Blue Jays Discussion: Vlad Jr wait/watch II: Watch Harder

[hoc123]

So do we want them gone? 1 of the 2 or both?

If we were to get a Paxton like return, I would lean yes to trading Stroman. If we got anything like that for Sanchez I drive him to the airport myself. I would be fine with just a top 100 prospect for Sanchez.

 

[hoc123]

The dodgers are actively trying to trade Puig. If it didn’t cost much I’d be happy to grab him as a moveable asset later.

Yeah he would be a good addition by the Jays. I would see him kind of like a Grichuk type add but with a higher floor, plus the Jays do kind of have an opening in the corner outfield so he would fit.

 

[Cor]

I believe any team can now sign Tulo for league minimum which comes out of what the jays owe Tulo. I believe Tulo just keeps receiving the same salary for the next two seasons. It’s not a buyout.

I believe this is correct. It’s like NHL coaches.

If some team was to give Tulo 14M for whatever reason (it won’t happen) the Jays would only owe him 24M. But he’s getting league minimum so we’ll still owe him roughly 37M


This is the Winter or cleaning up AA’s mess.

Tulo released and the Jays are expected to eat a good portion of Martin’s deal to find him a place to play.

 

[deletethis]

1998 - 19th
1999 - 14th
2000 - 24th

I can't find payroll data for 1996-97, but those are your "big market" payroll rankings for the last three Interbrew years.

Thanks for those numbers.

zeke, you're fake news!

BTW, hate Rogers all you want but if Rogers hadn't bought the team and the stadium there wouldn't be an MLB team in Toronto right now.

 

[deletethis]

The dodgers are actively trying to trade Puig. If it didn’t cost much I’d be happy to grab him as a moveable asset later.

Remember that little propaganda piece with Puig at the CN Tower orchestrated by AA? Word is this dude is a disliked teammate and employee who the Dodgers have been trying to pawn off for several years.

 

[Anthrax442]

If we were to get a Paxton like return, I would lean yes to trading Stroman. If we got anything like that for Sanchez I drive him to the airport myself. I would be fine with just a top 100 prospect for Sanchez.

I still maintain that Sanchez will end up our closer.

 

[deletethis]

To be fair to everyone including Interbrew, the Blue Jays' fortunes (and player sell offs) seem to be tied to the CAD USD exchange rate:

 

[Loosie]

I don't get why you'd ever release a player under these circumstances. There doesn't seem to be any monetary benefit to the team. The only thing this accomplishes is giving the guy an opportunity to play elsewhere this season. If I'm eating $38M from a petulant entitled jerk (it's actually $58M considering the 2018 no-show), I also want to make sure the career is dead too.

So hang on to him for spite? This was the right move the Jays made. He has 0 value right now by missing the last season and a half.

 

[supermann_98]

So hang on to him for spite? This was the right move the Jays made. He has 0 value right now by missing the last season and a half.

Somewhat agree with the other poster. Sure he has 0 value but now he can sign with the Yanks or Boston for minimum wage and we are paying for him to revive his career on a division rival and (probably) beat us directly in head-to-head games as well. Makes no sense to me.

 

[phillipmike]

I still maintain that Sanchez will end up our closer.

He is pulling the Brandon Morrow, in denial about his durability to be a starter. So he will eventually get traded/leave and then become a dominant (imo) closer for another team. Just seems to be how this situation will shake out and how he and Boras work.

 

[Loosie]

Somewhat agree with the other poster. Sure he has 0 value but now he can sign with the Yanks or Boston for minimum wage and we are paying for him to revive his career on a division rival and (probably) beat us directly in head-to-head games as well. Makes no sense to me.

So what. Otherwise he's taking up a spot on the 40-man roster than can go to a young player that the Jays want to develop. Tulo's career is pretty much done as it is right now. He might return to some serviceable form for someone, but it's not what the Jays need right now.

If he had rehabbed and played some of the end of last year than maybe you have him here as a kind of 'mentor' to Gurriel, but really the SS position is his this year.

