The Shapiro & Rogers Megathread

[C Court]

I am thinking a poster here is also on Twitter....

Read on Twitter

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[gei]

Why do people act like a "teardown" is the ultimate solution to everything? Has there ever been a "teardown" team that ended up competing a few years later?

All a few years of a "teardown" gets you is a few elite-level prospects playing for a team that is never going to compete, who ultimately get traded away. Just look at the Rays.

[ratul]

This is a continued disgrace. Please fire these a**-clowns so we can get a real gm in here (no pun intended).

My boycott will continue and looking at the attendance figures which are catastrophic so early into the year, I think many people are doing the same. We literally traded or let go pretty much everyone away from our 2015 ALCS team. What an effing disgrace of a front office

[wamco]

Time for Atkins to make some Shrewd trades. He bores me

[Fairview4Life]

Why do people act like a "teardown" is the ultimate solution to everything? Has there ever been a "teardown" team that ended up competing a few years later?

All a few years of a "teardown" gets you is a few elite-level prospects playing for a team that is never going to compete, who ultimately get traded away. Just look at the Rays.

Tigers, Rays, Astros. Amongst others.

And this isn't like a tear down in basketball to get the next Lebron or whoever, it is movimg older guys before they age/decline into not being worth much to try and restock the farm system. The goal is to have a good major league team with a bunch of young guys always ready to replenish when the major league team gets old, or declines, or costs too much. The reason why we have to do this now is because AA created a very good major league team by emptying out the farm system so that now, when the major league team has aged and declined into being not good, there wasn't much internal youth around to replace them, and they weren't worth much in trades (with the caveat that we waited a year too long to move Donaldson). There are some good prospects, especially Vlad, but we need a whole team of them and a good farm system, which is going to take a few years to build up. The tear down now is to help speed up the farm restocking by moving guys who are decent now, but won't be when the team is good enough to compete for something again.

[Schad]

Why do people act like a "teardown" is the ultimate solution to everything? Has there ever been a "teardown" team that ended up competing a few years later?

All a few years of a "teardown" gets you is a few elite-level prospects playing for a team that is never going to compete, who ultimately get traded away. Just look at the Rays.

The team would've torn itself down, owing to the ages of the players involved. To Ratul's point:

We literally traded or let go pretty much everyone away from our 2015 ALCS team.

Let's look at where those players are:

Martin - traded because he's 36 years old, was in decline, and is an FA after 2019.
Smoak - still here, for the moment.
Goins - no longer in the majors.
Tulo - in his natural habitat, on the DL.
Donaldson - was an FA after 2018. Remains to be seen how he bounces back, but he only merited a one-year deal for a reason: he's a bit on the old side.
Revere - hasn't played in the majors since 2017.
Pillar - just traded, as his defense is declining and his bat doesn't exactly make up for it.
Bautista - remains unsigned after being a part-timer in 2018, (involuntary) retirement a distinct possibility.
Encarnacion - just got salary-dumped by Cleveland. Performance declined sharply last season.
Colabello - retired.
Travis - still on our DL.
Dinner - retired.
Zeke - retired.
Valencia - remains unsigned, retirement seems likely.


In 2015, those players combined for 35.5 wins above replacement, the best in baseball. In 2018, those same players were good for 8 fWAR. What was the most dominant group of position players in baseball in 2015 would have been the worst/very close to the worst in baseball in 2018. Among all of the players who featured on that 2015 team, not a single position player exceeded the 2 fWAR threshold to be considered a full-season average starter.

The pitching staff isn't much better. Stroman and Sanchez are still here. Dickey's retired. Buehrle is retired. Hutchison's career looks to be over, sadly. Price is good, but keeping Price past 2015 was never on the cards. If we somehow kept the band together, sans Price, we'd have lost close to 100 games last year.

[ratul]

Why do people act like a "teardown" is the ultimate solution to everything? Has there ever been a "teardown" team that ended up competing a few years later?

All a few years of a "teardown" gets you is a few elite-level prospects playing for a team that is never going to compete, who ultimately get traded away. Just look at the Rays.

The team would've torn itself down, owing to the ages of the players involved. To Ratul's point:

We literally traded or let go pretty much everyone away from our 2015 ALCS team.

Let's look at where those players are:

Martin - traded because he's 36 years old, was in decline, and is an FA after 2019.
Smoak - still here, for the moment.
Goins - no longer in the majors.
Tulo - in his natural habitat, on the DL.
Donaldson - was an FA after 2018. Remains to be seen how he bounces back, but he only merited a one-year deal for a reason: he's a bit on the old side.
Revere - hasn't played in the majors since 2017.
Pillar - just traded, as his defense is declining and his bat doesn't exactly make up for it.
Bautista - remains unsigned after being a part-timer in 2018, (involuntary) retirement a distinct possibility.
Encarnacion - just got salary-dumped by Cleveland. Performance declined sharply last season.
Colabello - retired.
Travis - still on our DL.
Dinner - retired.
Zeke - retired.
Valencia - remains unsigned, retirement seems likely.


In 2015, those players combined for 35.5 wins above replacement, the best in baseball. In 2018, those same players were good for 8 fWAR. What was the most dominant group of position players in baseball in 2015 would have been the worst/very close to the worst in baseball in 2018. Among all of the players who featured on that 2015 team, not a single position player exceeded the 2 fWAR threshold to be considered a full-season average starter.

The pitching staff isn't much better. Stroman and Sanchez are still here. Dickey's retired. Buehrle is retired. Hutchison's career looks to be over, sadly. Price is good, but keeping Price past 2015 was never on the cards. If we somehow kept the band together, sans Price, we'd have lost close to 100 games last year.

You act like double A acts in stasis. And that would be the team we have today. I am certain he would have found other players and let Bautista go or at least on a light deal. It’s the fallacy of the double A haters. That somehow the gm ceases to behave like a gm.

Moreover, this administration has just allowed everyone to leave and replaced them with nobody of substance. Our starting nine could be the worst in baseball and certainly defensively atrocious.

We are probably going to average 7-8k in attendance while Rogers will have to cost cut meaning we can’t even buy a better team. It’s exactly what happened in Cleveland. Fan base two on its way to being destroyed. It will take years to recover from this.

[Schad]

AA would find them...how, exactly. We had few prospects, little money to spend, and a team full of ancient players. He was just going to magic them into existence through his elite GMing skills? Odd that he didn't demonstrate that talent before. Note that he didn't find Bautista; that would be JP Ricciardi. He didn't find Encarnacion, either; that was Ricciardi, as well. Hell, AA let him go on waivers to the A's.

AA was a solid GM in a lot of respects; he also was fortunate enough that a couple guys who were acquired prior to his tenure blew up in a very unexpected way, and he got out of Dodge before the inherent flaws of our roster construction came into full view (though if you go back and read threads from 2015, it was patently obvious to a lot of us what was coming). Leading to people like yourself ascribing all the good things to AA and all the bad things to his successor, despite the obvious fact that he lit the fuse on the bomb that was our post-2016 roster.

How long it takes for the fanbase to recover is inextricably linked to how long it takes us to be good again. If AA was our GM, our attendance would suck, because our team would suck. If the current rebuild succeeds, our attendance will be good. That's the nature of baseball fandom in Toronto, and it has been for 20 years.

[ratul]

AA would find them...how, exactly. We had few prospects, little money to spend, and a team full of ancient players. He was just going to magic them into existence through his elite GMing skills? Odd that he didn't demonstrate that talent before. Note that he didn't find Bautista; that would be JP Ricciardi. He didn't find Encarnacion, either; that was Ricciardi, as well. Hell, AA let him go on waivers to the A's.

AA was a solid GM in a lot of respects; he also was fortunate enough that a couple guys who were acquired prior to his tenure blew up in a very unexpected way, and he got out of Dodge before the inherent flaws of our roster construction came into full view (though if you go back and read threads from 2015, it was patently obvious to a lot of us what was coming). Leading to people like yourself ascribing all the good things to AA and all the bad things to his successor, despite the obvious fact that he lit the fuse on the bomb that was our post-2016 roster.

