Lohensports

 We're going to sidestep most of the panic in Jays land today and continue the Steelers roster overview I've been doing. I'd be silly if I didn't address it a little bit though. Jeff Hoffman has had a rough month or so here and it's definitely cause for concern heading into the playoffs with no clear option to replace him as closer. Giving up 4 runs in the 9th inning against the bottom of the Twins order is pretty pitiful, and a heartbreaking way to lose. I mean he gave up the tying run on the first major league home run of Mickey Gasper's career, a guy hitting .154 this season. Brutal, we have no choice but to let him figure it out I guess. Anyway, the Steelers defense looks banging, lets summarize it here:  Defensive Line Depth Chart: Cameron Heyward, Keeanu Benton, Derrick Harmon, Isaiahh Loudermilk, Yahya Black, Logan Lee, Daniel Ekuale, Esezi Otomewo This was actually a sneaky weakness of the Steelers last season, and they spent a decent amount of resources...

 The Season is right around the corner and it's time to go over the Steelers roster! I thought about just recapping the moves they made and going from there but as I started I was realizing that I was about to cover every position and instead I should just do an overview of the entire roster. In this post I'll go through each of the positions on offense and talk about the team's moves then I'll give my thoughts on how I'm feeling about the position group. Tomorrow we'll do defense then Thursday unless something crazy happens with the Jays I'll go around the NFL talking about some moves I thought were interesting.  Before I get into that, this is way too short for even a random thoughts post but last night Nathan Lukes was up with the bases loaded and a 3-1 count. The pitcher missed the plate inside and low for what should've been a bases loaded walk, but the umpire blew the call and called it strike 2. On the very next pitch Lukes hit a  2 run double, th...

 I just noticed as I signed on today that this is my 200th post on here! I can't believe I made it to pumping out 200 of these without even really thinking of advertising or optimizing it, but here we are. If you've read a good amount of these, thank you! That's pretty cool, I'm just some dude with a lot of sports takes that I wanted to get out somewhere and this has been a nice vehicle to do it. I appreciate the love and encouragement for sure! Now to the point of the post, the Jays had a pretty exciting series win against the Marlins this weekend. I'll qualify this with saying the Marlins are a very young team, especially on offense, and that showed up in some of the Jays pitching performances this weekend. Still though they are scrappy and annoying, almost like a lite version of the Jays offense this year and it made for some fun baseball. The only game I missed was the one where they lost, so we won't be talking about that much. Lets get into it:  Bieber Fev...

 This is a quick post today, and it's not something that I haven't done before I just think it's timely given the game yesterday. All off season, fans and myself were hating on the Jays front office. We wanted Juan Soto or Roki Sasaki and got neither. This made the fanbase, and myself, overlook the moves the front office did make bringing in real contributors to winning. I'll save some of the other guys for another day, today the focus is on Myles Straw and Max Scherzer, two guys brought in this offseason without much noise and two guys who won the Jays a ballgame last night.  Myles Straw I'll be the first to admit that I hated this move when the Jays made it. To be fair to myself and the fans, the Jays were coming off a season where they had the best defense in baseball, only to have nobody hit anything making the defense useless. At this point of the offseason, the Jays already missed on Juan Soto which bummed the fan base out to a significant degree. It was ok th...

 Wow today for the first time in a while I actually have a few genuine random thoughts that aren't big enough for their own post but are definitely worth thinking. It helps when the Jays game was fun last night, despite the loss. Lets get right into it! Bobby Webster is the Head of Basketball Operations  Some Raptors news in August! This one came through yesterday morning as a nice surprise. After the Raptors let Masai Ujiri go in a move that I came on here and hated on, they said they would be looking for a new president of basketball operations to work alongside Bobby Webster as the GM. I thought that sounded discouraging. Bobby had been around for a while as the GM and if Masai was going to be let go, I was hoping we'd keep some kind of stability at the top and just let Bobby run the ship. Yesterday they announced that Webster will be the Head of Basketball Operations and they will stop their search for a new president, at least for this season. My initial reaction was good...

 Hello everyone, been a while! I took both Thursday and Friday off last week because Thurs I had a half day where I was going to the Jays game and Friday was Friday. With that in mind, I have a lot of Jays stuff to catch up on which is perfect for  a quick Monday post! Side note here, the stadium is rocking now. Every game is sold out in Toronto and the energy is immaculate. Ticket prices are going up but the experience is as well, love when the city starts to vibe like this. Ok lets get into it: Vlad Guerrero Jr. is Clutch (I was Wrong) Yum, humble pie! I've already come on here and talked about how Vlady is heating up and getting some extremely timely hits. That post I made about the "Flu game" had a whole section apologizing to Vlad. I have to come on here again and say sorry once more right off the top though. Vlad's been on a stretch of doing whatever it takes to will the Jays to wins, and it's been so exciting. On Thursday against the Cubs we got a real pitc...