 

[Loosie]

The industry has generally had a fair amount of praise for team management (excepting Scott Boras, but who cares, Boras would run down his own mother if it got his clients a few extra million or initiated some franchise making a knee-jerk reaction to spend). It's the fans that believe that they suck. The training staff issue is more questionable since it's hard to assess how much of injury problems comes from the trainers and how much comes from the players just getting hurt.

Also there has been training staff turnover in the last couple years and guys still got hurt. So that would seem to indicate that maybe it's not all the staff's fault?



1) He's not an all-star shortstop. He wasn't for several years before the Jays acquired him. He's a broken shell of what he once was and is currently basically borderline unemployable at the MLB level if his defence slips even a little bit

2) The Jays didn't pay him big money. The Rockies did. The Jays simply decided that they'd rather pick up the Rockies' tab more than they wanted to hang onto Jose Reyes

3) He sucked well before the injuries. He hasn't been what people picture when you mention Troy Tulowitzki since 2014. 2013 if you want to consider that he played barely half a season in '14.

4) The team has more than enough 2B/SS/3B types on the 40-man, never mind the wave of guys coming up who can fill those roles. The younger players need a chance to prove themselves more than Tulo needs a chance to get back out there. Gurriel needs a full season of MLB development more than Tulo does. Travis needs one last chance to prove himself worthy of a starting gig more than Tulo does. Drury needs to find a place to play before and after Guerrero arrives more than Tulo does. These and playes who can come up from the system are more important to the team moving forward into its next competitive window than a degraded husk of once-upon-a-time All-Star Troy Tulowitzki.

5) They can't let insurance pay him out becuase he's probably healthy enough to play eventually, just not necessarily healthy enough to play well. He's going to be 35 by the end of next season, hasn't played an MLB game since July 2017, and hasn't played a reasonably full season since 2011. the best case scenario for him is probably a small but noticeable step backwards in his overall play on both sides of the ball. The more likely case is that he's going to show a noticeable lost step defensively (thereby tanking most of his remaining value) and his bat is going to continue its downward trend (as it was already mediocre-to-poor for his entire Blue Jays run)



They get:

1) a spot on the 40-man roster
2) no distraction from the issue of having the most expensive player on the roster probably riding the pine for stretches this season or being trotted out to start even if someone else deserves the job more because of some sunk cost BS.
3) Potentially some yearly monetary relief because while we know they're paying out the whole salary left on his deal, we don't know how. Maybe they pay it all out this year and are off the hook for 2020/21 seasons. Maybe they spread it out longer and don't have to fork out so much every season. Maybe they Bobby Bonilla'd him and we'll get something to laugh and joke about from now on.
4) The goodwill from giving Tulo a chance to find a team that wants him instead of sitting him at home and not playing because there's no room for him.



If there are hypothetical fans whose decision to watch/not watch the Jays is entirely based on whether Troy Tulowitzki is present, I would argue that perhaps they aren't fans worth caring about in the grand scheme of things. Not that what the fanbase wants is worth caring about in a management decision-making process anyway (becuase the goal of management is to achieve as much sustained winning as possible. Fans want wins. You don't make personnel decisions based on fanbase favoritism to players or the like unless it also aligns with "is this going to help my ballclub win now and/or in the future?" Fans make favorite players out of guys who do well and help them win games. You can have all the star players you want, but if the team has no hope and no future and sucks, players will turn on those fans. Fans were already turning on Jose Bautista before the bat flip heard round MLB. Fans turn on great players all the time because they can't singularly drive a team to success. And then they pick up the "not a winner" stigma and it gets held against them even though it's not even close to being entirely their fault.



First, if there's one position more than 2B/SS/3B that the team has some issues with in terms of finding adequate playing time, it's DH. Morales is stuck at DH. Hernandez should possibly be a DH. Smoak will need some time at DH. Martin would probably get some DH work if he's still around. Lots of players need to be able to use the DH spot for a variety of reasons, so shoving Gurriel there to placate Tulowitzki doesn't seem tenable.

Second, shoving a 25-year-old, promising middle infielder who is likely to be a part of this team now and into the foreseeable future just so that they can give Tulo one last ride as a starter seems like poor management.



