The second place Baltimore Orioles trundle into town having taken two out of three games off the Yankees. With the Red Sox and the Yankees holding up the standings it is opposite day, or week, in the AL East.

The Blue Jays are assigning minor league players to their teams this weekend. The teams will travel to their home cities on Monday or Tuesday with the local teams announcing the rosters soon thereafter. Today I will look at where the top 30 prospects will be assigned and take my best guess. These guesses are not exhaustive, I am mainly looking to place the names you know who are prospects.

The 2019 season begins for the Toronto #LetsGoBlueJays.

Whoa. More than 300 comments? Strike another match, go start anew...

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?