How long it takes for the fanbase to recover is inextricably linked to how long it takes us to be good again. If AA was our GM, our attendance would suck, because our team would suck. If the current rebuild succeeds, our attendance will be good. That's the nature of baseball fandom in Toronto, and it has been for 20 years.

The same way he got Donaldson, pillar, vladdy, Sanchez, stroman etc. Shrewd drafting and effing awesome trades.

Your contention he jumped ship before this car crash is just nonsensical.

And you’re referring to wrong gm when it comes to sucky attendance. Our current guy is the piece de resistance when it comes to destroying a fanbase.

[Schad]

The same way he got Donaldson, pillar, vladdy, Sanchez, stroman etc. Shrewd drafting and effing awesome trades.

Drafting takes years to pay off. Let's say that AAAAAAAAAAAAAa was still GM in 2016. Players drafted then would start filtering up to the majors in...about 2019 at the earliest, most in 2021 or later given AAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaa's preference for high school kids. IFAs would generally take even longer.

In other words, we'd have still had a period of being bad, because there was a massive talent deficit in our upper minors and a 3-5 year lag time before any newly-drafted players reached the majors. Which is exactly what we're dealing with now.

Regarding awesome trades, there was Donaldson, and...there was Donaldson. Beyond that excellent move, Anthopolous' trade record was mixed, to be generous. And to trade for Donaldson required us to have something we didn't have by 2016: highly-regarded prospects that we could afford to ship out. At the time that AA left, our farm system was rated as one of the worst in baseball, because he'd traded most of the quality away.

[ratul]

The same way he got Donaldson, pillar, vladdy, Sanchez, stroman etc. Shrewd drafting and effing awesome trades.

Drafting takes years to pay off. Let's say that AAAAAAAAAAAAAa was still GM in 2016. Players drafted then would start filtering up to the majors in...about 2019 at the earliest, most in 2021 or later given AAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaa's preference for high school kids. IFAs would generally take even longer.

In other words, we'd have still had a period of being bad, because there was a massive talent deficit in our upper minors and a 3-5 year lag time before any newly-drafted players reached the majors. Which is exactly what we're dealing with now.

Regarding awesome trades, there was Donaldson, and...there was Donaldson. Beyond that excellent move, Anthopolous' trade record was mixed, to be generous. And to trade for Donaldson required us to have something we didn't have by 2016: highly-regarded prospects that we could afford to ship out. At the time that AA left, our farm system was rated as one of the worst in baseball, because he'd traded most of the quality away.

What? It’s a combination. The reason we have no one now is because Shapiro can’t draft for crap. And trades players away for nothing while eating salary.

the Donaldson trade is probably one of the biggest hoodwinks in blue jays history. I am much more certain that double A would have found a way. That’s why he is a gm and you are not. He has an infinitely better track record than this trash heap we have now. No qualms to be registered about a team this year who has been almost no hit twice in 10 games playing with a decimated crowd. Maybe we are just not a baseball town like Cleveland was with Shapiro.

Btw, double A has had 70% winning seasons as a gm whereas Shapiro has 70% losing seasons as a gm. Yet somehow you seem more skeptical about the previous management compared to the current one.

Also, great zazz with the AAAAAA stuff. At least we know the grammar police is on fleek on this thread.

[BigLeagueChew]

What? It’s a combination. The reason we have no one now is because Shapiro can’t draft for crap. And trades players away for nothing while eating salary.

the Donaldson trade is probably one of the biggest hoodwinks in blue jays history. I am much more certain that double A would have found a way. That’s why he is a gm and you are not. He has an infinitely better track record than this trash heap we have now. No qualms to be registered about a team this year who has been almost no hit twice in 10 games playing with a decimated crowd. Maybe we are just not a baseball town like Cleveland was with Shapiro.

Btw, double A has had 70% winning seasons as a gm whereas Shapiro has 70% losing seasons as a gm. Yet somehow you seem more skeptical about the previous management compared to the current one.

Also, great zazz with the AAAAAA stuff. At least we know the grammar police is on fleek on this thread.

