefully
Again do you even know what you are talking about? You are just making things up. So far the Jays have only lost Dickey and Cecil... But you are speaking in absolutes that Bautista, EE and Saunders are gone because the new FO has an agenda to get rid of them. Jays made Bautista at least 1 offer and EE at least 4 offers - doesnt sound like guys you want to get rid of.
But you can continue coming up with your conspiracy theories to stir pot as you try to trick everyone into thinking you are a "fan."
why do you keep saying I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm stating my opinion on the Blue Jays. Honestly if you knew so much you wouldn't be phillipmike behind a computer posting on realgm. You'd be in a front office somewhere.
Like I said it's my opinion on what is going on. The market for players took a huge dip especially for DH's as you can tell and if you have been listening to shows talking about baseball there saying the same thing. Why wouldn't you sign EE back? Where's the loyalty? Not like he's crap either he can put up 30 home runs in a bad season without a doubt. Not to mention his RBI's. Every time an offer was made to EE it was a low ball offer that he would have beaten if it were in any other market in any other year. Jays lucked out in not looking bad because they offered him the money he got but that's only because of the way the hitters market shaped up this year. Bringing EE would have shown loyalty at least. The dude has done a lot and to bring back such a significant Blue Jay would have shown that in fact Rogers does take care of their own.
Todd01 wrote:Well it's officially the blue jays are going to suck this year. And I would like to thank the blue jays new management for making this happening. You did nothing to improve this team.But you did manage to make it the laughing stock of mlb. I have no idea on how you two managed to get these job. I'm officially put my name in to be head guy and the general manager of this team to get it out of this mess you guys got this team in. FIRE everyone of them
Todd01 wrote:Well it's officially the blue jays are going to suck this year. And I would like to thank the blue jays new management for making this happening. You did nothing to improve this team.But you did manage to make it the laughing stock of mlb. I have no idea on how you two managed to get these job. I'm officially put my name in to be head guy and the general manager of this team to get it out of this mess you guys got this team in. FIRE everyone of them
raf1995 wrote:I just don’t think he has that kind of potential. I think we will regret not trading him for a haul in a few years when he’s a mid-tier starter with nice playmaking and defense and a shaky jumper.
LBJKB24MJ23 wrote:Blame AA for helping the Jays get here. That Martin contract seems ridiculous now and Tulo's contract. Let me guess ... Guess what- that team isn't good enough. The one made by AA. all the big contracts.
So stfu
Skin Blues wrote:LBJKB24MJ23 wrote:Blame AA for helping the Jays get here. That Martin contract seems ridiculous now and Tulo's contract. Let me guess ... Guess what- that team isn't good enough. The one made by AA. all the big contracts.
So stfu
Martin has been worth over half of the total cost of his contract through 2/5 of the duration. Hardly ridiculous. And that isn't taking into account his value added from framing. Tulo's contract isn't looking good, at least not the last couple years of it, but keep in mind the Rockies also took on the remaining $56M on Reyes' contract, which bought them a grand total of -0.4 WAR before they DFA'd and released him. Tulo has also been worth more than his contract is paying him thus far, and has already been a big part of two long playoff runs.
Bottom line: the team AA put together made the ALCS in two consecutive seasons. True, he didn't sell off all the productive veterans to get a really strong core ready for 5 years from now, but most of us are happy we went this route. So far, Shapiro and Atkins seem to have done a pretty good job maintaining and adding to the core AA put together. Why so much hate to go around? haha.
raf1995 wrote:I just don’t think he has that kind of potential. I think we will regret not trading him for a haul in a few years when he’s a mid-tier starter with nice playmaking and defense and a shaky jumper.
Sportsnet: Given the coming spike in the cost of your controllable players who’ll be eligible for arbitration and your pending free agents, can the Blue Jays remain competitive without a boost in payroll?
Mark Shapiro: “You can’t speak in absolute certainties, but in everything I’ve seen there’s been a consistent commitment at every juncture to provide the resources necessary. What’s probably less noted, and probably of less concern to a fan but maybe more important for what we’re trying to ultimately build here, the resources, while they’ve been extended for major-league players, they’ve been committed, without almost any limit, to building the infrastructure beneath the big-league team that is essential – not important but essential – to build a sustainable championship-calibre team."
“Whether it’s building out an entire HP team that didn’t exist, or bringing in major-league resources like Derek Shelton to help complement our big-league staff, or front-office roles that can help us make better decisions, or just software that can help us frame better decisions or redoing the weight room in Toronto, or redoing both weight rooms here – the commitment to providing the resources to help both our current group of players perform at their best and help us both identify and develop players more effectively, that’s been without question supported. That to me is as important as spending on any free-agent player because ultimately everything we’re trying to do is build it so that we don’t have to sign free agents because it’s tough to sign free agents effectively.”
