Why do you believe teams would want to trade for players like Barney and Bolsinger? If they are looking at the Jays, they are looking at the good players, not the bad ones.

Odd thing to say about a 30-year old guy with close to 3000 plate appearances prior to this year. But he's clearly changed his approach in 2017, so he is listening to somebody.

Echoing greenfrog, colour me cautious about Alford. Some ongoing success at AA would seem to me to be a requirement. I think it's because he just looks so damned athletic that we're assuming he'll naturally turn into a useful major leaguer. That's far from a given.

Is Bautista house-cleaning at this point? Are there really no Bautistists left?

I love the guy, think it'd be a shame to lose him, and would like to see the Jays do what they can to keep him. The Yankees could've let Jeter go about four years before they did... and they didn't. There's never really been a Blue Jays great (Stieb excepted, in a semi-kinda kinda way) who retired with the team. Bautista should be the first.

He couldn't hear his first base coach, who was whispering.

Is that 2 good games from Tulo this week?

His OBP now starts with a 3 and his SLG now starts with a 4, so his slash line is over the embarrassment hurdle. Hopefully this is a sign of a strong upcoming second half.

Donaldson could put up another 7 WAR season in 2018, but if the team finishes with 82 wins and JD bolts immediately after that, how much does it really help?

It helps get me through the summer of 2018. That's gotta count for something. I'm not getting any younger.

More seriously: I would only trade him in 2018 if it was clear that he was not coming back, and if trading him was likely to gain more than the compensation the Jays would get for letting him go. (Looking up the latest CBA, this would be a first-round draft pick if JD signed a deal worth more than $50 million.) If the Jays trade him in 2017, they become immediately worse and lose fans, which means less money to sign players in the future.

Take the Jays drafting on a whole and you have a pretty impressive run since JPR

They drafted well enough to be able to land Donaldson, Tulowitzki, Price, Dickey, and most of the Miami Marlins roster in trades. They basically traded their way to the 2015 post-season. That's pretty good; you have a good point there.

The Jays didn't develop hitters because they didn't draft many, and many of the hitters they did draft - Pompey, Anderson, Dean, Pentacost - suffered from injuries.

The injuries part supports my thesis: that good drafting is really just good luck. If you draft somebody who gets injured a lot after having no pre-draft injury history, that's plain old misfortune.

But it is somewhat astonishing to see how much the Jays have focused on pitching in the draft. Going year by year:

• 2009: first four draftees were pitchers (last year of JPR's reign)
• 2010: first six were pitchers
• 2011: 9 of the first 11 were pitchers (#1 was Tyler Beede, who did not sign)
• 2012: a bit more normal - six pitchers and four hitters in the top 10 - only Stroman and Alford look likely to come out of this draft and do anything)
• 2013: first nine were pitchers (!!)
• 2014: even split between hitters and pitchers

I think this is fallout from losing so many young starters to injury, and from having a team that scored buckets of runs. And it might very well be the case that AA was planning to do all along exactly what he did: bundle bulk pitching prospects to land aging top players. It got the Jays to the post-season for the first time in 22 years, and that's a very good thing.

But it's still true that, by accident, design, or just bad luck, the Jays don't have any young hitters. And we're seeing exactly what happens when you don't have young hitters - gradual declines in performance, increasing quantities of injuries, station-to-station baseball, and boatloads of double plays. I'd do it all again if given the chance, but there was a price to pay, and we're paying it now.

And especially painful when one team after another features so many young stars.

The Astros have Altuve, Springer and Correa, the oldest being 27. The Yankees have Judge and Sanchez (and now Frazier) and two 27-year old middle infield castoffs performing well. The Red Sox have their 3B outfield.

It truly is remarkable how little hitting talent this organization has developed in the past decade, maybe longer.

I'm no Pat Gillick fan boy, but I recall him saying that hitters were safer draft picks because they were more predictable than pitchers. He said that a team's core players should be position players, again because they were more predictable from year to year than pitchers. He said you should build around your core with pitching, reacting as required because of its volatility.

Now, if you've got Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz, maybe it's a different story.

The rest of the pitchers. Sorry for flooding the thread.

Mike Bolsinger

Pretty much the working definition of a replacement-level pitcher: if you need one, you can find one by just making a phone call. Bolsinger's virtue is that he seemingly never gives up. When he gives up a walk or a home run – both of which are likely to happen - he just gets a new ball and tries yet again to get his high fastball and his curve over for strikes. He's gone deep into a couple of ballgames to take one for the team, so he's been better than any of the other emergency options. That's not saying much, though.

Grade: F

Marco Estrada

After a typically wonderful April and May, Estrada suddenly lost it in June. Seemingly, hitters weren't being fooled by his changeup. He's a smart enough pitcher that he was able to get many batters out without it – he's striking out more than a batter an inning – but his mistakes are getting absolutely plastered. He's 33 now, so perhaps he's just reached his limit. It would be too bad if this were the case – it has been an absolute joy to watch him when he was on form.

Grade: D

Jason Grilli

He lost control of his breaking pitch, which forced him to attempt to challenge hitters with his fastball. This would have worked better for him if he was not 40 years old. Before his release, his worst outing was against the Yankees at home on June 3rd, during which he surrendered four home runs. Cynics might suggest that his removal from the roster was delayed until after the scheduled “Fire Up the Grilli BBQ” Father's Day promotional event on June 18th. It's a tragedy – he loved pitching in Toronto, and he was so much fun to watch.

Grade: F

J.A. Happ

His 195 innings pitched last year was a career high, and he's now 34, so it's not surprising that he had arm trouble for a while this year. When he returned, it took him two starts to get his mojo back, but he has been good every time out. He doesn't go deep into games, though, as his pitch per inning count is high – he has not yet made it out of the seventh in any of his starts since coming back. He's a very good pitcher, but he's always going to need some help.

