That list of trustworthy relievers is certainly shrinking. Can't be too long now that Gaston begrudgingly makes Frasor Downs' official caddy.

WIth Janssen scuffling an with Tallet possibly entering into mid-season dead armedness, I wonder if one of them mightn't return to the pen someetime soon, though I imagine the team will want to sort out Halladay's status before deciding who Cecil might be replacing, if anyone at all.

My apologies ... my memory just ain't what it used to be when I  ... ?  

I was remembering your May 5th posting of File and Forget but I forgot to forget .  Maybe I just 'misremembered'.  It seems to be going on alot around here .

Anyways I won't mention the May 4th game vs Cleveland, 9th inning , 2 out , 1 on, 0-2 changeup to Cabrera who ... singled .  The gutting just made it seem like a homerun.

Let's just refile and remember to forget  this time ...  now what were we discussing ?

All hail Dirk Hayhurst, who will soon become the new setup man, or at the very least bridge to the setup man. He's already shooting past everyone on the depth chart except for Frasor and Downs.

First, this was too long between "This Day in Baseball" threads; it was nearly a week. I have been waiting a couple of days to comment, and I am not going to bother doing it on a thread that no one is reading anymore- it has already been pushed off the front page. If you want people to stay on topic, you have to keep up with the threads. There wasn't even one for Doc's injury.

Well, it looks like the team is going to make it an easy decision for JP to not be a buyer at the trade deadline. This team could be below .500 by then the way things have been going lately. The interesting thing is that the team has only had one bad stretch of ten games so far according to Cito's ten game breakdowns.

7-3

7-3

6-4

6-4

1-9

6-4

This current 10 game set looks to maybe be the second losing one.

Speculative theory one: this team needs Travis Snider (as soon as he is healthy). Having an extra power threat in the number 9 hole really doesn't let a pitcher rest through the lineup. This team has won and won and won when Snider has been up here. Since they sent him down, the results have not been that good, and they were not that good last year when he wasn't here.

Speculative theory two: Vernon Wells is still recovering his power from that wrist injury last year. Just like it took forever for Overbay to recover his power, Vernon is missing his. Vernon needs to (in my opinion) take up a lighter bat and try to hit line drives (doubles power). He also needs to lose weight to be a little faster on center field defense and baserunning or even legging out an extra infield hit here or there. If you go to Vernon's Fangraphs' page, you can see that he is only seeing three pitches an at bat (on average). He needs to work the count more. He isn't hitting fastballs as well as he used to because he is swinging at more pitches outside the strikezone (thereby expanding the zone and making tougher for him to hit). Cito has even said that Vernon is starting late against pitches, but we all know he is sitting dead red on fastballs. This season, Vernon has had negative value out there (according to Fangraphs). These changes could at least help him out a little.

Also curious how Cito managed to get a 2 year / 4M contract when he hadn't received a job offer in 12 years.

Okay, here we go. The predictable anti-Cito voices, who had been invisible for the past 12 months, are coming out of the woodwork.  In this case, the argument seems to be: if nobody offered Cito a job as manager, obviously he must be a bad manager.  (Note the factual error in the attack -- it's actually untrue to say that Cito didn't have job offers.  He had tons of job offers as coaches etc, he just didn't have an offer as manager, and so he declined all the many job offers because he preferred to be a manager.)

Here are two of the many points that the anti-Cito crowd are ignoring:  1) over the past 12 months, Cito has a much better winning percentage than Gibbons did;  2) he's kept the Jays in contention this season when his rotation and bullpen have been devastated by injuries, departures, etc.  He's doing it without Marcum, without McGowan, without Litsch, without Burnett, without a healthy Ryan, with injuries to Romero and Janssen, etc, etc.   And the Jays are still within 3 games of the wild card.

• move the team to the visitor's clubhouse and ban Toronto fans from the building. 
  
• make the team keep the road trip routine going full time;
  
• forfeit the last at-bat advantage during home games; let the visitors have it.

           Perhaps Wells' shoulder is acting up again and he is still trying to be the cleanup #4 HR guy. He puts alot of pressure on himself. Maybe he should just back off a bit (a la Scott Rolen) and settle for singles and doubles until the pitchers adjust to his new approach. Right now they seem to just throw him high out of the zone fastballs or anything that starts out looking good and ends up wide . He seems to be swinging at more bad pitches and those swings seem to occur increasingly in proportion with the number of men on base and the importance of the atbat ... FWIW

Anyone who has not been to Fangraphs, you need to go now to look at stats. Here is the link for Vernon

http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=1326&position=OF

If it were his shoulder, I would be so much more angry at JP for that huge contract. The Jays have admitted they knew about the shoulder before they offered him that monster contract. I still think it is his wrist that has sapped his power (remember Overbay, anyone?). I had been constantly going over this since Overbay broke his hand and now his power has returned. It takes time to get over these injuries. People were talking before about Overbay's slump- it wasn't a slump; it was his power being sapped. People talk about Vernon being in a slump. IT IS NOT A SLUMP!  Changing his stance or something is not going to fix him.

While the "Wells sucks" meme is prevalent throughout Blue Jay fandom, it is not a position that leaves room for much interesting conversation or reasonable debate.

First off, I think the issue of his paycheque has to be separated from the issue of his performance.

A gold glove version of a 350/550 Wells may be worth $18M (and it may not), but the ink is dry and the cost is sunk. He's going to get all the money he signed for. There's no turning the clock back there. Nor is there any likelihood, at all, of finding someone to assume the lion's share of the contract.

Insulting Wells for the organization's gaffe in overpaying him is absurd. So while his fat paycheque will serve to (a) fuel fans' disdain for the man and (b) indirectly drive the organization into personnel decisions that are not purely objective (i.e., batting him third, playing him in centerfield), all that really merits debate is what to do with the man.

First off, who is he? Is he the next incarnation of Andruw Jones, i.e., a man who has not just declined but fallen off a cliff? Or is he really an 800 OPS (his career rate) hitter who is just in a slump? Or is the truth somewhere in between?

Is he masking another injury, as he is wont to do? Or have his skills simply atrophied over the winter?

And what of his defense? I think he's been carrying the gold glove reputation for longer than was fair and has been in decline for a while, popular perceptions notwithstanding. This year, of course, things have looked disastrous both subjectively and objectively. A Wells/Rios flip-flop would appear to be in order, but Rios doesn't help force the issue with his never ending stream of brain farts.

Now, what does the organization do? Wells has had success as recently as last August/September, so he's not exactly a man with no recent track record. He's not Buck Coats, say, stinking it up, forcing a dismissal from the lineup. So he does warrant the opportunity to find himself. But the organization is trapped, in a sense. They have painted Wells as the (non-pitching) face of the team. They have invested a great deal of money that they are going to try very hard to get value from (rightly or wrongly). Wells gets to bat in a sexy spot in the order and on defense gets to play a sexy position. Do you move the face of the team to the 8-hole? Do you move him to a corner outfield spot? How does the organization reconcile these seemingly obvious personnel moves with the mythical/marketing role Wells is expected to play?

I don't pretend to have any idea on where Wells' true abilities lie at the moment (that might make an interesting poll question: what OPS will Wells put up from now until the end of the season?). I do know that the organization may be facing some tough decisions, if perhaps only diminishing Wells' role on the team. And I do know that the howling in the blogosphere and the ad hominem attacks are nowhere close to ending. That the man's on-field performance is somehow seen as reflective of his character boggles my mind (and I'm the farthest thing in the world from a Wells apologist -- I was no fan of the contract from the very start).

If any anger is justified, it should be directed at the organization for handing out that massive boondoggle of a contract in the first place.  Don't blame VW for taking the money, blame J.P. Ricciardi for throwing it away.  Once again my biggest criticism of the Jays' GM seems applicable: Poor performance = bad luck.  Exceptional performance = player's true level of ability.  J.P. saw a guy he thought was a 300/350/550 hitter with Gold Glove defence in CF, and paid him accordingly.  Unfortunately for the team and the fans, J.P. was mistaken quite badly.

None of this is Vernon's fault, though.

We still don't know if it was Ricciardi or Paul Godfrey who pushed for the Wells contract.

That's fair.  It's true that Ricciardi might not have been the final decision-maker, and I'm more than willing to give him a free pass on this one if that's the case.  However, it does seem to fit his modus operandi of buying high.

Out of curiosity, how common is it for a team to extend the contract of a very-good-but-not-quite-a-star player before the final year of the previous contract?  I don't mean the buying out of arbitration years; only guys who've already signed a contract and are offered a new one with at least a year remaining on the old agreement.

...there is no reason whatsoever to assume Wells will be this bad even the rest of this year and even less to assume he will be so in perpituity.

With regards to his hitting, I agree fully.  After the hamstring injury last year, Wells came back to hit 318/365/566. This is remarkably close to his "good season" average, so I don't think he's having any trouble with his wrist.  I would theorize that whatever extra work he's been doing since last October has done him more harm than good, but it's possible that's not a significant factor and Vernon's struggles this year are just a half-season swoon based on a mix of bad luck and pressing for hits.  Last year Wells had a much stronger second half.  Granted, his first half wasn't anywhere near this bad, but the season isn't yet a complete write-off for him.

On the other hand, I'm much more skeptical about a recovery in defence.  Aging and that wonky hamstring have likely combined to permanently impair his range, and while it seems plausible that his hitting issues are all in his head, his declining defensive ratings have a more obvious cause.

I'm all for playing him full-time in left field and giving him occasional days off against lefties for now.  I don't think a full-blown platoon is the solution at this point if he's to salvage any confidence at all from being moved out of CF - If that's even possible at this point.  I think he has to be moved down in the batting order though.  If he continues to struggle and the Jays allow him to bat third all season, the organization is going to look as incompetent as the Mariners did last year with their Designated "Hitter" fiasco.