Broadcast news! Shapiro speaks! Bo's deal made official! More!
Some thoughts on this week's good news on the TV front, Mark Shapiro's wide-ranging interview with the Sun, Bo's new deal becoming official, WBC rosters, and more!
Sportsnet finally did the thing.
No, you ghoul! Not quietly disappearing Arash Madani from their TV broadcasts (although…). They have actually, finally, after years of whining in places like this very space, made the decision to produce TV broadcasts for each and every one of the Blue Jays’ spring training games this season.
Starting on Sunday, February 26th, against the Yankees, we’ll be able to see whether Brandon Eisert can get the better of Andres Chaparro — if Wynton Bernard stay back on a D.J. Snelten changeup and blast it into the schoolyard beyond TD Ballpark — if Jesus Bastidas can swipe a bag off of Steve Berman when Matt Peacock isn’t looking.
You know, baseball! And all the magic the spring version of it entails.
From there we’ll get a Sportsnet broadcast every other day or three all the way up until the Jays open the season at Busch Stadium in St. Louis on March 30.
And that’s not all. Sportsnet will air “select road games” as well, meaning there should be several more opportunities for us to check out the team during camp. Though, sadly, some of the other team broadcasters don’t seem to have as robust spring spring coverage as Sportsnet does.
• The Yankees’ YES Network has just one Jays game on their schedule of 13, which takes place on Sunday, March 26th.
• NBC Sports Philadelphia will produce 13 broadcasts, with the Jays showing up twice while visiting the Phillies: Tuesday, February 28th, and Friday, March 17th. (Side note: Wait, St. Patrick’s Day is on a Friday??? Nightmarish.)
• NESN will produce 17 Red Sox broadcasts this spring, including the Jays’ visit to Fort Myers on Friday, March 10th.
• None of the five Tigers games on Bally Sports Detroit will feature the Blue Jays, nor will any of the games against Atlanta on Bally Sports Southeast.
• The Rays’ broadcast schedule on Bally Sports Sun, the Twins’ schedule on Bally Sports North, the Orioles’ schedule on MASN, and the Pirates’ schedule on AT&T SportsNet have not yet been released.
That’s only four additional Jays games confirmed so far, and with the impending financial collapse of Diamond Sports Group — the Sinclair subsidiary that owns the various Bally Sports RSNs — I wouldn’t necessarily bet on a significant number being added once the Rays and Twins make their announcements. But still, 19 games out of a possible 301 is pretty good. Lest we forget, back in 2021, only 10 Jays Grapefruit League games were broadcast, and none of them were produced by Sportsnet.
That 2021 decision was obviously somewhat pandemic-related, but it was also a travesty. Here’s what I wrote about it at the time:
Treat the team your company just let spend nearly $200 million on baseball players like a team your company just let spend nearly $200 million on baseball players. Treat their games, even exhibition ones, like something people not only want to follow — because many absolutely do and are rightfully disappointed by this decision — but that people should be following. This isn’t hard.
Finally, Sportsnet is doing exactly that.
And speaking of travesties of the past being righted, they also seem to be at least a little bit closer to getting things right on the radio side as well.
In a follow-up tweet, Ben adds that his radio call will be available for every game — spring, regular season, and postseason — on Sportsnet.com and the Sportsnet app this year for the first time. That’s tremendous news. Unfortunately, while Ben will travelling to road parks this spring, Simon Houpt of the Globe and Mail revealed in his Friday piece on the changes that once the regular season begins Ben will return to calling road games from 1 Mount Pleasant.
Ben’s a pro and does great work no matter where he’s broadcasting from, but that’s a shame. Like I said back in 2021, it makes zero sense to make such financial commitments to the product on the field and not to the way that fans want to consume it. Margins are obviously thinner on the radio side, but especially with games now available for those without radios or an MLB Audio subscription, there’s no excuse not to make it as good as possible.
As of last March, per Dan Connolly of the Athletic, only four teams did not have radio broadcasters travelling to road games: the Dodgers and Angels, who both did so because it was the crew’s preference, plus the Blue Jays and Orioles.
This is an issue not just about calling the game off of a screen but about storytelling, too. Getting to be on the field before games, and around the team in general, is important. If the Pirates can send a radio crew on the road, if the Guardians can send a radio crew on the road, if you’re Rogers and you can afford to send the TV crew on the road, you can send the radio guy. Come on.
