Blue Jays Podcast (VIDEO): Turning Point in the Season

This week’s episode of Jays’ Nest featured a lot of good Blue Jays talk. We hit on a number of interesting topics from the standings, the rotation to trading some pretty big names. You’ll even witness Keegan going off about Chris Colabello‘s performance, but change his tune about a certain pitcher. we also address a reader question that led to some serious debate. And, our weekly awards offer some varied discussion.

Remember, to catch all of our episodes, you can find us on Stitcher (for Android) and iTunes. If you’d rather watch our show, check us out on YouTube. If you like what you hear, please be so kind as to give us a good rating or some stars. Thanks! As always, you can tune in live on Google Hangouts to interact with our panel with questions, etc during our LIVE broadcast. We would also love to respond to your questions/ comments on air. You can submit them to @JaysNestPodcast or toJaysNestPodcast@gmail.com. 

Toronto Blue Jays

We started off the episode looking at the seeming turn around the Blue Jays are putting forward right now. Since our last episode (that featured Daniel Norris, by the way), this club has gone 4-2 and sit just 2.5 games out of first place. We discussed the reasons for the winning record over the last week and whether this is a sign of things to come, or just simply a string of good luck. The starting rotation ha a lot to do with our consensus. They are starting to come around to where they’re expected to be. For a long time, we’ve been saying “They can’t possibly be as bad as this”. Well, now we’re seeing that we were right. The questions is: For how long?

We then moved into a very interesting discussion over Kevin Pillar. And, while he’s been getting a lot of love for his glove, his bat has all but disappeared. This talk centered around the piece by Eric Elliott that looks at whether it may be time to replace Spider Man in center field. After looking at the struggles of Pillar, our panel wondered if there are any real options at this point if the team were to consider replacing him. The answer: There aren’t many. All of this is very interesting because since the beginning of our podcast, we’ve been saying that all Kevin Pillar needs is regular at bats and he’ll do well at the big league level. Well, he’s getting them and it isn’t going well.

After looking at the potential Blue Jays All Star representatives, we moved to the rotation situation with Daniel Norris returning at some point and Marco Estrada likely heading for the bullpen, we spent some time examining the Oakland A’s, Josh Donaldson trade. With The Bringer of Rain on an absolute tear lately, we wondered if the Blue Jays won this trade as it would appear right now. We checked in on those involved in the trade. 

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Brett Lawrie has compiled 52 strikeouts thus far to go with just 6 walks. Kendall Graveman hasn’t had such a good start to the season, including a demotion to AAA. Sean Nolin seems to be OK in AAA and Franklin Barreto is hitting .250 in A+. Any time a team makes a trade, it is hard to say for sure who won or lost, but right now (which is the when the Blue Jays need it to pay off) the trade looks pretty good for the Blue Jays.

From there, we answered a reader/listener question. @DonJuan0217 asked our thoughts on a trade for DJ Peterson of the Mariners for either Jose Bautista or Edwin Encarnacion. We debated this idea. While we weren’t necessarily sold on Peterson himself, we really focussed on the notion of trading either of these studs at the July 31st Trade Deadline. This was a very interesting topic for us. We had varying opinions about the time to trade them or whether they should be traded at all.

We wrapped up with our weekly awards. It was a huge challenge for us to choose a Blue Jays Hitter of the Week other than Josh Donaldson. His 5 home runs in the last 4 games have been incredibly impressive. Keegan did go against the panel, though. And, I took a neutral stance when considering the Blue Jays Pitcher of the Week. There was lots of love for the starting rotation.

All of this and more can be found in our weekly podcast. We thank you all for tuning in every week.

AUDIO:

Jays’ Nest- Jays Journal- Podcast about Toronto Blue Jays – Jays’ Nest #21- All Stars, Trades & More

VIDEO: