• Moderators, please send me a PM if you are unable to access mod permissions. Thanks, Habsy.

OT: The Toronto Blue Jays

steve simmons ‏@simmonssteve · 2m
Frank Wren, whose Atlanta Braves finished 1st, 2nd, 2nd, 2nd, last four years has been fired as GM. Wonder how Alex Anthopoulos feels today.
 
Tonight is the perfect example of what is wrong with the Jays offense and why it needs to be reshaped and remodeled in the off season. Zeke will show you the overall numbers and say its fine, well, its not.

Too reliant on the HR to be successful which means they are too streaky with not enough people to compliment the power hitters by getting on base. When they are firing on all cylinders, they can do what they did tonight. When the power hitters go cold, the team goes cold. Not enough depth and too many of the same hitter. Heck, anyone who has watched this team this season can see that the offense has let the team down greatly for extended periods of time.

Jays need to deepen their bench and find a 2B guy this off season among other things.

The best thing to come from September is showing that Gose (despite his HR) and Goins will not be the answer next year in anyway shape or form. Will force AA's hand to have to do something.
 
Last edited:
Tonight is the perfect example of what is wrong with the Jays offense and why it needs to be reshaped and remodeled in the off season. Zeke will show you the overall numbers and say its fine, well, its not.

Too reliant on the HR to be successful which means they are too streaky with not enough people to compliment the power hitters by getting on base. When they are firing on all cylinders, they can do what they did tonight. When the power hitters go cold, the team goes cold. Not enough depth and too many of the same hitter. Heck, anyone who has watched this team this season can see that the offense has let the team down greatly for extended periods of time.

Jays need to deepen their bench and find a 2B guy this off season among other things.

The best thing to come from September is showing that Gose (despite his HR) and Goins will not be the answer next year in anyway shape or form. Will force AA's hand to have to do something.

This is Greg Zaun level dumb.

Hopefully an astray foul ball will hit you in the head and knock the stupid out of you one day.
 
Tonight is the perfect example of what is wrong with the Jays offense and why it needs to be reshaped and remodeled in the off season. Zeke will show you the overall numbers and say its fine, well, its not.

Too reliant on the HR to be successful which means they are too streaky with not enough people to compliment the power hitters by getting on base. When they are firing on all cylinders, they can do what they did tonight. When the power hitters go cold, the team goes cold. Not enough depth and too many of the same hitter. Heck, anyone who has watched this team this season can see that the offense has let the team down greatly for extended periods of time.

Jays need to deepen their bench and find a 2B guy this off season among other things.

The best thing to come from September is showing that Gose (despite his HR) and Goins will not be the answer next year in anyway shape or form. Will force AA's hand to have to do something.

the jays have been top 5 in team batting average and OBP all year, in addition to hr and slg.

they are not too reliant on HR, no matter how many times buck martinez repeats it.
 
the jays have been top 5 in team batting average and OBP all year, in addition to hr and slg.

they are not too reliant on HR, no matter how many times buck martinez repeats it.

right on que. Well done.

When this team is hot, its hot and can bash with the best of them but when they are cold, they are cold. There is no middle ground and that is the point. This team goes into major funks offensively or major highs.
 
the jays have been top 5 in team batting average and OBP all year, in addition to hr and slg.

they are not too reliant on HR, no matter how many times buck martinez repeats it.

Dude, you're arguing with the Pronger84 of the Blue Jay thread.
 
right on que. Well done.

When this team is hot, its hot and can bash with the best of them but when they are cold, they are cold. There is no middle ground and that is the point. This team goes into major funks offensively or major highs.

i guess you can argue that they are innately and irreparably streaky. i guess.

this has nothing to do with being reliant on hr, though.
 
Like every goddamn baseball team?

fat-twins-on-motorcycles.jpg
 
Entering Friday’s games, the Kansas City Royals trailed the Detroit Tigers by a half game in the AL Central and were a half game up in the race for a wild card playoff spot. Math suggests the Royals have a 78% chance of ending a 28-year post-season drought.

That would leave the Toronto Blue Jays, at 20 years and counting, with the longest gap in Major League Baseball between post-season appearances.