There was more news announced on Wednesday, too. As mentioned above, it appears as though I’ll be retiring some oft-used Simpsons imagery…
Hazel Mae and Arden Zwelling are listed as the only on-field reporters for this season. More significantly, Sportsnet made it official that the legendary Buck Martinez will be back this season — and it sounds as though he'll have a bigger role than many anticipated. Or at least than I did.
"Dan Shulman delivers the play-by-play call alongside analyst Buck Martinez throughout the season. Joe Siddall will also serve as game analyst for select series," the official press release crows.
This is obviously tremendous news, as there were very real questions this winter about whether Buck would return at all — including from Buck himself.
“I don’t know,” was Buck’s reply when asked by Houpt for a Globe piece back in October whether he was going to return to the booth in 2023.
“It has nothing to do with Rogers,” he continued. “It’s just me. You know, I’ve been through a lot. And, you know, my wife and I have had a lot of discussions about it. I don’t know.”
My guess at the time was that we might see Buck in a reduced role, but clearly the pull of the ballpark was too strong for one of the game’s ultimate lifers. You love to see it.
Of course, Buck’s longtime partner, Pat Tabler, was unceremoniously dumped by Sportsnet when his contract expired at the end of last season. I’m hopeful that they will at least give Buck the courtesy of letting him go out on his own terms — perhaps a factor in his decision to return in what sounds like full capacity. I do love the Dan-Joe booth and am glad we’ll hear a little more of it this year, but there will be plenty of time for that going forward I suspect.
So, uh… yeah. Mostly good news! Well done, Sportsnet! I assure you I don’t like typing those words! Well done!
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Shapiro Speaks (to the Toronto Sun)
Rob Longley of the Toronto Sun spoke to Jays president and CEO Mark Shapiro recently, and a bunch of quotes from that session ended up being spread across three of his pieces this week. You can read each of the pieces via the following links: part 1, part 2, part 3. I encourage you to do so, because I certainly won’t be covering everything said in each of them below. Nevertheless, here are some highlights, as well as my thoughts on the selected quotes. You know the drill!
On last season’s playoff exit…
“It was a bitter, disappointing end, but the season was not a disappointment. We’ll use that bitterness as fuel to build our expectations this year and we’ll be better prepared for the postseason.”
I mean, clearly Shapiro feels that this is something he has to say for the sake of his players and staff — and, perhaps, his marketing department — but in what possible way was last season not a disappointment? You improved by one win on the team that missed the playoffs by a game in 2021, got bounced from the playoffs at home in the most humiliating fashion possible (partly because of issues of defence and the bullpen that had long been glaring), and along the way fired your manager, saw Vlad’s production dip, watched Bo struggle for nearly five entire months (his wRC+ when he woke up on August 22nd was 104), had Springer battling injuries all season again, and endured year one of a three-year deal with Kikuchi where he needed to be banished to the bullpen, while Berríos somehow managed with an even worse ERA in year one of a seven-year, $131 million extension.
I think it’s OK to call that a disappointing year. Even if winning 92 games and making the playoffs is obviously, objectively, good.
On accountability and culture…
“I think ultimately what we’re hopeful of is that we’ve built a team culture where our players take ownership of their fate, are holding each other accountable for high standards and expectations and they are responsible for the outcomes.”
This is not especially different than anything the team has been saying for years, but it’s hard not to notice how often “accountability” has come up since about the middle of last season. What’s trickier is deciding what, exactly, it all means.
Back at the end of August the Jays were swept at home by the Angels, dropping their record to 11-13 for the month and leaving them just 1.5 games ahead of a Baltimore Orioles team that had lost 110 times in 2021. As I wrote at the time, by this point in the season Buck Martinez was becoming much more vocal in his criticisms of the club’s malaise during TV broadcasts. That specific weekend Joe Siddall and Jamie Campbell had been particularly critical of Teoscar Hernández after a play, which I brought up in last week’s transaction-ranking piece, which saw him cost the team a run because of some extremely casual base running.
Teoscar was given the next game off, and while the team insisted it was because of the foot injury that may or may not have had something to do with the incident, when he returned the following day and belted a go-ahead three-run homer in the sixth inning against the Cubs, the broadcast attributed it to the “wake-up call” he’d been given.