None of the players he drafted have made the majors yet, mostly because they haven't had long enough to develop.

That trash heap was given full control of the team, AA wasn't offered full control and decided to leave. If AA was given full control we'd have an aging extremely overpaid core that would need to be 'fixed' by replacing by 1 or 2 guys or a free agent that magically puts us over the top , or a voodoo trade filling all of our needs in 1 sitting. All while our players that used to be good are getting worse.

You're not winning any arguments here and just showing that you have a complete lack of understanding of the whole situation.And yes it's not that shocking that Shapiro's record is worse when hes rebuilt teams from the bottom rather than starting with teams that have near .500 records. AA here and in LA for whatever and when he went to Atlanta already had some workable talent to deal with going forward, not so much with Shapiro.

[ratul]

What? It’s a combination. The reason we have no one now is because Shapiro can’t draft for crap. And trades players away for nothing while eating salary.

the Donaldson trade is probably one of the biggest hoodwinks in blue jays history. I am much more certain that double A would have found a way. That’s why he is a gm and you are not. He has an infinitely better track record than this trash heap we have now. No qualms to be registered about a team this year who has been almost no hit twice in 10 games playing with a decimated crowd. Maybe we are just not a baseball town like Cleveland was with Shapiro.

Btw, double A has had 70% winning seasons as a gm whereas Shapiro has 70% losing seasons as a gm. Yet somehow you seem more skeptical about the previous management compared to the current one.

Also, great zazz with the AAAAAA stuff. At least we know the grammar police is on fleek on this thread.

None of the players he drafted have made the majors yet, mostly because they haven't had long enough to develop.

That trash heap was given full control of the team, AA wasn't offered full control and decided to leave. If AA was given full control we'd have an aging extremely overpaid core that would need to be 'fixed' by replacing by 1 or 2 guys or a free agent that magically puts us over the top , or a voodoo trade filling all of our needs in 1 sitting. All while our players that used to be good are getting worse.

You're not winning any arguments here and just showing that you have a complete lack of understanding of the whole situation.And yes it's not that shocking that Shapiro's record is worse when hes rebuilt teams from the bottom rather than starting with teams that have near .500 records. AA here and in LA for whatever and when he went to Atlanta already had some workable talent to deal with going forward, not so much with Shapiro.

Weak take.

Shapiro has had a losing record in 70% of the seasons he has been a gm, despite being handed a World Series contender on two occasions. The implication that Shapiro does more with less is completely the opposite of the truth. Shapiro just destroys teams and then claims it’s a rebuild.

The argument that his guys haven’t developed yet is bonkers considering our current talent on the field is atrocious. All of these amazing signings by Shapiro have be garbage. We were last in defense last year and have been almost no hit twice in ten games. Stay woke.

[Schad]

What? It’s a combination. The reason we have no one now is because Shapiro can’t draft for crap. And trades players away for nothing while eating salary.

As people have pointed out again and again, Shapiro isn't drafting anyone (similarly, Anthopolous probably wasn't even in the building when Pillar was drafted in the 30th round; that'd have been Andrew Tinnish and some area scout who liked him). However, we have drafted quite well over the past three years, so the point is invalid. Our farm system is now one of the best in baseball, and it's not solely owing to holdovers. Yet again: those players take a number of years to reach the majors. Under no circumstance would we expect to have a bunch of players drafted in the Shapiro era in the majors now.

And yeah, when you have a bunch of players that were signed by the previous GM to big-money contracts that no one wants, sometimes you have to trade them for next to nothing and eat salary in the process.

the Donaldson trade is probably one of the biggest hoodwinks in blue jays history. I am much more certain that double A would have found a way. That’s why he is a gm and you are not. He has an infinitely better track record than this trash heap we have now. No qualms to be registered about a team this year who has been almost no hit twice in 10 games playing with a decimated crowd. Maybe we are just not a baseball town like Cleveland was with Shapiro.

Ah, yes, when in doubt, just hand-wave it. AA would have found a way because he's just that good.

