Blue Jays Journal

This may come as somewhat of a surprise, the Blue Jays top a list of talent production.  Since the 1995 season, they’ve had more baseball player seasons then any other team in baseball with close to 90.  It did bring up a painful memory though and that is that Michael Young is a Blue Jays farm hand.  Man, we could use him now. 

Gustavo Chacin was knocked around for five runs in the first three innings as the Blue Jays faced a pretty big deficit.  Fortunately, the Jays put together a come back that saw them score four unanswered runs, with the final run coming in the final frame, to pull out the win.  Jason Smith had a solid game at the plate.  He went two for four with an RBI and two runs. 

John Brattain worked his magic today at the Hardball Times in his preview of the Blue Jays.  He touches on everything from the back end of the rotation to which players are going to end up on the disabled list.  Nice read.

You don’t normally think of an organization having a log jam in the minors at a particular spot but that’s just the problem presented in the Jays spring training preview at MiLB.com.  The Jays have as many as 20 pitchers vying for spots on the Triple A team, which means a handful of players will probably have to start at Double A.   With just 12 spots, the Jays definitely have to make some decisions and while cuts might be part of the process, you also have to make sure you hang on to the right guys.    There’s also a Q&A with Jays first round pick Travis Snider.

In the latest team preview over at Baseball Prospectus, William Burke takes a look at what the Blue Jays can do to win the World Series.  He talks about how the Blue Jays need some career years as well as keeping injuries under control.  He also talks about the importance of the Jays bullpen putting it together and how just maybe the Red Sox AND Yankees might have down years.  Good stuff.

The up and coming setup man for the Blue Jays, Brandon League, was shut down after an unusual bullpen session in which League’s mechanics were off.  Pitching Brad Arnsberg was also concerned that League was trying to cover up some kind of injury and said it almost looked like League had never thrown professionally, his mechanics were so out of whack.  Now it’s been revealed that League has an overdeveloped lat muscle that’s the cause of everything.  I guess working out too much could actually be a bad thing.

So now the Jays have to reword their pen.  Jason Frasor is as an option as the setup man as is someone like Scott Downs.  Or it could be a committee thing.

Beyond the Boxscores recently took a sabermetric look at the Blue Jays and their chances in 2007.  He says a 90 win season isn’t out of the question and he breaks down every position in a well written piece.  The final conclusion is that the Jays have a lot of “high variance” players and that while if things go right, they could crack 95 wins but if things go wrong (i.e. injuries), then you could even see a sub-.500 record.

Jayson Stark recently penned a great article about how the Blue Jays, by not signing Gil Meche and Ted Lilly and instead went with lower end starters like Tomo Okha and John Thomson, will saved more then $90 million over the life of the various players contract.  And in the end, the production from Okha and Thomson probably won’t be that much worse then what Meche and Lilly do on the field.  Good stuff and I couldn’t agree more.  The Jays spent a ton of money to keep Vernon Wells and that was well spent.  If they can get a full season from A.J. Burnett and then some decent production from guys like Okha and Thomson then the Jays will be in good shape in 2007. 

This isn’t good.  I’m not sure if we can equate this to Frank Thomas showing up to camp out of shape but Frank Thomas will miss the first week of spring games because “his legs aren’t in shape.”  I know he’s had ankle problems and watching him run last year actually hurt but hopefully this is a minor setback.  Having a healthy and effective Frank Thomas gives the Blue Jays lineup a huge boost.