Another Canadian Icon Traded - The 2015 Toronto Blue Jays Thread

i think the Jays should just automatically trade for anyone who who omits them from their list. as a kind of "thank you".

he gave them them the "last season may have been a fluke" discount

Yes--with a bit of "I've already turned 30" discount thrown in for good measure.

there's a lot of money in baseball these days, but i don't think anyone is going to offer jbats $150m for his age 36-40 seasons

I think it's a huge bluff by Bautista -- from his perspective if the Jays are dumb enough to give him the money then great, and at the very least they'll be scared enough to go all in this season because they (Jays' ownership) know JBats will walk.

What he hasn't considered is option c), that the new/old Jays regime doesn't give a crap about winning or losing or his contract demands.

I'm not sure what he was thinking. He must realize the team wasn't likely to keep both him and EE (not at market value); so I do t get why'd he be so rigid right out of the gates.

No harm really in playing hardball with management.

uhya... behind closed doors maybe.

well actually yes – the harm maybe be management decides to pay out the other guy well into his 30's, who will probably be DH'ing for most of his contract instead of you!

All the more reason to be aggressive now! He knows he's competing against an equally popular teammate and there's only going to be room for one of them on the team, isn't it better to go on the offensive and dictate the terms of the debate?

I think he also realizes that the only way to get our cheapskate ownership to deal with him fairly (if he's interested in staying with the team) is by making his demands public and getting the fans on his side.

I'd be interested in a study that compares Bautista to another set of similarly-skilled 35-year-olds. (Could be difficult to find a large enough pool of players--Bautista's career arc has been pretty unusual.) Seems to me that the biggest risk he's taking is that he heads into the break this year hitting .225 with 11 home runs or something. That wouldn't be out of the question for someone his age.

His age-based similarity scores (on B-R) list names like Jason Bay, JD Drew, David Justice, and Jay Buhner. All of them were good through Age 34, and all of them pretty much fell apart within the next couple of years. But none of them were as good as Bautista has been from Ages 30-34.

Darryl Strawberry appears as a comp, but it's misleading -- Straw was great in his 20's and then declined, JBats had his first great season at age 29, but if you compare their career stats at Age 34, they're similar.

So yeah, finding a good comp is tough.

Oh please:

http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/14943065/goose-gossage-rips-jose-bautista-toronto-blue-jays-nerds-ruining-baseball

I suspect half the reason people my age remember Gossage so well is because of the flair and colour he brought to the game--he was a character. I know I've said that walk-off bedlam for a meaningless game in June can be a bit much, but the bat-flip game wasn't that.

worst thing about north american sports in general and baseball in particular: old white guys getting mad at non-whites for being insufficiently reticent.

someone started a new thread:

In the Unlikely Event Drew Hutchison Posts a Sub-5.00 ERA, How Will You React? (Toronto Blue Jays 2016)

Yes, someone...I thought I was on the new one, oops.

You're right--I didn't even mention the underlying racial implications. I don't know much about Gossage the person, so it's not an accusation, but you can't avoid acknowledging that. Anyway, Bautista handled it well, and I like the Harper quote in there.

haha hadn't noticed you were the thread starter on the other one