They were going to let him finish the job. He was offered a new contract as GM when his old one expired. He walked because he didn't like the idea that Shapiro as president wouldn't necessarily just let him do whatever he wanted. Like do the things that got us into this mess right now (becuase this is the price paid for those 2015 and 2016 playoff runs. Let's not pretend this would be any different if Anthopoulos was still here. Except that maybe we wouldn't have Guerrero/Bichette and others in the system to reinvigorate things over the next couple years because they would've been sold off to sustain a 2017 playoff run with a worse roster than what the team had in 15/16.)

We don't know if current management "has the balls to make the big splash" because the roster is not in a position where a big splash would do anything worthwhile.

But we do know they have the balls to cut a guy who has no place on the roster even if it means eating $38m in dead salary. So... they seem pretty ballsy?



Your whole thing was about management before, and now it's ownership? The ownership situation does suck. It sucks they're owned by a corporation that has to operate differently than a billionaire hobbyist owner. It sucks that they're owned by a media corporation that makes them take a bath on the biggest potential revenue stream (TV deal) in the name of corporate synergy. But nothing your really talked about was even about ownership. Well, except that apparently ownership was cool with lighting a giant pile of money on fire to make Tulo go away. So I guess Rogers isn't really as cheap as they tend to get made out as much of the time.

I wish I could like this post more than once.

 

[deletethis]

So hang on to him for spite?

Absolutely. He gets to pocket the remainder of his contract without making any effort whatsoever to fulfil the terms of the contract. I think that entitles the organization to a small level of payback. In the real world there are consequences to your actions. Maybe Atkins and co. know there's no chance Tulo can play any longer and this is a moot point all together. I'm operating on the perhaps faulty assumption that Tulo is holding something back. Maybe this scenario offers watching a committed Tulo go to another team's camp and ultimately getting released. Or worse, no team being interested in him on an open market.

 

[Diamond Joe Quimby]

Absolutely. He gets to pocket the remainder of his contract without making any effort whatsoever to fulfil the terms of the contract. I think that entitles the organization to a small level of payback. In the real world there are consequences to your actions. Maybe Atkins and co. know there's no chance Tulo can play any longer and this is a moot point all together. I'm operating on the perhaps faulty assumption that Tulo is holding something back. Maybe this scenario offers watching a committed Tulo go to another team's camp and ultimately getting released. Or worse, no team being interested in him on an open market.

Contracts are guaranteed in Major League Baseball. Once it’s signed, that money is committed and will be paid, by one party or another via one avenue or another. Hence the importance of a conservative approach when committing dollars to players on their thirties. Getting angry at the player for being unable to fulfill their side of the contractual obligation is foolhardy. The Counterparty knew the risks involved when they agreed to the deal. And in this case, the Blue Jays organization knew the risks when they inherited the deal.

As for the rest, assuming a player is holding something back, elects to have multiple surgeries and sit out more than a calendar year seems odd. Further, basing your level of disapproval on whether the player is able to recover and be an above replacement level performer again is profoundly negative. He’s more than likely played his last game in the MLB, and if he somehow made a miraculous come back, it should be celebrated, not panned.

 

[deletethis]

Contracts are guaranteed in Major League Baseball. Once it’s signed, that money is committed and will be paid, by one party or another via one avenue or another.

I never knew that. I thought the Blue Jays could just wish the contract away.

Hence the importance of a conservative approach when committing dollars to players on their thirties.

It's almost like the GM who committed the Blue Jays to this contract of a player with an already plummeting OPS wasn't a baseball savant after all.

Getting angry at the player for being unable to fulfill their side of the contractual obligation is foolhardy.

This isn't about the player being unable to fulfil his contractual obligation. He can fulfil that without playing another game at any level. This is about his perceived open petulance towards the organization with regards making an effort to fulfil that obligation.

And in this case, the Blue Jays organization knew the risks when they inherited the deal.

The genius mind behind this huge risk was inexplicably rewarded with perhaps the best GM job in the MLB. That was ultimately a Blue Jays' ownership mistake allowing a lame duck to take risks without having to stay around for the consequences. This will make a great book one day.

