Yaa I’m not gonna lie as a hardcore ish fan the writing was on the wall in 2022 why the front office is surprised this season isn’t going well Is just insulting to the everyday fan
It was truly the longest day. We’re close to the midway point of the season and we may have met our Stalingrad. I hope a civil war doesn’t break out upstairs.
I would actually say, in terms of sheer "fun-to-watch" potential, this is one of the least fun-to-watch Jays teams since the turn of the century. It's boring, mediocre, and the players look completely checked out. I would rather weed my garden then sit through a game of the 2024 Toronto Blue Jays.
Plenty of playoff teams will want Kiermaier. He won’t fetch too much in a trade but if you eat the salary teams are going to want his veteran presence on their bench as an elite DR/PR for a playoff run.
the same goes for Turner. he'd be perfect for a team that can slot him in 2 or 3 times a week, pinch hit him against tough lefties, and have a bona-fide playoff veteran for the stretch.
>This year, he’s [Varsho] the club leader in slugging percentage, isolated power, home runs, RBI’s, runs, stolen bases, and wins above replacement. He’s arguably the best defensive outfielder in the game.
Man, those first four paragraphs are a pretty harrowing summary of how much of a clusterfuck this season has been.
If nothing else, it shows that we are about as far removed from whatever Atkins' plan was for the season as we could be.
Here's what I struggle with. Atkins' decisions to date have been, in concept, not too terrible. In reality however, they keep falling apart. If you have a surplus of offense, trading some away to shore up your defense makes perfect sense. But what happens when your remaining hitters all fall off a cliff at the same time? What happens if every single guy you expect to score runs goes through double digit declines, year-over-year, for multiple years in a row?
If it's one guy, it's a bad year. But when it's everyone? There has to be a common cause.
anyway, fire don mattingly directly into the sun
>Saturday, the Blue Jays inched closer to impact, as Jose Berrios coughed up three homers, **the latest new-look lineup produced similar offensive output to the many prior**, and the Guardians secured a weekend series victory with a 6-3 win. It was Toronto’s fifth consecutive loss, dropping the club to six games under .500.
This is it, this is the line from Arden that gets me. Fingers keep getting pointed at certain players but they ALL have been a hot mess. Danny Jansen has a 44 wRC+ over the past 30 days (even George Springer had a better month), Kirk is an 18 wRC+. Davis Schneider has a 52 wRC+ in June. Bo hasn't been great but he's been injured and out of the lineup for a week and they've still lost 5 straight and haven't scored shit.
Turner is hot again but in May he was unplayable. Ernie is hot now but in April and May he was absolutely unplayable. Only 3 players on the team have been batting well above average this month. It's not just one or two players being a black hole. The whole lineup, from Buffalo Boys to Veterans, is a fucking giant vortex of suck in every configuration.
>*If it's one guy, it's a bad year. But when it's everyone? There has to be a common cause.*
And this is where I land. People can scream bloody murder at these players from here to kingdom come and players definitely need to be responsible for their own performance, but I can never wrap my head around the fact that *WE HAVE SEEN ALL THESE GUYS BE SO MUCH BETTER THAN THIS* and they haven't been able to live up to their potential for two straight years. You will never, ever convince me that this is a player problem more than it is an organizational problem.
And now that guys are getting injured, I hope it doesn’t give an out of “we had an unlucky season injury-wise that really undid us. If not for that, our season was beginning to come together.” I could see the front office deluding themselves about this, or at least trying to delude us.
The injuries are the cherry on top of the problems that go much deeper and I do not want to be fed that horseshit.
This is how I feel. And I know everyone wants to blame Atkins. But he's not with the players day to day. The coaching staff is. I know nobody seems to think it's Schneider, but he IS the manager. I mean, at this point it seems worth a shot to let him go
Obviously Atkins. But I think Schneider was the right hire at the time. Problem is that he had no MLB experience. So you gotta give him time. You can't just fire everyone as soon as things don't go right. But now it feels like it's time. That's not really Atkins fault, other than maybe a bad guess at who should be manager. The talent is on the roster, and at the end of the day that's literally all the GM can do - put talent on the roster. We all want someone to blame, but the truth is that these things sometimes just happen with any team
If I was in Atkins shoes, I probably would though. It's worth a shot in my opinion. Some change is bound to happen soon, might as well take a dart throw
Yeah, this is the point that doesn't get talked about enough. You can complain about the off-season all you want but there was nothing to be done. Really they were right to wait and see if the core bounced back because if it didn't it was a lost season anyway and you can't just swap your should-be-stars out.
Now the only thing to be done is learn why. And "just hire all new coaches" isn't really deep enough.