More than that, the whole situation seemed to wake the front office up to an ever-deepening image problem. Both Shapiro and Ross Atkins spoke to the media that week, with Shapiro acknowledging that it was a somewhat unusual time in the season for him to be doing so. And the thing is — the reason I bring this all up — is that the response then was also about to talk accountability. Only, it was to insist that accountability at the time was entirely fine!
“Even in my role, obviously, as we watch baseball and watch a lot of it, it can become easy to fall into the trap of expecting perfection from human beings. Which just isn't going to happen,” Atkins said. “We have the benefit of seeing under the hood, and get to see — and you (media) do as well — the work that goes in on a daily basis, their preparation, their conversations about accountability. And that gives me a great deal of confidence in where this team is.”
The Jays went 24-12 the rest of the way, powered by Bichette’s offensive explosion, finishing nine games ahead of the O’s and comfortably making the playoffs. This would seem to have vindicated Atkins on the point of accountability, and yet they’re still talking about it!
Is it all just a “fans will never respond poorly when we say we need more accountability” thing? Because that I could believe.
On roster balance…
“What we’ve got right now, as far as the time we’ve been here, is the best balance from the (different) segments of (player) populations.”
A criticism of the Jays’ approach this winter might be that they’ve become overly reliant on older and oft-injured players. The average age of the nine big leaguers the Jays have brought in since the trade deadline — Anthony Bass, Chris Bassitt, Brandon Belt, Chad Green, Kevin Kiermaier, Whit Merrifield, Erik Swanson, Daulton Varsho, and Mitch White — is 31.9 years.
This, however, appears to have been a rather deliberate move, and one that the front office has gone into with eyes wide open. Consider what Shapiro said back on an October 2019 episode of Sportsnet’s At The Letters podcast when talking about the Washington Nationals, who were then on their way to becoming World Series champions:
“I've always been a big believer in looking at the different segments of the player population and feeling like, when you're ready to win, you need representation from all three. So, you need young players — you know, obviously Robles, and Taylor, really hyper-talented young players that give you upside and tons of energy and, frankly, can just play and stay healthy. You need players in their prime, like Rendon and Trea Turner, guys like that — like, right in the middle of their prime — because they're the most reliable performance and you can bank on what they're capable of. And then you need veteran players. And they're volatile because they get hurt a lot, and they get dips in performance, but those are the guys that want to win. They're the guys that can handle the pressure a little better. And they're the guys that make younger players better.
“More than anything, though, that at that point in their career, winning is what matters to them. Young guys are happy to be there. Guys that are in the middle of their career want to get paid — they're looking at, like, you know, a lot of the self-interest. The veteran guys have done all that. They've gotten there, they've had careers, they've gotten paid, they want to win. So, some of that burning desire of talking to the other guys in the clubhouse that Howie Kendrick can do. Max Scherzer can do on the pitching staff. It's certainly something to pay attention to. It reinforces those two things for me, though. A, just get in — find a way to get in, anything can happen. And B, make sure you're cognizant of the fact that you can't do it all young, all prime, all old. You need to have a balance.”
On the changes to the roster overall…
“I think it’s less a reaction to the identity or makeup of ’22 and more the reality that we need to get better. It’s not necessarily saying we need to change, but it is saying we need to get better.”
Here’s another one that I think is interesting to contrast with what Shapiro said on that ATL episode back in 2019 — which, I should note, was released about a week before the Jays hired Charlie Montoyo (and presumably recorded a little earlier than that).
This comment was more in response to questions over his own job, as it came at a time when Shapiro was heading into the last year of his first contract with Rogers, and not long after it had emerged that he was on the shortlist of names to become commissioner of the NCAA’s Big Ten conference. But it’s interesting to look at what he’s saying here considering all the change he’s presided over in the last seven months. It’s not something they’d have entered into remotely lightly, by the sounds of it. Which tells us something about how strongly they felt it was all necessary — and maybe that some folks weren’t learning or adapting well enough.
