Blue Jays Discussion: No longer the off-season. It's time for real baseball

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i almost wonder if it will come down to someone offering the moon for jansen or a favorable deal for reese. we have one too many active and on the cusp.

cant see them selling on kirk or moreno the way they are coming along
If they were to move Jansen, They would definitely have to add a veteran catcher to backup Kirk. Cant go into season with his inexperience.
 
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Manoah is starting today.

Looks like it will be against a B squad from the Yankees.

Jays lineup

Springer
Semien
Bichette
Guerrero jr
Biggio
Gurriel
Grichuk
McGuire
Davis
 
I don't expect either of him or SWR to break camp with the team, but it's not at all unrealistic to think either (or both) could force his way into the rotation by the end of the year.
Oh definitely can't see either breaking camp with the team, but man.

5 IP, 1H, 0R, 11K, 0BB.

Now that's a statline.
 
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Man we have a deep farm system. To think of the talent who graduated to the big club already, and we have another 2 waves of prospects.

Good time to be a Jay's fan. We could very well see a championship era.
 
Austin Nola takes a foul tip and fractures his finger.

I wonder if the Padres would be interested in McGuire.

Yu Darvish's personal catcher Victor Caratini is expected to open as the starter. The only other catcher the Padres have on their 40 man is Luis Campusano who has no AA or AAA experience. Played a few games with the Padres last season.

Now SD can easily sign Flowers for nothing but perhaps they favor McGuire?
 
After making 2-strike strides in 2020, is Blue Jays' Rowdy Tellez primed for a breakout season? – The Athletic

GettyImages-1304587523-1024x681.jpg


“If Rowdy breaks out, it’s going to be huge because his tools are so big,” Bichette said. “He has the potential to hit a ton of homers and hit for average. If he breaks out, and absolutely I believe he can, he could just be a monster.”

In 2019, Tellez was swinging for the fences because he believed that’s what was expected of a guy as big and strong as him. He hit 21 home runs in 111 games. But he often chased pitches outside of the zone, finishing with a 37.2 percent chase rate, and tried to do too much during at-bats. His strikeout rate was 28.4 percent, above the MLB average.

“It was just pressure, adding pressure to myself, trying to do more than really I could, trying to hit a ‘five-run home run with nobody on base’ type of deal,” Tellez said.

Bichette said he’s seen young hitters, like Tellez, fall into the habit of going up to the plate with a home run in mind.

“Once you look at him, you see home runs,” Bichette said. “That’s what you want from him. And I’m sure he heard it — ‘this guy could hit 40 homers’ — and he’s still hearing it. But that’s not how he’s going to get the 40 homers. I know how he got to trying to hit homers, and it was actually pretty easy to get him off of it.”


Since Bichette joined the Blue Jays coaching staff last year, hitting with two strikes has been an area of focus. Guys like Teoscar Hernández, Randal Grichuk and, of course, his son Bo have benefitted from Bichette’s two-strike teachings.

With Tellez, Bichette said they first worked on getting him to stop trying to lift the high fastball, which was causing Tellez to swing underneath it, instead attempting to get on top of the fastball to make better contact. “What that is is just taking (out) any thought of trying to lift the ball with two strikes,” Bichette said. “If you take that out of your mind, then you won’t come under the ball, you’ll be able to get on top of the ball.”

With the breaking ball, Bichette advised Tellez to let the ball travel deeper — closer to the catcher’s mitt — which would make it easier to put in play. With Tellez’s naturally quick bat speed, he could still generate power, even if he was making contact farther back in the zone. “If you let the ball get deeper with two strikes, you’re going to see the ball longer, and you have a little more time to make a decision: swing or don’t swing?” Bichette said. “And any time you got more time, you’re going to make better decisions.”

Beyond the mechanical adjustments, Bichette also helped instill a positive mental approach in Tellez. It’s easy for hitters to become fearful in a two-strike count, but Bichette reminded Tellez to trust himself. He also reinforced that fouling off a pitch is an acceptable outcome. After all, it means he’s still up there hitting.

“Trusting that (the pitcher’s) got to come to you, he’s got to throw it in the strike zone,” Tellez said. “Believing in yourself, believing that you’re going to be better than him regardless, better than the guy that’s on the mound, and compete. He’s trying to get you out and you’re trying to get a hit, but if you can better him, it’s not always that you got the hit or that you put a good swing on the ball; it could be that you fouled off a nasty pitch that bought yourself another pitch. So trust, belief and competing were big words that stick out to me from (Bichette).”

Bichette’s advice paid dividends. In 2020, Tellez made more contact with pitches inside the zone, per Statcast data. He also lowered his strikeout rate to 15.7 percent, a drop of nearly 13 percentage points from 2019. With two strikes, he hit .260/.275/.420 in 2020 compared with .107/.197/.249 in 2019. Against breaking balls, he hit .281 in 2020 compared with .137 a year earlier. He also pulled the ball less and increased his output to the opposite field by about 7 percentage points. He had eight home runs in 35 games, which put him on pace for 37 in a 162-game season.
 


If this happened in the regular season with the 3 batter minimum is pitch count limit a valid reason to remove a reliever? It's not an injury, but if a guy threw 25 pitches the day before, after throwing 22 pitches to the first batter, removing him 2 batters early to avoid injury should be a valid reason. I assume it wouldn't be allowed.
 
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Austin Nola takes a foul tip and fractures his finger.

I wonder if the Padres would be interested in McGuire.

Yu Darvish's personal catcher Victor Caratini is expected to open as the starter. The only other catcher the Padres have on their 40 man is Luis Campusano who has no AA or AAA experience. Played a few games with the Padres last season.

Now SD can easily sign Flowers for nothing but perhaps they favor McGuire?
They will at the very least 100% grab Reese if we try to slide him through waivers
 


Pretty good interview with Kloffenstein. Channel has interviews with some other prospects also, listened to the Groshans one. Both him and Kloff seem very motivated to get better every day
 
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Mod edit: Sorry, the video kept keeps autoplaying (with sound) every time the thread opens.

If you want to edit in a link that doesn't automatically embed, cool. But I don't want to leave the video up.
 
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