Wouldn't you rather have a hitter of Stewart's ability and experience on the roster than whoever projects as a 7th or 8th reliever?  I know I would.

Consider the following injury risks and uncertain performance which could affect the outfield picture:

A)  Vernon Wells - will his shoulder hold up?  Will he get his power back?  Johnson or Rios may be required in CF if Wells has problems.

B)  Is Reed Johnson healthy and effective?  Even if he is, Stewart is a better bet for performing against RHP.

C)  Can Matt Stairs produce again?  Will Stairs be required to fill in for Overbay if Overbay has problems?

D)  Adam Lind might be the best option but he has to earn the spot after his struggles last year.  If he does earn the spot, it will be at the expense of someone else.  It seems destined at this point that it will take half the year for Lind's situation this year to clear up.

If there is a downside to having Stewart, I'm not seeing it.  In the best case, he has another .300/.350/.440ish season in him and there isn't much wrong with having that available.

Thought I would update and move my comment here since I originally wrote it before this thread was opened....

As far as I'm concerned, the Jays may need 14 position players more than 12 pitchers.

Has the team confirmed where their preference lies?  Is it 5 bench players or 7 relievers?

Let' s assume they decide to go with a very deep 5 man bench of R.Johnson, MacDonald, Scutraro, Barajas, and Stewart.  Let's further assume that Ryan is ready to go and that Janssen begins the season as a starting pitcher.  Givens to begin the season in the bullpen are Ryan, Accardo, Frasor, Downs, Wolfe, & Tallett.  Therefore there would be no spots available for any of Litsch, League, Parrish, Carter, Camp, or R.Wells.  Actually being a rule 5 pick up doesn't R.Wells have to be kept on the major league roster or offered back to the Cubs before being sent down?

Assuming Ryan is healthy and they decide to start Stewart in the minors (barring a trade of Reed), then who has the inside track for this last bullpen spot?  I hope it is League.

Assuming League comes through and they do go with 7 relievers, then AAA is very deep with players ready to help in case of injury on the big club - especially OF and relief.  If Litcsh makes the Jays as a starter then it may be a good idea to move Reed for SP insurance since we would only have Chacin or Pursey to go to in the event of an injury to the roation (I guess Janssen too).

Starting Pitchers: Litsch, Chacin, & Pursey

Relievers: Parrish, Carter, Camp, R.Wells, D.Romero, Banks, Gosling, Kenny "the Cuban" Rodriguez, & Ketchner

OF's: S.Stewart, Lind, & Coats

IF's: Adams, Santos, Inglett, & P.Lopez (with the versitle Scutaro and McDonald on the bench I don't think there is going to be a big risk of having to call one of these guys up)

Am I forgetting anyone?

Stewart was signed to a minor league contract so there's nothing to lose and I'm certainly not opposed to the signing.  I just don't see how Stewart fits.  Johnson is better defensively, and in a strict platoon with Stairs in LF, Johnson is a better hitter against LHP than Stewart with Johnson's career .833 OPS vs. LHP compared to Stewart's career .796 OPS vs. LHP.  Unless Lind tanks in AAA, he would likely get the call over Stewart if Stairs was unavailable in LF against RHP.  Barring a trade or injury, I don't see Stewart with the club to start the year.  Again, though, a good signing since there's nothing to lose.

Ricciardi says:

"We're trying to put the best team that we can possibly put out there and if it creates competition, so be it," he said. "[Stewart has] always been a good hitter. We struggled last year against right-handed pitching - he hit right-handers good, he hits left-handers good. He's a proven .300 hitter ... we'll see how he plays in camp."

He also says 'there could be room for both players on the roster when the season begins....We'll be able to answer all those questions probably a lot clearer the last week of spring training,"

John Gibbons says": "We could possibly end up somehow keeping both of them, you never know."

http://www.nationalpost.com/sports/story.html?id=331824

To some degree that's true, but Coats isn't going to make the 25-man roster. Johnson still provides the Jays with the ability to play all 3 outfield positions and he's a far better candidate to move over to right field than Stewart. If Rios is playing in center you'd have to have Stairs or Scutaro in right, you couldn't move Stewart there. Reed's also a better outfielder period, which is helpful as you can move Stairs off the field in the later innings.

I don't see any reason to take a healthy Stewart over a healthy Johnson. While I'm a Reed fanboy, Reed hits lefties better than Stewart does and it's clear that Stairs is going to play a good percentage of the time against right-handed pitching. Stewart can't come off the bench for defense like Reed can and I doubt he runs as well as Reed does. As I said, if this a contingency plan in case Reed's back isn't 100% that's fine, but if Reed is fully healthy he's a better bit for the team and a better player than Stewart.