“If you're able to have continuity, stability, and consistency, in an environment where emotion and momentum often force decisions and change, it is a competitive advantage. If you look at the great organizations in sport, whether it's the Pittsburgh Steelers, who keep the same head coach, or the Baltimore Ravens in the NFL, or baseball organizations that have fought the urge and the need to kind of feed the monster. Because once you start changing it's perpetual change. And once you change it's kind of reinventing yourself.
“If you have the ability and the strength to stick with a group of people, or to stick with a leadership group, as long as you're aligned in the way you're driving, then you can course-adjust. Then you can make adjustments. You can change. You can evolve. You can learn from your experiences. Doesn't mean you're going to be perfect. There is no perfect front office, there is no perfect major league manager. But, over time the best ones will learn. And if you stick with them over that time they will learn and understand from their experiences, from their environment they're in, and they'll be able to adjust and adapt and get better. And if you keep getting better, sooner or later you're going to be one of the best.
“So, I still think, when I think about — and obviously I preached this to our owners in Cleveland, and we lived it in Cleveland — that stability, consistency, continuity, is a competitive advantage if you've got other teams around you who are constantly changing because they feel the need to follow the latest trend, to react to sentiment on social media. You've got to have the strength and the toughness, frankly, to stay the course and to continue to learn and adapt.”
On the vibes…
“Part of our strength as a team over the last few years, not just last year, was our ability to have fun and that’s extremely important. I think there is, though, a line between fun and joy and I think our guys exuded that joy.”
He later added a bit about Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett.
“Kirby made it better for everyone to come to the ballpark. He just played the game with an incredible sense of joy. But when it came down to it, he also put the team on his back. He competed and he wanted to win. I feel like we’re still establishing what our identity is as a team and last year was just part of that process.
“We’re still maturing. We’re still growing. But joy and fun will still be part of it. It’s not just going to go away.”
Here we have a little bit of word salad — there’s a line between fun and joy but both will still be part of the team going forward? — but I thought it was important to highlight because this is definitely subject matter that fans have wondered about.
My first instinct here was thinking he was about to suggest that fun for the sake of fun is not the same as the joy of competition, of playing the game, and of succeeding. That might have been a fair point, had he made it. Those who disliked the home run jacket — or at least disliked it when it came out during hopeless losses or on losing streaks — would probably have liked to hear that.
As it reads, however, I don’t really have much to offer.
That said, I think the addition of Brandon Belt will help the team strike the right balance with this kind of stuff. A blog post he wrote for MLB.com back in 2019 should give you a bit of a sense of why.
On extending Vlad and Bo…
“The focal point for (Vlad) and Bo is we’ll deal with the system that’s in place which provides us with three more years of certainty of them being here. We’ll utilize every opportunity within that time frame to explore whether there’s the opportunity to keep them here.
“We want to do that. We want them to stay here. But the only thing we have to do is win. There are multiple ways for that to happen as well.”
I’m not going to go as far as saying he’s laying the groundwork for anyone’s eventual departure with that last line — I’m not even sure I’m interpreting it correctly — but it certainly reads to me like a nudge. A reminder that whether or not these guys get their names on long-term deals maybe isn’t quite the life-or-death question hanging over the franchise that fans sometimes view it as.
That’s not to say that losing talent of either player’s calibre wouldn’t be a massive deal, but it is maybe less of a deal than we would have thought a few years ago, when we didn’t think the Jays would ever be willing to spend as much as they are currently. Part of that spending increase is, of course, to do with the fact that they have elite players like Vlad and Bo making as little as they do, but Shapiro has long seemed unbothered — at least outwardly — by the idea of paying players.
“We want to pay our players more because we want them to achieve more,” he told Longley. “If they achieve more we have a better chance to win.”
Thing is, if they’re comfortable with — and budgeting for — huge extensions with these guys anyway, I suppose they could be a little more choosy about who they ultimately lock up. Some of their recent sniffing around on guys like Corey Seager and Xander Bogaerts maybe speaks to this.
On ownership…
“We could have lost our (competitive) window if we were run as a business. I think our ownership gets accused frequently of running this as a business and we have not been run that way over the last four or five years. We’ve lost quite a bit of money.”
I mean, obviously he has to say a thing like that — and I’m sure a lot of people would be thrilled for the team to open up their books so they could see whether or not the team has actually lost money — but at this point it’s pretty hard to argue that the last few years have seen a very clear change in how Rogers views and supports the club.