Your preference is to pursue free agents as finishing pieces?
“Exactly, or because there’s an opportunity.”
In Cleveland you signed several players – Corey Kluber, Carlos Carrasco and Jason Kipnis among them – to multi-year deals early in their careers to contain costs. With the Blue Jays, do these deals still make sense given that you have more payroll to work with, and may not need to take on the risk?
“I still think they make sense. When you talk arbitration-eligible or pre-arb eligible deals, those contracts are about sharing risk. They don’t just need to make sense to us, they need to make sense to both us and the player. Ultimately in every one of those deals, you’re saying listen, the club is going to risk something, it’s going to risk injury, a dip in performance from a player who’s not completely established so there’s no certainty to performance."
"You’re going to risk a variety of factors that can happen with a very young major-league career for cost-certainty because you believe in the player as a person as well as a player. The player is going to risk some upside, clearly, that would exist if they go year to year and then test the market sooner than ultimately those deals allow them to do. The question becomes is the shared risk something both sides are comfortable with? Can you find the sweet spot for the shared risk? It’s got to be a little uncomfortable for the club, but there’s a tradeoff, and it’s got to be a little uncomfortable for the player, but they get security and a contract that will change their lives. Every player is different and every situation is different. There’s no commonality other than you’re able to find that sweet spot.”
Does it make sense to explore such a deal for Aaron Sanchez and Marcus Stroman?
“It always makes sense to explore those things and we’ll never comment on whether we’re doing those things along the way, but I’ll leave the decisions to Ross (Atkins) as to when we’ll explore that.”
Do you have a panic button in your office? The team has started off on a poor note.
I think 25 years provides you with the backdrop to maybe have a little more perspective. It doesn't make you any less competitive, it doesn't make you any less unhappy, but you also recognize that the first week of the season exacerbates and kind of exaggerates the impact of a bad start. You get back to what your process was, and who these players are...and how much I believe in them as people, as competitors.
But you also look at the standings. I know it's a handful of games in but when they're in the cellar, you have to question it.
I honestly don't look at the standings. I do look at the losses and say, hey, this is not how we want to start the season. But I'm not looking at the standings yet. I really do hold back, until about the quarter pole, and 40 games in, and I say, drawing any conclusions prior to that time is way premature. We are going to believe in what led us to believe in these players in the first place, their track records, their careers, who they are as people, their character, their toughness. I think these guys will put themselves in the thick of things throughout the season.
The welcome was interesting when you arrived. You replaced a fan favourite. And people wondered, who is this guy? Do you feel a bit more welcome now?
It's interesting, I never took any of that personally. You got to have a thick skin. You got to be able separate your self-esteem and who you are as a person—father, husband, friend, son, brother—from who you are professionally. The goal of the job has always been to make fans happy. We want to provide a team that not only wins, but makes fans across this whole country proud, not just in this city.
When I came back from spring training this year, it wasn't coming back to an apartment downtown. I was coming back to a home with a family and kids. I felt like I was coming home. In year two, this is my home, and in year two, I feel more at peace here.
How do you match your expectations with the expectations of fans? People have different timelines. You're in it for the long haul.
I would say, If my expectations aren't greater than fans, then we're in real trouble. You have to have one eye on today and one eye on the future and what you are building.
When they get engrossed in a sports team, they just want to root and they just to win. And anything other than that is a disappointment. The ultimate goal is always to provide a sustainable championship team, a team that can compete year after year. Getting from here to there, hopefully, we'll have no hiccups, and no bumps in the road. You have to do two jobs, one is building that infrastructure, the other is winning, now.
You may not consider Nick Swisher, late of the New York Yankees and a few other teams, a reliable arbiter of taste and decorum. Not knowing him personally, I will reserve judgment. But he is notorious in Toronto baseball circles for one thing: Last fall, he called us out for our lack of etiquette. Blue Jays fans, he said, are the nastiest in all of baseball.
“I would say they’re the worst,” Mr. Swisher told this newspaper’s sports columnist, Cathal Kelly. “But I don’t want to give them the credit.”
Just how bad is bad? “You would not believe the things you hear out there,” Mr. Swisher said. “Not just things about you. Things about your family. They’ll go on the Internet and find out their names and use them. It’s really unbelievable.”
