Previewing The Farm Rosters: Double-A New Hampshire Fisher Cats

I’ll take up less space with the prelude this time since I established the premise in the previous article. Using Scott Mitchell’s Top 50 at TSN, I’m attempting to project where the most interesting prospects will break camp in less than 60 days.

Between his Top 50 list, and his “just missed” group, no less than 16 of the names he dropped look likely to start with the Fisher Cats including of course the name on everyone’s list, consensus #1 in the system, LHP Ricky Teidemann.
Teidemann was handled cautiously in his first season, and while he was so very good that speculation about making it onto the Jays’ roster this summer is natural, such an ascent would be even more remarkable than Alek Manoah’s in 2021.
In his draft year, at age 21, Manoah hauled 135 innings between college and the Jays system. Teideman threw 38 in college in 2021 and 78 for the Jays in  2022, with a significant slowdown period throughout most of July as a 19-year-old most of the season. Manoah was in his age-23 season when he came up for good. It’s much more likely that he gets 8-10 starts (40-50 IP) for New Hampshire and moves up to Buffalo at some point in June and goes another 80 or so. That’ll set him up to compete for a spot in the rotation in the Spring of ’24.
Speaking of… a mild tangent: between Manoah and long-term contracts, the Blue Jays have four rotation turns locked …

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Author: Tammy Rainey / Blue Jays Nation

Aube-Kubel is another in a series of physical players that couldn’t fit in with the Leafs

Aube-Kubel is another in a series of physical players that couldn’t fit in with the Leafs

I’ll spare you the trip down memory lane to the failed David Clarkson era and the mind-boggling stupidity of paying Matt Martin $2.5M AAV for four years. We can all acknowledge that the Leafs history is riddled with mistakes that only serve to ruin what could still be a pretty good weekend.
Instead, we’ll focus on the recent Keefe-era Leafs and explore how there seems to be a steady decline in outputs from physical forwards the second they put on the blue and white.
Wayne Simmonds serves as Exhibit A here and perhaps the weakest argument as Simmonds did seem capable of playing a role in the Leafs lineup when he arrived. In his first 12 games with the Leafs, Simmonds picked up 5 goals and it was a wrist injury that shut him down.
After that initial season, Simmonds’s time on ice declined sharply. He was still doing what he was brought in to do and that was hit a ton, and fight when he was called upon to do so, but he very much was a fourth liner after his wrist injury and the shifts in the top nine were almost non-existent.
Simmonds’ numbers h …

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Author: Jon Steitzer / The Leafs Nation