Grade: B

Dominic Leone

Very similar to Ryan Tepera: excellent strikeout rate, a tendency towards wildness, and effective in about three-fourths of his appearances. Not a great pitcher, but he's better than Gavin Floyd and Drew Storen were last year. Admittedly, this is damning with faint praise.

Grade: C+

Francisco Liriano

He's the polar opposite of R.A. Dickey. When Dickey was here, he could be counted on to provide 6 or 7 mediocre innings. Liriano is never mediocre – at any given moment, he is either unhittable or terrible. There's not much you can do, other than cross your fingers and hope. He has managed five wins, and two of his losses have been tough losses, so thankfully there have been more good moments than bad ones.

Grade: C+

Aaron Loup

It's the same old problem: his sweeping sidearm delivery requires him to get his release point just right, or his pitches wind up out of the strike zone (or hitting unsuspecting batters). He's wilder this year than he has been in the past, and he has now plunked 27 batters in 256 2/3 career innings. One of this year's targets was the Braves' Freddie Freeman, who missed 44 games with a broken hand. Loup's future vacation plans should probably not include the state of Georgia.

Grade: F

Roberto Osuna

Osuna failed to convert in three of his first four save opportunities. The last of his blown saves was on April 27; since then, he has compiled 21 consecutive saves. He gave up two earned runs in May, one in June, and none so far in three opportunities in July. He was vulnerable to the home run at times last year, but has given up only two this year. He has a new weapon, a cut fastball, which makes him pretty much impossible to hit. Osuna Matata!

He now has 78 career saves, despite still being several months shy of his 23rd birthday. He'll have a bit of work to do to set a Blue Jays record for most saves in the first three seasons of his career, though – Billy Koch picked up exactly 100 saves between 1999 and 2001.

Grade: A+

Aaron Sanchez

The good thing about his blister troubles, if there is a good thing, is that his arm won't have been overworked this year. He's still only 24, and studies suggest that pitchers this young need to be used carefully. Unfortunately, it might take him a few starts to find his way back, which will cause more damage to an already mortally wounded 2017 season.

Grade: Incomplete

Joe Smith

Until he got hurt, he was fulfilling his role: he picked up 11 holds between April 27 and June 10, and had only two bad outings in May and one in June. His injury left a gaping hole in the Blue Jays bullpen that has yet to be filled. He's 33 and he's never pitched more than 74 2/3 innings in a season, so there isn't much in his gas tank. His strikeout per inning pitched figure is much higher this year than it's ever been before.

Grade: B

Marcus Stroman

It is not surprising that it has taken him a while to figure it all out, given that he has so many pitch options available to him. If you can throw only one pitch, it either works or it doesn't; if you can throw six, you have to decide each time whether to use or discard an available option. At this point, he looks like one of the three players who will be part of the next good Blue Jays team (Sanchez and Osuna are the others).

The only concern is that Stroman tends to give up more ground balls than fly balls; historically, ground-ball pitchers tend not to have long careers in the majors. But Stroman is exceptional in so many other ways, so he might be exceptional in this too.

Grade: A-

Ryan Tepera

For the most part, he's been good – he's picked up seven holds. But in about one out of every four appearances, he gets clobbered. This illustrates how difficult it is to assemble a championship team – there's a lot more pitchers who are good about three-fourths of the time than there are who are good in 90% or more of their appearances. And it's that difference that separates the good teams from the average ones. Could probably stand to improve his control a bit.

Grade: C+

Dave, enjoying your write-up, as usual.

Re Carrera, it's worth noting that in 4 of 5 seasons from 2012 to 2016, his OPS was actually better against LHP than RHP (in 2013, he was 0-for-2 against LHP).

It's only this year that he's finally exhibiting a more traditional L/R split. And so dramatic is that split that he's finally pushed his career split to something closer to normal (676/686).

Stroman's a tough cat to figure out. His ERA has improved tremendously from 2016, 4.37 to 3.28. But his component stats are virtually identical:
2016 BB/SO/HR: 2.4, 7.3, 0.9
2017 BB/SO/HR: 2.3, 7.5, 1.0

Even his BABIPs are virtually the same: .310 vs .315.

His split for bases-empty/men-on-base has improved from 695/756 to 712/719, so that accounts for some of the drop in ERA. But what about the rest? Frankly, I can't help but think that his big "improvement" is an improvement in luck, from bad to good.

I cited a link in this thread showing every team's spending commitments. An observation I made browsing that data, and which confirmed an opinion I already had, was how much presumed buyer's remorse so many long term deals invariably invited. Boston, for instance, can't keep from messing up. They cut bait on Carl Crawford. They just today cut bait on Sandoval. I imagine they'd like to undo the Hanley Ramirez deal. And maybe even the Price deal is now giving them pause.

I say this because the idea of keeping Donaldson around long term seems, on its face, to be warranted. If he is in decline (his first ever serious injury is a warning sign), then he's descending from a lofty 7/8-win perch. So even if he becomes "just" a 4/5-win player, that's still well worth the money. And if a WAR is going to soon cost 12M, a player will only need to deliver 2.5 WAR for a team to break even on 30M.

But I am rationalizing here. Signing guys in their 30s to long deals usually doesn't end well. It looks up front like it should be safe, but so often it just turns ugly.

So while my instinct is to prioritize keeping Donaldson, I don't know. There are reasons to be cautious. But Plan B can't be to take the 30M targetted for him and spend it on three 10M, 1-WAR players. If I have a choice between one Donaldson and three Morales, I'll take the former.

My wishy-washy sentiments as well. So what would you offer?

He's not being trusted with nuttin'. The team is taking a cheapo flyer on him to see if he can find back his mojo. No sign of it yet.