Stewart would be useful as Triple-A insurance and that would mean he could be recalled in September and possibly finish his career in a Blue Jay uniform, but I doubt that's his plan for the season.

I apologize for hijacking this thread, but if anyone is interested, we have an exclusive interview with Casey Janssen up at Bluebird Banter.  One of our writers got the chance to speak with Casey at Spring Training on Saturday.  Thanks.  www.bluebirdbanter.com

I now return you to your regularly scheduled thread. 

Speaking metaphorically, Bartolo is only half the man he used to be. A semi-Colon, if you will

You, sir, should be pun-ished for the pain and suffering you inflicted on my gut...

Well Blair reports that the market for Reed is non-existent.

That's really not hard to fathom. Johnson had one very good season, at age 29, that the world viewed skeptically in light of what came before. Back surgery meant not only that he was not given the opportunity to prove that his offensive gains were real, but that he'd have a huge enough challenge simply to prove that he could return to his pre-2006, 4th outfielder levels.

He's 31. He's coming off surgery that is not minor. And while Blue Jay fans may have an emotional attachment to him, the rest of the world sees him more objectively.

And he's now expensive for the role he provides. It was one thing when he defied the odds to even become a major leaguer and then amply filled a 4th outfielder's shoes making $300K. It's another thing altogether when his salary is ten times higher and his upside seems to be a combination of defensive caddy and the RH half of a platoon.

That's the year when he was voted the 4th most valuable player in the entire league, due to his heroics when he single-handedly lifted the Twins to the division title. 

Single-handedly, eh? Some guys named Santana, Radke, Hunter, Koskie, Morneau, Nathan and Rincon may have played  a role.

Stewart did have a nice 304/380/447 line in 378 ABs as a Twin, but that doesn't scream out MVP, even if Jayson Stark was able to convince a bunch of people that it did.

Oops. Mea culpa.

Stewart's 4th place finish in the MVP voting was 2003, when he put up a 322/384/470 line for the Twins in 270 AB (his overall line was 307/364/459). While some of the names noted in my last post are different, I still maintain that the Twins' resurgence was more of a team effort than the media depicted and that Stewart's season, while nice, was nowhere near MVP caliber.

China fan, a few nits to pick.

Stewart was traded because he was an impending free agent that the team didn't want to re-sign. While it's true that many believed Kielty to be of comparable value, that was neither here nor there. The team traded Stewart to get something presumed to be more valuable than the impending compensatory draft picks, not necessarily a player of equal value. The Stewart/Kielty retrospective comparison is therefore meaningless.

Has Stewart really done so fabulously well over the past five seasons? Ignoring the 50+ games he has missed on average (which detract from his value), and ignoring the intangibles which you earlier cited (which would arguably add to his value if they could be proven to exist), let's just look at his on-field performance with the up front concession that OPS+ undervalues players whose skillset is more OBP-centric than SLG-centric, like Stewart.

From age 26 to 28, he posted an OPS+ of 118, 117, 112. The five subsequent seasons were then 114 (Toronto 105, Minnesota 124), 113, 87, 88, 101. So he hung onto his skills at ages 29 and 30 before going into the crapper for two seasons. Last year, with good health he had not seen for a very long time (his 146 GP were the second highest total of his career) he was a league average offensive player and a surprising bonus for the A's who paid very little for that performance. So, while Stewart did bounce back from two awful seasons, we shouldn't get carried away. An OPS+ of 101 from a left fielder makes him below average at the position.

On a final note, you claimed that many analysts have underestimated Stewart. This I cannot understand. Any serious analyst of the game appropriately values on-base skills and would therefore properly measure Stewart's on-field contributions. It is the fans and many in the media who under-value OBP and would thus hold Stewart's lack of power against him.

All that said, I like Stewart on this team. If Stairs has to wind up playing a lot of 1B, then I'd sooner see Stewart vs RHP in LF than Johnson. That said, I'm not sure that a 34-year old Stewart can be counted on for another 101 OPS+.

Stewart's 146 GP, his solid defensive numbers and his 11-3 SB-CS are certainly positive signs of renewed health in 2007 and would support your argument that he'll age well. Without pretending to be Will Caroll or pretending to know something no one else knows, I find myself cautious with my optimism when there is a history of recent injuries. For that very reason I find myself less bullish on Scott Rolen than most in these parts.

China fan,

The MVP voting is not based on who is the "better" player.  It's not based on statistical analysis. It's based on the word "valuable" which contains a whole host of intangibles, including leadership, clutch hitting, and a lot of factors that can't be analyzed by the statistical measurements that dominate the thinking of many Bauxites. 

