Seems I've found as many top 30 lists as I'm going to at this point without subscribing to a dozen services. Time to summarize them before the season gets going.

It's time for a fresh thread, and I want to alert one and all to Nate Silver's modest proposal to fix that which is broken. That thing being baseball, of course, which has been broken by an endless procession of ordinary pitchers wandering out of the bullpen to throw as hard as they can for no more than one inning. The result has been tedium, historic numbers of strikeouts (seldom the most exciting thing that can happen on a baseball diamond), and a game awash in mediocrity. Your modern dugout manager has found a way to actually weaponize mediocrity, and roughly a third of each team's active roster consists of these... mediocrities.

Yes, I'm an Old Fogey. And this isn't what I signed up for. You?

It has been a long, tough, ornery winter. But baseball is back, the Blue Jays play their first game of the year today.

It is less than three weeks until pitchers and catchers report to the Jays spring training facility. With the last thread having over 300 responses, a new thread is warranted.

The Doc is in the hall of fame. While some might argue over his number of wins, he was without doubt a dominant pitcher for a long time.

We need a new thread and Fangraphs published their ZiPS projections for the Jays today. It does not make for easy reading. There are no standouts on the team, before Vlad, and the projection for Lourdes Gurriel is very low.

Yesterday, the Blue Jays announced the signing of Matt Shoemaker on a one-year contract for $3.5 million, plus incentives. Shoemaker is controllable through 2020, if the Blue Jays wish to retain him. It appears as if he will fit into the fourth spot in the rotation behind Stroman, Sanchez and Borucki, which currently leaves Reid-Foley and Pannone as the leading contenders for the fifth spot.

It's winter, and they're not playing any games, so I don't pay much attention. (Raptors, folks! And, dare we say it... Leafs?) But stuff is happening, at the usual glacial place, and 300 plus comments is way too much to scroll through. Am I right?

The winter meetings have begun in Las Vegas. Many GM's will be gambling with their moves. Will it be a good gamble or a bad gamble. The Jays are looking to take a flutter on a free agent pitcher or two. Mike Fiers and Kendall Graveman are the latest two names to be forwarded to Ross Atkins phone.

Two new members of the HOF were announced today.

The Bauxites have spoken. I received eight top 30 prospect lists and I have compiled them into a combined top 30. The resulting top 30 is similar in many ways to the Top 30 posted last week but there are a few key differences. The top nine on both lists have the same names with small changes in the order. Further down, the differences are bigger.

For the purposes of explaining the two top 30 lists, I will refer to last weeks list as the “official” list and this one as the “Bauxite” list.