The Donaldson trade also wasn't a "hoodwink". He was already a very good player; the problem, for Oakland, was that he was going to become fairly expensive through arbitration over the following couple seasons, and Oakland is a low-revenue team that has tight payroll controls. It was a very good trade, but within standard operating parameters...Billy Beane is very good at what he does, but their financial realities mean that they end up trading most of their best players away.

But they trade their best players for, y'know, desirable assets. We had desirable assets then, as we did in 2013. By the end of 2015, we had almost no trade assets...seriously, check our prospect list from 2015:

http://m.mlb.com/prospects/2015/?list=tor

Jon Harris was our top prospect, rated at 80th league-wide. Jon Harris! What a bad list. There's no act of wizardry available to AA or anyone else that was going to turn Jon Harris into a trade for a star.

Btw, double A has had 70% winning seasons as a gm whereas Shapiro has 70% losing seasons as a gm. Yet somehow you seem more skeptical about the previous management compared to the current one.

AA's record with the Jays was a whopping four games above .500 over six years. As people have reminded you repeatedly, he was not the GM in Los Angeles. That is Farhan Zaidi. Ascribing the Dodgers' record to Anthopolous is nonsensical.

[ratul]

What? It’s a combination. The reason we have no one now is because Shapiro can’t draft for crap. And trades players away for nothing while eating salary.

As people have pointed out again and again, Shapiro isn't drafting anyone (similarly, Anthopolous probably wasn't even in the building when Pillar was drafted in the 30th round; that'd have been Andrew Tinnish and some area scout who liked him). However, we have drafted quite well over the past three years, so the point is invalid. Our farm system is now one of the best in baseball, and it's not solely owing to holdovers. Yet again: those players take a number of years to reach the majors. Under no circumstance would we expect to have a bunch of players drafted in the Shapiro era in the majors now.

And yeah, when you have a bunch of players that were signed by the previous GM to big-money contracts that no one wants, sometimes you have to trade them for next to nothing and eat salary in the process.

the Donaldson trade is probably one of the biggest hoodwinks in blue jays history. I am much more certain that double A would have found a way. That’s why he is a gm and you are not. He has an infinitely better track record than this trash heap we have now. No qualms to be registered about a team this year who has been almost no hit twice in 10 games playing with a decimated crowd. Maybe we are just not a baseball town like Cleveland was with Shapiro.

Ah, yes, when in doubt, just hand-wave it. AA would have found a way because he's just that good.

The Donaldson trade also wasn't a "hoodwink". He was already a very good player; the problem, for Oakland, was that he was going to become fairly expensive through arbitration over the following couple seasons, and Oakland is a low-revenue team that has tight payroll controls. It was a very good trade, but within standard operating parameters...Billy Beane is very good at what he does, but their financial realities mean that they end up trading most of their best players away.

But they trade their best players for, y'know, desirable assets. We had desirable assets then, as we did in 2013. By the end of 2015, we had almost no trade assets...seriously, check our prospect list from 2015:

http://m.mlb.com/prospects/2015/?list=tor

Jon Harris was our top prospect, rated at 80th league-wide. Jon Harris! What a bad list. There's no act of wizardry available to AA or anyone else that was going to turn Jon Harris into a trade for a star.

Btw, double A has had 70% winning seasons as a gm whereas Shapiro has 70% losing seasons as a gm. Yet somehow you seem more skeptical about the previous management compared to the current one.

AA's record with the Jays was a whopping four games above .500 over six years. As people have reminded you repeatedly, he was not the GM in Los Angeles. That is Farhan Zaidi. Ascribing the Dodgers' record to Anthopolous is nonsensical.

Yeesh, so many bad takes

1. AA was a draft beast. To suggest he’s bad based on speculatively assuming his physical presence when he drafted Pillar is just stupid, speculative and impossible to refute or prove. Therefore stupid.

2. How you think not getting the AL MVP on a team friendly contract for a guy who isn’t in the league anymore is NOT anything but a pillaging is just beyond pale. We traded Brett Lawrie for a guy who hit 43 homers for us. Yeesh.

3. Look at double A’s winning percentage as gm and compare it to Shapiros and try not to faint. I’ll fill you in, it’s brutal. Shapiro is a proven loser. AA is a winner based on the records. And it’s not even close.

