Hudson, Sanchez, Biagini

Wednesday, July 31 2019 @ 06:48 PM EDT

Contributed by: Magpie

The trade deadline has passed, three pitchers have been excised from the active roster and I gather there's a great deal of distress about losing... Joe Biagini and Aaron Sanchez?

Folks need to vent, and this is the Emergency Thread.

First, however, Daniel Hudson was sent to the Nationals for RH Kyle Johnson.

Hudson signed with the Angels this off-season, but he didn't make their bullpen. They released him near the end of March and the Jays picked him up a few days before the season started. Hudson did a fine job here, demonstrating yet again what every raccoon knows - and this is Toronto, also known as Raccoon Central - that good stuff can be salvaged from the scrap heap.

Sanchez, Biagini and prospect Cal Stevenson were then sent to Houston for... isn't he a basketball player? Oh, a different one? Never mind.

Joe Biagini was taken in the Rule 5 Draft from San Francisco and did a very nice job as a rookie in 2016, working out of the bullpen. He'd been a starter all the way in the minors, though, and in 2017 the Jays tried to ease him into that role in the majors. After a promising start everything went to hell. He went 2-12, 5.63 as a starter and in 2018 he was simply awful. He arrested that decline this season, recovering much of his 2016 form - but it does look like his strong rookie year was driven by a lot of luck on HRs allowed (as in he gave up hardly any, and for no apparent reason.)

Aaron Sanchez was drafted in the first round, 34th overall,  out of Barstow High School in 2010. By 2014, still just 21 years old, he was pitching, and pitching exceptionally well, in the major leagues. He worked exclusively in relief in that first taste of the majors. The Jays began working him into the rotation in the first half of the following year, but the organization was being pretty cautious with increasing the number of innings he was being asked to handle. Sanchez didn't become a full-time starter until 2016, and all he did that year was go 15-2 and lead the league in ERA. The team's next ace, the heir to the late lamented Roy Halladay, had arrived. Or not, as it's been all downhill ever since. A series of injuries, many of them weird and inexplicable (one of them involved luggage), have dogged his path. General ineffectiveness, marked by high walk rates, has been most of what he's provided ever since.

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