It has come to this, then: the Jays face the very real possibility of becoming the baseball version of the Buffalo Bills.

After two decades in which every other team in baseball has at least once managed to do what it cannot — compete in an actual playoff race — there are no excuses left for the Blue Jays. Toronto fans are used to the constant jokes about the ineptitude of the city’s hockey franchise, but somewhere along the way, almost by stealth, the baseball team has become just as much of a place where hope goes to die. The longest Jays playoff drought before this one was only eight years — and that began with the birth of a franchise and a roster constructed from bailing wire, chewing gum and wet matchsticks.

How did this happen? How did the once-mighty Blue Jays become so thoroughly irrelevant? They have had great hitters and great pitchers, but never enough of them at the same time. They have had veteran managers and those who were inexperienced but came with great résumés. They changed the uniforms, mascots, turf, announcers (so many times!) and the restaurant in the outfield. And through most of it, the one constant has been the one thing most unlikely to change: ownership.

For a good chunk of this 20-year absence from games that really felt like they mattered, the Jays, and fans who wanted to console themselves, could put forward a reasonable explanation: it was just too difficult to compete with the free-spending ways of division rivals New York and Boston. This argument had some merit. It wasn’t simply that the Yankees and Red Sox could go out and bid for big-name free agents year after year, it was that they could also preserve their own star players without having to worry about a large-market predator swooping in when the player hit free agency. The long run of Yankees success wasn’t keyed just by the players they brought in, but by those — Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada — they didn’t lose.

But the payroll defence has long since rung hollow. Tampa Bay and Oakland, the thriftiest of teams from the smallest of markets, have made multiple post-season appearances, while the addition of the second wild-card team last season allowed wee little Pittsburgh into the playoff mix and could do the same for it and Kansas City this year.

So: money, on its own, is not a ticket to the playoffs. There’s no denying that it helps, though. If the season ended today, five teams in the post-season would be in the top third of payrolls, two would be in the middle third, and two would be in the bottom third.

For long stretches of their time in the wilderness, the Jays pretended to be a small-market team with payroll in the bottom half of the league, often the bottom third. This was true even though many of the factors that allowed teams like the Yankees and Red Sox to throw money around applied to the Blue Jays as well: they play in a large market, they own their stadium, they own their own regional sports television network, which is in fact a national sports network. And yet, even when the team finally moved into the upper tier of payrolls with GM Alex Anthopoulos’s all-in move in the 2012 off-season, it almost immediately went back to being thrifty.

Though the famously inscrutable Anthopoulos has avoided saying that Rogers Communications clamped down on payroll after the disastrous 2013 season, that’s the conclusion that has to be drawn from the GM’s engineering of salary deferrals among some of his high-priced veterans as he freed up cash in a failed bid to pursue Ervin Santana last off-season. And, though Anthopoulos claimed that “resources” were available to him prior to the summer trade deadline in which he did nothing of substance, with apologies to Danny Valencia, there were a number of big-payroll teams that simply took on more salary in pursuit of winning now. That’s what you do. Detroit added David Price and San Francisco added Jake Peavy to their rotations, classic money-bully moves as Peavy’s contract is expiring and Price is entering his walk year. Both the Tigers and Giants have been outside the playoff bubble this season but now look to qualify.

Toronto’s continued failures can’t entirely be blamed on the frugality of its owners, however frustrating it is for fans who see a huge, profitable corporation that just dropped $5-billion on NHL broadcast rights. Luck also refuses to bless this team, particularly in the Anthopoulos years, which have seen many a prized asset turn into pumpkins.

But when Toronto once again became a big-money team, it needed to commit to the spend. Its best players are either old, nearing the end of their contracts, or both. It’s a win-now roster with a let’s-not-be-hasty attitude from ownership. Does Rogers, with a new chief executive, even see the team as a key asset? On my Rogers phone, I recently received a cold-call text asking me to subscribe to the NHL GameCentre package. My phone has never once suggested I buy Jays tickets.

No, money isn’t the only reason the Blue Jays are missing the playoffs again. But the last time the team did make the post-season, in 1993? They had the highest payroll in baseball.

http://sports.nationalpost.com/2014...mark-team-looks-like-baseballs-buffalo-bills/
 
Back
Top