[Schad]

1. You don't understand how drafting works. You don't seem to understand how anything works, frankly.

2. It was an excellent deal. I'm not disputing that. I'm pointing out that it was an excellent deal that came about because we had prospects of value. Lawrie wasn't the big prize in that deal: Franklin Barreto was. We were all out of Barretos when 2016 rolled around.

It was also an excellent deal with no other parallels in AA's history. He did a number of things well as a GM; making big win-now trades, in the aggregate, wasn't one of them. He made some awful, awful trades.

3. AA was a winner with the Jays to the tune of four games above .500, because he had to rebuild at the beginning of his tenure, as our current braintrust is doing. He built a team that was meant to take us back to the playoffs, with a very short window for competitiveness. It accomplished that. But exactly nothing in his tenure with the Jays demonstrated him to be some sort of deal-making savant capable of magicking elite players out of nowhere. With or without AA, we were going to need a full rebuild. His decisions were likely worth it, but they made a rebuild inevitable.


Also, using your flawed premise, behold the Draft Beast:

2014

2015

Exactly zero players from 2014 or 2015 have had a substantive impact on our major league roster. Only one (SRF) is even in our top 30 prospects.

[BigLeagueChew]

Weak take.

Shapiro has had a losing record in 70% of the seasons he has been a gm, despite being handed a World Series contender on two occasions. The implication that Shapiro does more with less is completely the opposite of the truth. Shapiro just destroys teams and then claims it’s a rebuild.

The argument that his guys haven’t developed yet is bonkers considering our current talent on the field is atrocious. All of these amazing signings by Shapiro have be garbage. We were last in defense last year and have been almost no hit twice in ten games. Stay woke.

It's bonkers that it takes players time to develop in the minors? Stay uninformed and deluded.

Says they understand the situation but shows they don't, even more.

[ratul]

Weak take.

Shapiro has had a losing record in 70% of the seasons he has been a gm, despite being handed a World Series contender on two occasions. The implication that Shapiro does more with less is completely the opposite of the truth. Shapiro just destroys teams and then claims it’s a rebuild.

The argument that his guys haven’t developed yet is bonkers considering our current talent on the field is atrocious. All of these amazing signings by Shapiro have be garbage. We were last in defense last year and have been almost no hit twice in ten games. Stay woke.

It's bonkers that it takes players time to develop in the minors? Stay uninformed and deluded.

Says they understand the situation but shows they don't, even more.

What? We are in year three and just gave 55mn to a below average defender who can't get on base and our defense was ranked last year. What exactly are you 'hoping' for? We were the WORST defense in baseball last year and are being run by a GM who has losing seasons in 70% of the seasons he has been a GM.

Are you thinking that Shapiro will turn it around based on prospects in Double A? Playa please. I am stunned people are defending this a**-clown.

[BigLeagueChew]

What? We are in year three and just gave 55mn to a below average defender who can't get on base and our defense was ranked last year. What exactly are you 'hoping' for? We were the WORST defense in baseball last year and are being run by a GM who has losing seasons in 70% of the seasons he has been a GM.

Are you thinking that Shapiro will turn it around based on prospects in Double A? Playa please. I am stunned people are defending this a**-clown.[/quote]

yes.

[Schad]

What? We are in year three and just gave 55mn to a below average defender who can't get on base and our defense was ranked last year. What exactly are you 'hoping' for? We were the WORST defense in baseball last year and are being run by a GM who has losing seasons in 70% of the seasons he has been a GM.

Grichuk has graded out as an above-average OF every year of his career. I presume you're looking at the little "Def" stat on Fangraphs; that includes a positional adjustment, and corner OFs are penalized for playing less difficult positions than, say, a CF or SS.

It's worth noting that the defensive matrix on which that is based is fairly outdated now; given the proliferation of LAUNCH ANGLE proponents, and the increased use of infield shifts, corner OF defense is probably at least as important as 2B or 3B.

Anyhoo, Grichuk has significant flaws, but being below-average defensively isn't one of them.