True, this narrative is easily dismissed as insult-swapping. Mr. Swisher, self-portrayed as a good Christian and family man, was no saint on the diamond; he was no Nice Guy Nicky. Alternatively, I have heard some Toronto fans embrace his negative judgment, as though this is all a testament to Toronto’s grittiness, our tough north-of-the-border refusal of the pastoral myth-making of American baseball. Toronto versus everybody, pal.
Here’s my take. The Jays’ New Millennium fans seem hell-bent on the hockeyization of baseball, with the hurling of beer cans, racial insults and water bottles, directly at opposing players from the upper decks of the chaotic SkyDome – a stadium that corporate influence forces me to call, in this forum, the Rogers Centre. When the Baltimore Orioles visited late last season, they complained that playing outfield in Toronto means running a gamut of racial slurs and projectiles alike.
Alas, none of this is news if you have ever attended one of the beer-soaked bro-parties that Blue Jays night games have become. Cathal Kelly wanted to push the question. “We are, officially, the worst,” he wrote. “That it’s hard to argue the point has made Torontonians suddenly shy and unsure. Do we deny what’s pretty plainly true? Do we embrace our new identity as the drunken cousin who ruins every family gathering? And if neither of those things suit us, whom can we blame instead?”
The answer is: nobody. This is us, the new Canada of rude, racist and often drunken behaviour.
If you’re like me, whether you live in Toronto or not, whether you are a sports fan or not, you’ll want to distance yourself from this image. And of course a country as big and wide as this one embraces a lot of different identities; that’s part of its genius. But the perception of our failure is based in a reality we all need to recognize. We’re not PolitenessLand anymore (maybe we never were). Instead, we’re the Broad Street Bullies of Baseball, the continent’s backward louts of lousy conduct. I used to think Boston was the rudest city I knew, trumping even London’s class-based surliness and the exquisite disdain of Paris. Congratulations, Toronto – you are now a world-class contender in an undesirable category, namely, treating visitors badly.
polo007 wrote:You may not consider Nick Swisher, late of the New York Yankees and a few other teams, a reliable arbiter of taste and decorum. Not knowing him personally, I will reserve judgment. But he is notorious in Toronto baseball circles for one thing: Last fall, he called us out for our lack of etiquette. Blue Jays fans, he said, are the nastiest in all of baseball.
“I would say they’re the worst,” Mr. Swisher told this newspaper’s sports columnist, Cathal Kelly. “But I don’t want to give them the credit.”
Just how bad is bad? “You would not believe the things you hear out there,” Mr. Swisher said. “Not just things about you. Things about your family. They’ll go on the Internet and find out their names and use them. It’s really unbelievable.”
True, this narrative is easily dismissed as insult-swapping. Mr. Swisher, self-portrayed as a good Christian and family man, was no saint on the diamond; he was no Nice Guy Nicky. Alternatively, I have heard some Toronto fans embrace his negative judgment, as though this is all a testament to Toronto’s grittiness, our tough north-of-the-border refusal of the pastoral myth-making of American baseball. Toronto versus everybody, pal.
Here’s my take. The Jays’ New Millennium fans seem hell-bent on the hockeyization of baseball, with the hurling of beer cans, racial insults and water bottles, directly at opposing players from the upper decks of the chaotic SkyDome – a stadium that corporate influence forces me to call, in this forum, the Rogers Centre. When the Baltimore Orioles visited late last season, they complained that playing outfield in Toronto means running a gamut of racial slurs and projectiles alike.
Alas, none of this is news if you have ever attended one of the beer-soaked bro-parties that Blue Jays night games have become. Cathal Kelly wanted to push the question. “We are, officially, the worst,” he wrote. “That it’s hard to argue the point has made Torontonians suddenly shy and unsure. Do we deny what’s pretty plainly true? Do we embrace our new identity as the drunken cousin who ruins every family gathering? And if neither of those things suit us, whom can we blame instead?”
The answer is: nobody. This is us, the new Canada of rude, racist and often drunken behaviour.
If you’re like me, whether you live in Toronto or not, whether you are a sports fan or not, you’ll want to distance yourself from this image. And of course a country as big and wide as this one embraces a lot of different identities; that’s part of its genius. But the perception of our failure is based in a reality we all need to recognize. We’re not PolitenessLand anymore (maybe we never were). Instead, we’re the Broad Street Bullies of Baseball, the continent’s backward louts of lousy conduct. I used to think Boston was the rudest city I knew, trumping even London’s class-based surliness and the exquisite disdain of Paris. Congratulations, Toronto – you are now a world-class contender in an undesirable category, namely, treating visitors badly.