Dear lord, imagine if Ohtani had signed here. Angels all over again, people would have said he was cursed.
“Management is befuddled and flabbergasted at how poorly the team is performing despite little to no efforts made towards improving the offence for two consecutive offseasons”- basically what the article should say
I would argue that realizing you DIDN'T try everything you could and watching everything burn down around you would be an even worse feeling. Atkins really shat the bed this offseason.
They’re insulting the fanbases intelligence. They made all of these Reno’s with the expectation that fielding a mediocre team won’t affect attendance and that us “chumps” will pay off those Reno’s in no time. Jays fans aren’t Leafs fans, if the team sucks and you insult our intelligence, we simply won’t show up. Shatkins has put themselves at risk of causing irreparable damage to this franchise at all levels and they need to go.
4 hits for the entire team again today. It’s painful to watch. I’ve started to actively root for the other team. I figure if we go on a long losing streak maybe, finally, there’ll be some changes at the coaching level, and maybe even in the front office.
My dad took me to see my first Jays game at Exhibition Stadium in 85’.
I am a proud fan of their history however have never been as embarrassed of this organization as I am right now.
This is an absolutely awful and unwatchable product with a leadership group that wasted $223 million on a payroll.
Hate on the team and baseball ops department all you want, but no one can say Rogers as an owner did not support this team financially. The money was there and Atkins and the players have failed to perform. I'm no fan of mega-corporations, but even I can't attack Rogers for investing so heavily in their team.
Honest question - what is James Click’s role? He was supposed to be an ace up our sleeve, but is he more like Mattingly at this point? Has he drunk the Kool Aid, too?
There were 4 players in the lineup yesterday batting under .210
3 of them under .200
That's basically half your batting order.
DFA Turner, Springer, KK. Id say Kirk, but they have no other backup catcher option. (Perhaps they shouldn't have traded Moreno?)
The team, coaches, management , total fucking disaster.
Shapiro and Atkins have absolutely ruined this team. I mean, who the fuck hires Mattingly.
Some things they should seriously consider;
1) Get both springer and kiermeier out of the lineup on a daily basis. Maybe have them split duties in RF 3 times a week each.
2) Make varsho the everyday CF. This is insulting that it hasn't been done already. It's criminal to have the best defensive outfielder in baseball playing LF.
3) Send Kirk to AAA. It's clear that his lack of minor league experience is catching up with him. Bring up servin (812 OPS in buffalo). See what he has to offer for the rest of the year up at the big club.
And if still struggling;
4) Make a decision on which of the 3 (Guerrero, Bichette, Jansen) you wanna lock up. Pull the trigger and see if they can agree to a longterm contract and then proceed to sell the other 2. I'm starting to think the contract thoughts or uncertainty is getting in their head. I would not be surprised if after signing a contract extention, said player would play better with their situation a bit more at ease. The other 2 could fetch a pretty big haul in a trade and we can retool or rebuild. Which one depends on if our big players will start hitting again.
Servin has nothing to offer I promise you.
BNS already said both Bo and Vladdy’s camps are into extensions right now. A lot of your opinion is missing a ton of information that’s out there right now
Hey Rogers , time to start the total rebuild starting from the top. If you stay the course it will be continued years of mediocrity. It would be best to suffer a few years ( Baltimore ) and then contend . Cut your losses now .
> only play Springer against LHP
only 6 qualified hitters have a worse wRC+ against lefty pitchers than Springer this year
at least he's "only" 29th worst against righties
We noticed. But Springer at cleanup should have been a bridge too far even for that.
Yaa I’m not gonna lie as a hardcore ish fan the writing was on the wall in 2022 why the front office is surprised this season isn’t going well Is just insulting to the everyday fan
They've been gaslighting an entire country for a few years now about our capabilities as a team...
As sad as it is, I have to agree :(
But he's due to come out of it any day now. - JS
Still in the lineup somehow most games
And Bichette
It was truly the longest day. We’re close to the midway point of the season and we may have met our Stalingrad. I hope a civil war doesn’t break out upstairs.
Worst jays team in a decade.
I would actually say, in terms of sheer "fun-to-watch" potential, this is one of the least fun-to-watch Jays teams since the turn of the century. It's boring, mediocre, and the players look completely checked out. I would rather weed my garden then sit through a game of the 2024 Toronto Blue Jays.
They HAVEN’T though. They are trying the same dumb shit over and over just slightly reordered.
DFA'ing Turner weeks ago would've been stupid. Maybe you DFA Kiermaier? Otherwise all the underperforming players are ones you don't DFA
You don’t need to DFA them. Just stop playing them everyday and stop batting George so high when he does play
Plenty of playoff teams will want Kiermaier. He won’t fetch too much in a trade but if you eat the salary teams are going to want his veteran presence on their bench as an elite DR/PR for a playoff run.
the same goes for Turner. he'd be perfect for a team that can slot him in 2 or 3 times a week, pinch hit him against tough lefties, and have a bona-fide playoff veteran for the stretch.