Well, that's fine, except that the VAST majority of the value that any player provides to his team is in the form of his on-field performance, i.e. hitting, defense, and pitching (for a pitcher). It is nearly impossible to imagine a scenario in which a player with superior on-field performance (i.e. a "better" player) would not be more valuable to his team than a lesser player, and while the statistics we have aren't perfect, especially the defensive ones, they none the less are by far the best tools we have to compare the on-field performance of players. There are other, "intangible" factors such as leadership (though not clutch hitting, which is not a thing that, you know, actually exists) which do contribute value in some sense, and should be considered, but there is no reasonbable argument that such considerations should be given anywhere near the weight accorded to a player's actual performance, which has a direct and measurable impact upon the record of his team.

• Developing a young player to improve his performance
• Assisting other players to get marginal improvements in their performance (i.e. Fasano correcting some of our pitcher's pitches)
  
• Preventing other players from quitting on the team (and it's related concept - getting other players to join the team, i.e. Lilly apparently didn't want to pitch to Zaun again)
• and on, and on

Blair blog has just been updated with some interesting tidbits.

Blair states that the the Bluejays front office as a whole, see Stewart as a big upgrade over Johnson, and that the pressure is on Johnson to make the team. He states the odds of Johnson not making the team are 60%. He also mentions Brandon League is looking good and back in the good graces of the brass.

Blair also adds that Johnson or Lind can be had in a trade along with the Jays "pitching depth".  It seems to me that if the Jays are open to trading Lind if a trade proposal were made, they're really putting all of their eggs in Travis Snider's basket.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/baseball

The subject of platoon splits is an interesting one and I don't believe there is a concensus on the matter.

There is the "8%" school of thought that Rob Neyer promotes and that John seems to echo above. It says that given enough at-bats to remove sample size effects, a RHB will be 8% better vs LHP than vs RHP. In fact, all RHBs will be 8% better. (This 8% number comes from the fact that historically, this has been the aggregate platoon differential for RHB. I don't recall what the metric of choice was.)

There is another school of though that suggests that some RHBs will inherently exhibit wider platoon splits. One of these inherent reasons could be, say, trouble with breaking pitches. Some RHBs, it could be argued, have more trouble than others with pitches breaking away from them and are hence prone to wider platoon splits because of their innate problems with RHPs.

I don't subscribe entirely to one side or the other. My instincts are for the latter but I wonder if self-fulfilling prophecies aren't somehow playing a role. Back in the day, John Wockenfuss was a platoon player for the Tigers, logging almost twice as many ABs vs LHP than vs RHP. His career OPS split was 852/662. Could he have narrowed that platoon split with more playing time vs RHP? Did he simply not get enough practise against them? Or was there something inherent in his skillset that precluded him being any better vs RHP? I don't pretend to know.

The subject of platoon splits for LHB is another topic of interest. In their cases, the argument goes, they are plagued by lack of practise vs LHP, accounting for their volatile platoon splits. Are LHB fundamentally different than RHB or should the same set of arguments apply to them? Again, I don't pretend to know.

If you look at the career PA leaders, all the left-handed hitters have career platoon (vs. RHP as opposed to vs. LHP) differentials more than 8%, led by Yaz' .890/.642 OPS split!  No right-handed hitter has a differential remotely close to this. 

I'm starting to move entirely away from the "8%" school of thought and more towards platoon splits being entirely personal.

The MLB screening process for LHB's is different than for RHB's. Because a LHB will face a RHP 65-80% of the time, he will have a job if he can hit RHP regardless of how poorly he fares against LHP (check out Curtis Granderson).

On the other hand, a RHB will inevitably face RHP a good deal of the time, even as a platoon player, and must therefore hit RHP at a reasonable, if lesser, level than he hits LHP. Thus, any RHBs who might otherwise show huge platoon splits are not even afforded MLB jobs in the first place. This means that RHBs will, on aggregate, show smaller platoon splits than LHBs by simple virtue of the pre-selection process.

Now, some reasonable questions are:

* Are there even RH versions of Curtis Granderson out there to begin with, or does all the practise RHB get against RHP preclude that from being possible?

* If there are RH versions of Curtis Granderson, are they drummed out of baseball early on in their minor league careers? Do they even make their way into professional baseball to begin with?

* Is the scenario of LHB vs LHP entirely analogous to RHB vs RHP from a physics point of view (they are, after all, just mirror images of each other) or is there something else in the mix that makes LHB, in aggregate, more vulnerable to LHP than RHB are to RHP? Or perhaps pre-selection effects are in play here as well. Perhaps a 600/800 LHB gets a job whereas a 675/725 LHB does not because he simply doesn't hit RHP well enough. Perhaps there are many LHB with innately narrower platoon splits who can't find work, thereby throwing off the league average platoon split for LHB.

Like ChicagoJayFan before me, I'm just spit balling.