The trade deadline has passed, but there's a lot of meaningful fantasy baseball left,

a lot of baseball to be played in playoff races as well.

Here, to help me size down the ALE East, and specifically the Toronto Blue Jays is Joe O'Rico.

We will talk with him about those issues, all coming up on the Rotowire Fantasy Baseball podcast.

Everybody, welcome to the Roto Wire Fantasy Baseball podcast.

I'm Jeff Erickson here with Joe O'Riko. You can catch him on the Fantasy MLB Today podcast at Sport, Sport, Ethos, and Ethos Fantasy Baseball. Joe, thank you so much for coming on board today. How are you doing? Jeff, I'm doing fantastic today. It's really an honor to be on with you. I know I just mentioned it before we started, but Rotowire is kind of one of the gold standards in the fantasy world. So it's always great to talk with you and to be on the Rotowire network as well. Well, thank you. Appreciate that. You're doing a lot of work. You did the marathon trade deadline special. I was on. Thanks for having me on for that. Super fun. How's the voice? Sounds like you're pretty well recovered now. Yeah, you know, I got the lucky break of waking up on deadline day with a five-hour show ahead of me with a bit of a tickle in the throat. And the last few days, I've been a bit better, but there was a good four or five-day stretch where I couldn't really even put out new podcasts. I was kind of cheating and putting out the hour-long segments from that show. So apologies, anybody who usually listens to the new content for me, they couldn't get it last week. But we're all, we're all healed up, ready to talk some Blue Jays, talk some American League East, and talk some fantasy in general. It should be a lot of fun, Jeff. Yeah. And you do a show every day. And that's pretty impressive because I know it. You start to worry about repeating yourself sometimes, you know, hosting shows on both satellite and doing podcasts.

Like, where did I say this? Where did I say that and all that? Who did I have this person on on this platform before?

I think it can be a bit of a grind. So it has tip to you. You said you've done about 400 shows the last two years.

That's pretty impressive. Yeah, I think it's 370 or so when you add in the guest episodes and whatnot. It's probably close to 400. But, you know, I mentioned it before we started recording here. It's not like I'm talking about anything that's too taxing on my brain. I'm there's a lot of info you have to comb through and you want to be giving informed analysis. But at the end of the day, I get down talk baseball for a half an hour to an hour and it's it's kind of nice just knowing that at some point during the day I'm going to have to sit down and talk baseball and it's it's honestly become kind of calming for me just knowing that I'm going to have to do that I get the weekends off so it's not such a crime where I never get a day off but it had some structure to my day knowing that I'm going to have to do that. I get the weekends off, so it's not such a grind where I never get a day off. But it had some structure to my day knowing that I'm going to have to record a pod. And it's kind of just become a part of the daily routine. I couldn't see myself not recording a pod at this point. That's kind of where we are now after two years of doing this. Absolutely. And just even researching for the pod, for the broadcast, you're reading about baseball. You're checking out baseball stats.

You're looking into a player. That's always fun. I mean, that's why we play fantasy baseball in the researching for the pod for the broadcast you're reading about baseball you're checking out baseball

stats you're looking into a player that's always fun i mean that's why we play fantasy baseball in the

first place i would think like we love baseball we want to read up on a player we love gaming usually

too there's those two skill sets and off you go so yeah it's always a blast let's talk uh blue jays

they haven't been as fun lately, struggling to

score runs right now. That's kind of like one of the hidden underlying factors of this

Blue Jays season is you always think, oh, they got this loaded lineup, but it hasn't quite clicked

on all cylinders all season. No, it hasn't. I think a lot of it has to come back to Vladimir Guerrero Jr. But I think if we look at it more from a broader perspective, the struggles with runners in scoring position are just ridiculous. Mike Petriello from MLB.com, he tweeted this out two days ago. So the stats might be slightly different. But with the base is empty, we have a 762 OPS, fifth in baseball.

With runners in scoring position, we're 28, 685 OPS.

If Toronto does make the playoffs, that would be a bottom 10 OPS with runners in scoring

position ever for a playoff team.

And it's the pitching that's kind of carried them.

But the offensive struggles have been pretty severe, I would say. And now losing Boba Shett over these last couple of weeks has definitely not helped. You would not think this is a team that's 15 games over 500 or 14 games over 500. And, you know, if you want to go to the pitching side, they have the best ERA in Major League Baseball with Alec Manoa, who is arguably their ace coming into the season, having a horrible year. So it has been a strange year. We've had, you know, the reemergence of Whitmerfield, who's been fantastic, but then you've also got Dalton Varsho, who's been really struggling. It's very hard to properly analyze this team and see what they're capable of in September, because I think generally you're going to be carried by your pitching in the playoffs and the hitting you need timely hits more so than you need consistent

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