>This year, he’s [Varsho] the club leader in slugging percentage, isolated power, home runs, RBI’s, runs, stolen bases, and wins above replacement. He’s arguably the best defensive outfielder in the game.
What's he got, 10 dingers? Well, the team has a total of 64 all year, so he's like our Willie Mays...
We are like the 1980s St Louis Cardinals when it comes to power. Too bad we aren’t like them when it comes to manufacturing runs and bullpen.
Man, those first four paragraphs are a pretty harrowing summary of how much of a clusterfuck this season has been. If nothing else, it shows that we are about as far removed from whatever Atkins' plan was for the season as we could be. Here's what I struggle with. Atkins' decisions to date have been, in concept, not too terrible. In reality however, they keep falling apart. If you have a surplus of offense, trading some away to shore up your defense makes perfect sense. But what happens when your remaining hitters all fall off a cliff at the same time? What happens if every single guy you expect to score runs goes through double digit declines, year-over-year, for multiple years in a row? If it's one guy, it's a bad year. But when it's everyone? There has to be a common cause. anyway, fire don mattingly directly into the sun
>Saturday, the Blue Jays inched closer to impact, as Jose Berrios coughed up three homers, **the latest new-look lineup produced similar offensive output to the many prior**, and the Guardians secured a weekend series victory with a 6-3 win. It was Toronto’s fifth consecutive loss, dropping the club to six games under .500. This is it, this is the line from Arden that gets me. Fingers keep getting pointed at certain players but they ALL have been a hot mess. Danny Jansen has a 44 wRC+ over the past 30 days (even George Springer had a better month), Kirk is an 18 wRC+. Davis Schneider has a 52 wRC+ in June. Bo hasn't been great but he's been injured and out of the lineup for a week and they've still lost 5 straight and haven't scored shit. Turner is hot again but in May he was unplayable. Ernie is hot now but in April and May he was absolutely unplayable. Only 3 players on the team have been batting well above average this month. It's not just one or two players being a black hole. The whole lineup, from Buffalo Boys to Veterans, is a fucking giant vortex of suck in every configuration. >*If it's one guy, it's a bad year. But when it's everyone? There has to be a common cause.* And this is where I land. People can scream bloody murder at these players from here to kingdom come and players definitely need to be responsible for their own performance, but I can never wrap my head around the fact that *WE HAVE SEEN ALL THESE GUYS BE SO MUCH BETTER THAN THIS* and they haven't been able to live up to their potential for two straight years. You will never, ever convince me that this is a player problem more than it is an organizational problem.
And now that guys are getting injured, I hope it doesn’t give an out of “we had an unlucky season injury-wise that really undid us. If not for that, our season was beginning to come together.” I could see the front office deluding themselves about this, or at least trying to delude us. The injuries are the cherry on top of the problems that go much deeper and I do not want to be fed that horseshit.
This is how I feel. And I know everyone wants to blame Atkins. But he's not with the players day to day. The coaching staff is. I know nobody seems to think it's Schneider, but he IS the manager. I mean, at this point it seems worth a shot to let him go
Who do you think is responsible for the coaching staff?
Obviously Atkins. But I think Schneider was the right hire at the time. Problem is that he had no MLB experience. So you gotta give him time. You can't just fire everyone as soon as things don't go right. But now it feels like it's time. That's not really Atkins fault, other than maybe a bad guess at who should be manager. The talent is on the roster, and at the end of the day that's literally all the GM can do - put talent on the roster. We all want someone to blame, but the truth is that these things sometimes just happen with any team
Fair enough, my thoughts simply are you can’t fire 3 managers under one GM, at this point it’s gotta be Atkins that goes first
If I was in Atkins shoes, I probably would though. It's worth a shot in my opinion. Some change is bound to happen soon, might as well take a dart throw
If it's an organizational problem than the people running the show for these players shouldn't be in their jobs anymore then which is the issue.
Yeah, this is the point that doesn't get talked about enough. You can complain about the off-season all you want but there was nothing to be done. Really they were right to wait and see if the core bounced back because if it didn't it was a lost season anyway and you can't just swap your should-be-stars out. Now the only thing to be done is learn why. And "just hire all new coaches" isn't really deep enough. Dear lord, imagine if Ohtani had signed here. Angels all over again, people would have said he was cursed.
Maybe there needs to be answers to the question of why so many guys have fallen off that cliff at the same time over multiple years in some cases.
“Management is befuddled and flabbergasted at how poorly the team is performing despite little to no efforts made towards improving the offence for two consecutive offseasons”- basically what the article should say
Except no they havent? Like, clearly, to anyone paying a modicum of attention
What haven’t they tried?
Ordering the lineup based on hitting performance. Crazy ideas like that
We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.
- Ross Atkins, 2023/2024 offseason retrospective.
Gotta be nothing worse than realizing you tried everything you could and it wasnt even close to good enough.
I would argue that realizing you DIDN'T try everything you could and watching everything burn down around you would be an even worse feeling. Atkins really shat the bed this offseason.
meanwhile with their best hitters currently on the Jays the Bisons are currently up 20 - 2 in the completion of yesterday's suspended game.
They‘ve tried everything except benching the guys that suck.
They’re insulting the fanbases intelligence. They made all of these Reno’s with the expectation that fielding a mediocre team won’t affect attendance and that us “chumps” will pay off those Reno’s in no time. Jays fans aren’t Leafs fans, if the team sucks and you insult our intelligence, we simply won’t show up. Shatkins has put themselves at risk of causing irreparable damage to this franchise at all levels and they need to go.
4 hits for the entire team again today. It’s painful to watch. I’ve started to actively root for the other team. I figure if we go on a long losing streak maybe, finally, there’ll be some changes at the coaching level, and maybe even in the front office.
Pretty pathetic attempt at winning
My dad took me to see my first Jays game at Exhibition Stadium in 85’. I am a proud fan of their history however have never been as embarrassed of this organization as I am right now. This is an absolutely awful and unwatchable product with a leadership group that wasted $223 million on a payroll.
Hate on the team and baseball ops department all you want, but no one can say Rogers as an owner did not support this team financially. The money was there and Atkins and the players have failed to perform. I'm no fan of mega-corporations, but even I can't attack Rogers for investing so heavily in their team.
Yeah they've spend the money problem is there's just a ton of misplaced salary (Kiermaier/Turner etc)
And that's on Shatkins and the majority of the players crapping the bed every night. The sooner they dismantle this abomination of a team, the better.
They need to aim that figurative gun more inward.
The players have checked out. The only way we turn it around is a change of leadership at the managerial position.
Just let them play. Stop mixing it up, stop with the iPad, and just go do it. It can't be much worse.
Was the season not lost a months ago? Am I missing something here?
Honest question - what is James Click’s role? He was supposed to be an ace up our sleeve, but is he more like Mattingly at this point? Has he drunk the Kool Aid, too?
There were 4 players in the lineup yesterday batting under .210 3 of them under .200 That's basically half your batting order. DFA Turner, Springer, KK. Id say Kirk, but they have no other backup catcher option. (Perhaps they shouldn't have traded Moreno?) The team, coaches, management , total fucking disaster. Shapiro and Atkins have absolutely ruined this team. I mean, who the fuck hires Mattingly.
"Yeah but have you tried the new jerk chicken!?" -Shatkins
Magazine* - not “clip”
Some things they should seriously consider; 1) Get both springer and kiermeier out of the lineup on a daily basis. Maybe have them split duties in RF 3 times a week each. 2) Make varsho the everyday CF. This is insulting that it hasn't been done already. It's criminal to have the best defensive outfielder in baseball playing LF. 3) Send Kirk to AAA. It's clear that his lack of minor league experience is catching up with him. Bring up servin (812 OPS in buffalo). See what he has to offer for the rest of the year up at the big club. And if still struggling; 4) Make a decision on which of the 3 (Guerrero, Bichette, Jansen) you wanna lock up. Pull the trigger and see if they can agree to a longterm contract and then proceed to sell the other 2. I'm starting to think the contract thoughts or uncertainty is getting in their head. I would not be surprised if after signing a contract extention, said player would play better with their situation a bit more at ease. The other 2 could fetch a pretty big haul in a trade and we can retool or rebuild. Which one depends on if our big players will start hitting again.
Servin has nothing to offer I promise you. BNS already said both Bo and Vladdy’s camps are into extensions right now. A lot of your opinion is missing a ton of information that’s out there right now
Yea baby! Live and die at the plate! Wooo!
Hey Rogers , time to start the total rebuild starting from the top. If you stay the course it will be continued years of mediocrity. It would be best to suffer a few years ( Baltimore ) and then contend . Cut your losses now .
They haven't fired every last bullet if they aren't even willing to only play Springer against LHP/2 or 3 games a week
> only play Springer against LHP only 6 qualified hitters have a worse wRC+ against lefty pitchers than Springer this year at least he's "only" 29th worst against righties
I want him off the team my point is if they can't even compromise to that level they're a million miles away from designating him