 

[inthe6ix]

In wake of Tulo release, Ross Atkins suggested the job will not be handed to Lourdes Gurriel Jr. Suggests they make seek a veteran infielder in trade.

— Jamie Campbell (@SNETCampbell) December 11, 2018

I figured we'd be looking at Gurriel Jr and Urena to take over the reigns at SS, but that tweet suggests otherwise.. anyone interested at bringing back Hechavarria or picking up a guy like Galvis to fill the void?

 

[Morgs]

Ew.

 

[deletethis]

I figured we'd be looking at Gurriel Jr and Urena to take over the reigns at SS, but that tweet suggests otherwise.. anyone interested at bringing back Hechavarria or picking up a guy like Galvis to fill the void?

Anyone else find Atkins' openness disconcerting? Sure, look for some veteran depth at SS to push Gurriel and others but why advertise it? What does that gain other than as a gauntlet for the current talent to be prepared for the next season? FA player agents and opposition GMs knowing your level of need is what it advertises. It's like me going into a Honda dealership today and telling them my car is on its last legs and I only want to buy a Honda. What kind of price am I going to negotiate in that scenario?

 

[SeaOfBlue]

I figured we'd be looking at Gurriel Jr and Urena to take over the reigns at SS, but that tweet suggests otherwise.. anyone interested at bringing back Hechavarria or picking up a guy like Galvis to fill the void?

What I do not understand then is why trade Diaz? Wasn't like half of the premise of dealing him due to not having any room to play him in the infield, specifically SS? Or does management literally not have any foresight at all, and had absolutely no intentions of releasing Tulowitzki at any point...

 

[BlueForever75]

Ew.

This was a given. Yanks were not letting him walk.

 

[BlueForever75]

What I do not understand then is why trade Diaz? Wasn't like half of the premise of dealing him due to not having any room to play him in the infield, specifically SS? Or does management literally not have any foresight at all, and had absolutely no intentions of releasing Tulowitzki at any point...

I agree with this. Why trade Diaz if you had intentions all along to release Tulo? Very bad asset management from the front office on this one. Unless Thornton is way more better then we all think.

 

[ShaneFalco]

Ew.

Awww too bad, thought he might come back

 

[BlueForever75]

Yesterday Atkins was quoted as saying that they are close to a FA signing. Has anything been mentioned since? Who could this possibly be?

The article I read stated they were heavily engaged in Lance Lynn talks. Good or bad?

 

[Diamond Joe Quimby]

I never knew that. I thought the Blue Jays could just wish the contract away.

I only state obvious facts when I believe the op requires them to be stated.

It's almost like the GM who committed the Blue Jays to this contract of a player with an already plummeting OPS wasn't a baseball savant after all.

@zeke

This isn't about the player being unable to fulfil his contractual obligation. He can fulfil that without playing another game at any level. This is about his perceived open petulance towards the organization with regards making an effort to fulfil that obligation.

It appears to be an amicable separation. You appear to have formed your opinion based on prior reports.

The genius mind behind this huge risk was inexplicably rewarded with perhaps the best GM job in the MLB. That was ultimately a Blue Jays' ownership mistake allowing a lame duck to take risks without having to stay around for the consequences. This will make a great book one day.

This sunk cost carries very little opportunity cost with it.

I guess my message to you is: is this truly something that requires a fraction of the energy you appear to be allocating to it? Or is this just a situation where one of three outcomes have come to pass, and the tangible effect of this move will have little to no impact on anything you truly care about?

 

[thehockeysong]

Anyone else find Atkins' openness disconcerting? Sure, look for some veteran depth at SS to push Gurriel and others but why advertise it? What does that gain other than as a gauntlet for the current talent to be prepared for the next season? FA player agents and opposition GMs knowing your level of need is what it advertises. It's like me going into a Honda dealership today and telling them my car is on its last legs and I only want to buy a Honda. What kind of price am I going to negotiate in that scenario?

I think it is in response to the widespread resentment in the fanbase. Some of their biggest criticisms came when he delived his "corporate speak".