 It just occurred to me last night that I was probably getting close to my anniversary of starting this blog. Then I checked this morning and it was August 12, I missed it! So happy anniversary to Lohensports! I haven't really marketed this blog or tried to make it pretty, it's been more for fun and to just see if I could get better at writing about sports. After a year of doing this, I can confirm that it is fun! Maybe one of you can tell me if I'm getting better haha. In seriousness though, if you're a consistent reader here then thank you that's pretty cool! I have a lot of sports takes so having an online diary to share them has been pretty nice. Ok now to the random thoughts. I am going to make these up as I go because I honestly don't have many today! I skipped yesterday with a busy day and today I am going to the Jays game in the afternoon so I don't have much time to pump this out either. It'll be a quick one I just didn't wanna miss too many...

 The NFL preseason always sneaks up on me. I was flipping through sports channels last week and I came across the Steelers Jaguars preseason game, which got me excited! I half paid attention to the first half of the game, knowing that you can't take anything too seriously in preseason, but it did get me thinking, there's a lot of guys that I'm excited to see for the first time on the Steelers this year and a lot of guys I'm excited to see in a bigger role this year. With about 3 weeks to the season, lets name some guys and talk about them.  Roman Wilson - WR This was the first name that popped up in my head when I started this exercise. The Steelers selected Roman Wilson in the 3rd round of the draft last year, and he had a season from hell. He got hurt in training camp then got injured again, I believe in practice, immediately after recovering. Because of that, this is essentially his rookie season. The Steelers swung a big trade for DK Metcalf to be their WR1, as elit...

 Here I was thinking that the Jays Dodgers series was going to be boring as a Jays fan. The first 2 games certainly were, it was looking like I'd have to hop on here and try and claim the Jays aren't frauds, which woulda been tough. Then came yesterday and we got what might end up being the game of the season. Thank goodness, I have something to write about today! Everyone on earth who covers the Jays is going to be talking about this game, but it's easy so lets hop on too. Skip to the last section if you want just the recap of the fun stuff, though I thought it was fun to set up why the ending needed to happen by giving the context of the first 7 innings.  Tough One for Lauer, Great One for Middle Relievers I guess I should start at the beginning of the game. Eric Lauer, who has been awesome all season, didn't really have it to start this one. After Guerrero doubled to score a Bichette walk in the first inning, Lauer gave up homers to Ohtani and Freeman in the bottom h...

 Fun and silly one today! I am going to The Weeknd concert tonight, my favorite artist, and I couldn't be more excited. I thought a fun way to celebrate this would be to compare all of his albums to a Toronto athlete and provide my reasoning for that comparison. This is an imperfect exercise, but I think I'll have a good time with it. The Weeknd has 8 projects that I'll consider for this exercise, one of them being a trilogy of 3 albums but we'll merge them into 1 for brevity's sake. I've realized now that there are no Leafs on this list. Sorry Leafs, I am just not as tapped in to you guys as I am the Raptors and Jays.  Trilogy (House of Balloons, Thursday, Echoes of Silence) - Jose Bautista Hear me out on this one! This was the Weeknd's first studio project, and a fan favorite. Like Jose Bautista, fans of the Blue Jays of course know who he is and hold him in very high regard. Fans of The Weeknd obviously know Trilogy and hold it in high regard as well. Acr...

 You know the drill by now! I've got a few things I want to talk about but nothing worthy enough of its own post. The Chris Boucher one comes close, but I've written pretty extensively about Chris Boucher on this blog so I don't feel the need to go too crazy here lol. Without delaying any further, here's some random thoughts! Chris Boucher Signs with the Celtics In my last random thoughts Tuesday I had a whole section pleading with the league to get Chris Boucher signed. Obviously the monkey's paw curled because Chris Boucher ended up getting signed by the Boston Celtics on a 1 year $3.3m deal. I had a lot of thoughts all at once. The first one was damn it, the last member of the 2019 championship team is now on the Raptors fans most hated rival, the Celtics. My next thought was damn, only $3.3m, the Raptors really did Chris Boucher dirty! I really believe if he was able to showcase his skills at the end of last season that he'd have better offers on the table f...

 Sorry loyal readers, bit of a hiatus from me! I took Thursday off due to lack of feeling it, then it was Friday, then it was the long weekend and so it ballooned into a 5 day break. With that in mind, I have the trade deadline to react to and I think the Jays did pretty well! I thought about doing a couple other baseball sections in here but I am pretty busy at work today along with the fact that I should save them and parcel them out throughout the week. Anyway, here's how I thought about the Jays deadline:  Bieber Fever! This one came out of left field! Early in the day on Thursday the Jays traded prospect Cal Stephen to the Guardians for Shane Bieber. Having only just gotten back into baseball pretty recently, I initially reacted to the name and was hyped! I remember this guy was lights out when I was watching every game a few years ago, and the headlines reminded me that he won the Cy Young award in 2020. Then upon doing a basic amount of research I was reminded that he h...