Let's Bitch About Our Stupid, Annoying Baseball Team: the 2024 Toronto Blue Jays Thread

I don't know if Thermo and NoTime and Francis will agree, but for me--as I wrote in the opening post--they're just not a particularly fun team to root for. Their young prodigies from five years ago are a mess, Springer and Kiermaier are showing their age, and they just never do anything dramatic. They plod along. They tease you, and then they immediately revert to form.

As I experience this team right now, I enjoy the defence (Varsho & KK get to everything/IKF is an innately great fielder/even Vlad -1 catch).

The pitching has been incredible and very fun to watch.

I watch the offence and think how drastically a few extra homers would change things. Varsho is going right now, but no one else feels like a game-changer.
Vlad hits the ball SO HARD but he's mostly just vaporizing worms, and it ain't good enough. And it's tiring to watch at this point. Even Bo stinks 🤷🏻‍♂️

That's probably what it comes down to: I miss the homers, the feeling you were always in the game. The three times the Jays were great--mid-80s, two WS winners (overlap, but I'll count those as different teams), 2015/16--they hit home runs, with power up and down the lineup. That has its frustrations too, always waiting around for the HR, but now that I have the alleged pitching-and-defense team I wanted three years ago, I want out. When this teams falls behind a run or two, the game is essentially over.

(Their pitching and defense has been good--the "alleged" is unnecesary.)

after - what - three years of watching them choke in the plays and in general fall frustratingly short of expectations; it's really had to get excited for them. i think the front office has done a great job of assembling a competitive team. most of mire ire is directed at the hitting coaches and the players themselves. Vlad and the coaches seem unable to clean up his approach and i'm sure *when* he leaves, there's a good chance he will do better when some decent coaching gets ahold of him.

It's a very frustrating team to root for as it feels like they are somewhat close to being a great team, but at the same time that greatness seems unattainable.

Sons watch --

The best player among the three heirs to the throne this season in terms of bWAR has been Cavan Biggio (0.3, same as Bo in 2/3rd the ABs, Vlad is at 0.1)

Gary Varsho erasure

Didn't they have another son in the system within the last five years--one who was drafted low as more of an honorary pick?

They did.

https://www.sportsnet.ca/baseball/mlb/blue-jays-select-roy-halladays-son-braden-mlb-draft/

At Penn State, it looks like.

Another (rain-shortened) one-run loss. Berrios was so-so.

Omg ohtani

Boos power the man

Sorry, I won't clog up this thread with ohtani talk! I was midway through writing about how much Ill-will ohtani has in Toronto vs. How much he should have? I couldn't remember if he contributed to the bogus Toronto stories or if that was the media being dumb before he hit that bomb.

Chris Bassit scares me. No man should have that many pitches

Can they patch a lineup together if they sit three slumping regulars for a game (or two)? Managers used to that. Vlad, Springer, and Bichette were 1-10 last night and are now hitting .206/.228/.216. Do something, Schneider. Half the city still thinks you're a puppet manager, so if nothing else, maybe you can bank some credibility. (Also wonder how long Schneider will be around.)

Ohtani never uttered a word. Definitely NAGL for Toronto fans to be booing a generational player on the basis of ... what exactly? Social media rumors? Media hype that lasted all of a few hours?

As one of the Beastie Boys said on Joan Rivers once, "Do I detect a note of jealousy?" (In the booing fans, not you.)

Ha! They really do say that (1:20). I worked with a guy in a record store at the time who quoted that line the next day. The way he said it was actually a little funnier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5UaUqH19-Y

Catchers interference on a non-swing. You see something new everyday

Is that not how the rule works?

It is, I'm not complaining! Just never seen one before!

Well I think I've seen one on a borderline, at least touched the plane of the plate, this one stopp3d just before the plate. Will was really reaching for it + Biggio was super laye with it

Heading to the game today. Might boo Ohtani, but only because I want to fit in.

Yimi Garcia's strategy of walking the 9th-place hitter to lead off the 8th so he could get to Betts, Ohtani, and Freeman almost backfired, but he scraped by (by about five feet).

Maybe the only good thing this season so far at the team level--the flip side of not being able to sweep a series--is that they haven't been swept. Because they have four starters who can throw a great game at any time, they're a hard team to sweep. Put those two together, and maybe that's just another way of saying that, in the end, they're a .500 team.

if i'm not mistaken, Jays have tied their longest streak of scoring 5 runs or fewer at 20GP (10W-10L), last achieved in 2008 (8W-12L)

I don't know a shortcut for checking that, but wouldn't be surprised at all--that's hard to do.

Jays' best ever outfield is back in full force this year

GEORGE SPRINGER!!! 😱😱😱 pic.twitter.com/RX9SMQkmJk

— MLB (@MLB) April 28, 2024

best ever outfield defence* 😏

Bell was adequate at best, but Moseby was really good and Barfield was legendary--close call?

i though Bell was terrible?!

when springer made that catch the stadium went so berzerk, my friend's kid started crying from the commotion!

xp

for the 3 main outfielders last year - KK was 2nd in MLB with a 15 OAA, Varsho 4th with 11, and Springer average. I can't speak for the '85 guys, but that's pretty damn good.

Not as close as I thought (and I actually forgot about KK!)--Moseby's dWARS were all negative from '86-88. For all three guys:

1985 - +2.3
1986 - +2.3
2023 - +4.6

Bell's number aren't great across his career, usually ~ -1.0 each season, but in line with lots of other sluggers, think. I'm influenced by something James once wrote, about working for Bell on an arbitration case and the research he did (pre-WAR and everything, obviously) that showed none of Bell's errors that year cost the Jays any wins. My memory, too, is that he was average, but not Dave Kingman out there.

Oops (important correction) -- that should be '84 and '85, not '85 and '86.

they scored 6! First time since Apr 6.

I really enjoyed watching IKF play shortstop. Bo definitely doesn't come with the same level of surety.
Vlad belted a couple hard liners.
and Pearson International with the save - sick curveball to end it after throwing heater after heater in the triple digits.

the KC broadcast is my favourite that I know of - though Rex wasn't there I don't think

Counting down till when the mighty White Sox and Athletics pass the Jays in runs scored.

1 run each of last 2 games since finally scoring 6. this is just sad. Bo was the rock last last year, don't know what could be going on

Why they're no fun in a nutshell (trust this is accurate): "Dating back to last year's All-Star Break, the BlueJays are 0-37 in games they trailed by 3 or more runs. No other team has gone winless in that time."

a smaller nutshell: few home runs

Probably a good day to sneak Manoah in there with all the Leafs post-mortems dominating local media. Wish they'd saved yesterday's rare jump-start for today.

Not pretty, to put it mildly. Gave up a 6-1 lead, couldn't get to the 5th: 4 IP, 6 hits, 4 walks, 6 ER (and one unearned), 92 pitches. Manoah did strike out 6, the one positive. I didn't see it all, but he can't throw a strike when he needs to, and it all seems to flow from there.

It’s at the point where I’ve turned off notifications for this team. I’d rather follow teams that have starters going for my fantasy squad than this dismal shittrain.

The bet on Berríos was pretty much my last reason to pay attention, and that blew up tonight. (I guess I still have to, though, with five of them on my fantasy team.) In all honesty, I want them to be forced into a position to tear it down and start over, rather than limp into September five games out of a WC.

This isn't the bottom yet, the Phillies are a really good team. We have six games against the White Sox in the second half of the month. If they go 2-4 in those games, I will turn off notifications too.

But with games vs MIN, TBR, and BAL coming up before that, things could get ugly (well, uglier) in a hurry.

If this is somehow searchable, I think I have the perfect record for this team to pursue: worst team ever not to get swept all season. How many series does a team play during a year--about 50? Right now, the Jays are 3 games under .500, but 12/12 in not getting swept. They're an easy team to beat but a tough team to sweep.

I was close--Jays will play 52 series in 2024.

https://jaysjournal.com/posts/former-blue-jays-first-round-pick-all-star-begins-toronto-comeback-with-minor-league-deal

The Blue Jays have been turning over rocks looking for minor-league pitching depth in the past week...The latest rock turned up former Blue Jay first round pick and All-Star Aaron Sanchez, who appears to have signed a non-roster, minor-league deal to return to the organization.

"The latest rock"--I like that.

Nice article in the Athletic about Travis Snider and what he's up to these days. In short, he started an organization to provide emotional and psychological support to child athletes. Essentially he wants to make sure kids have the support that he didn't. I didn't know he experienced so much personal tragedy in his life even before breaking into MLB.

It's fun to revisit our old board posts about Snider, this one of mine is a personal fave:

Those "what if?" scenarios might be reasonable if we were dealing with an ordinary manager, but Cito Gaston has a long history of not knowing the first thing about breaking in young players. Longoria's age isn't the point -- he's just one example among plenty that if you've got a top prospect on the big club then you PLAY THEM and stick with them and that's how they become stars. The fact that the team is hitting well at the moment is also not the point -- this is about the big picture, and nobody thinks about that when the team can do no wrong because whatever they're doing now is presumably "working". But the Jays' management is supposed to be thinking about the big picture, which means this: Bautista shouldn't be playing in place of Snider. EVER.

The Jays have been hedging their bets with their young stars for the past 15 years and that's a big reason why the team has been mediocre for so long. They pulled exactly the same crap with Lind last year and they're doing it again with Snider.

― NoTimeBeforeTime, Saturday, 18 April 2009 01:03 (fifteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've never been so right *and* so wrong in the same post!

Switched back to the jays when they’d closed the gap to 8-6. Been a real fun two innings.

Only saw the first few innings, but Manoah looked sharp today. He gave up a 3-run HR later on, but it was preceded by an error and all the runs were unearned. At a team level, it doesn't matter--they're deader than dead. But promising for him.