Wednesday Bantering: Offers to Springer and Sugano

Apparently, the Blue Jays have two offers out there:

While appearing on Baseball Night in New York Monday night, SNY contributor Jim Duquette said the Blue Jays gave an “aggressive” offer that was in the five-year range. However, it was worth “well under” the $150 million Springer is expecting.

I’m not really thrilled with the idea of $30 million a year for George Springer, but you do have to overpay for free agents.

And Ken Rosenthal says that the Jays made a ‘significant offer’ to Tomoyuki Sugano. If Sugano is going to sign with an MLB team, it has to happen soon. I think it is more likely that he will decide to go back to Japan. They said he would decide yesterday, but maybe he feels it is worth continuing to negotiate with someone, hopefully, the Jays.

Our friends at Beyond the Boxscore really like him:

If one wants to look more deeply at his stuff they may come away less than impressed. That is the beauty of Sugano, he’s not a pitcher who looks like he should dominate. He regularly sits in the low 90s with his fourseam fastball, though he can get it to the mid-90s when needed. His offspeed offerings don’t look like they are particularly nasty. That’s where one important aspect of Sugano’s make-up comes into play. He is first and foremost, a control machine. He doesn’t walk all that many and he has mastered tunneling and making his various pitches look as similar as possible. Sugano is an old-school pitcher in that he understands how to work over hitters, not just in terms of their weak areas but also in his ability to create new weak areas on the fly based on what he sees happening pitch-by-pitch.

Sugano is a workhorse. Outside of the last two seasons he started 23+ games every year and toed the rubber for 150+ innings each of those years. He’s also thrown 37 complete games in his career, in an era where the complete game has gone out of vogue, even in Japan. This is in an NPB that routinely plays 143 games and uses a rotation style that ensures Sugano only pitched once a week most weeks. Year in and year out Sugano has been a pitcher that his team could count on to go out and eat up innings while still being productive.

Yeah, I stole a large section of their post, but there is a lot more there. It is worth a read. I guess worth the read more if we get him.

MILB.com has a post giving suggesting for suggestions that for AL farm system resolutions. For the Jays, they suggest figuring out what position Austin Martin should play.

Maybe it is how long it has been since I’ve watched hockey, but last night’s game was great, other than the result. Either team could have won, a couple of lucky bounces, and Canada could have had two goals.

Does anyone have a good suggestion for a series to watch on Netflix or another streaming service?