Quickly…
• Bo Bichette’s deal was made official on Thursday, but it wasn’t until Friday morning that we were made aware — thanks to the Associated Press (though in my case their reporting came by way of Ben Nicholson-Smith) — of some of its quirks. For starters, Bo is getting a nifty signing bonus up front. His 2023 salary will actually be just $2.85 million, though he'll make $6.1 million this year by way of a $3.25 million bonus that's "payable within 30 days of MLB approval." He'll then make $11 million in 2024 and $16.5 million in 2025 — a very attractive price for a five-win shortstop, should the Jays be thinking about moving on from him at that point. There isn't complete cost-certainty here, though, as we’re subsequently told that there are escalators in the deal. Bo will get an additional $2.25 million in each subsequent year of the deal if he wins an MVP award, or $1.25 million by finishing second or third, or $250,000 by finishing fourth or fifth. He's received MVP votes in each of the last two seasons, placing 12th in 2021 and 11th last season.
• Ross Atkins spoke to the media Friday about the deal, suggesting that the club was — and remains — open to a longer-term extension. He added that both sides were motivated to avoid going to an arbitrator’s hearing. And he made clear that this deal wouldn’t have materialized if the team didn’t believe he would continue to perform at an elite level. (The fact that they seem just as comfortable going year-to-year with Vlad, however, suggests that this doesn’t really mean very much.)
• Naturally, Shi Davidi has a great one on Atkins' comments for Sportsnet, calling it “deft work by both sides” to “find their way out of potential trouble” by including the escalators, which could take the value of the deal as high as $40.65 million. He also provides a good quote from Atkins on team-building and why the club was willing to go to a hearing with such an important player in the first place.
“If you’re not fully tapping into every aspect of the process, which a hearing is just a part of the process, then you’re not fully utilizing it and respecting it as it relates to running the best possible business. That doesn’t mean thinking about saving every possible dollar all the time. That means building the most efficient roster that you possibly can. As we do every single deal, what we have to always be cognizant of is building the best possible team around each deal. And that means having discipline. And sometimes that means being willing to go to a hearing.”
• This week’s news about the deal has brought forth plenty of Bo-related takes, and the best way to dive into some of those is by checking out the magnificent return of GROF. Drew’s site — formerly Vlad Religion, now Long Way From Sunlight (a reference, of course, to the first home of Toronto baseball) — sprung back to life this week with a piece on Bichette’s new contract.
Full of angst about Bo’s unique skillset and its collision course with aging curve, he makes the case for not being especially troubled by the fact that a long-term deal for “the Blue Jays modern day answer to Nomar Garciaparra” has yet to materialize. As I mentioned above, based on the Jays’ reported free agent pursuits of guys like Seager and Bogaerts, Drew’s less-than-enthusiastic view may not seem so alien to the front office as it likely does to a lot of fans.
Yeah, I’m mentioning this again, but that doesn’t mean that I think the Jays should necessarily go a different route at shortstop. Most of the elite shortstops in the league are now locked into long-term deals, meaning the free agent classes at the position the next couple of years are pretty light.
Still, Drew’s assertion that three years is a pretty good outcome — and timeline — here makes a good deal of sense.
“I love the idea of 26-year old Bo playing a workable/passable/ambulatory shortstop and raking at the top (or middle) of the Blue Jays lineup,” he writes. “While the prospect of a 30-year old second baseman Bo hacking his way to even longer boom-or-bust trends than we saw in 2022 is terrifying.”
• Also taking a look at Bo’s contract this week was Ethan Diamandas of Yahoo Sports, who sees the new three-year pact as a reason to believe a bigger deal could still happen. It will certainly cost the Jays, however. Or someone. If he continues to put up 4.5 WAR per season, as he did 2022 per FanGraphs (in 2021 his mark was 5.1), Ethan notes that he'll end up a free agent at a younger age and with more career WAR than Corey Seager, who got 11 years and $300 million from the Rangers last winter. Though, like Drew, Ethan notes that it's not necessarily going to be quite that simple. Whether Bo can stay a shortstop, and questions about how an approach that is so reliant on bat speed ages, could send him into a lower income bracket.
• Over at his new Substack site, Richard Griffin, who is back covering the Jays after parting ways with the club over the winter, lauds Bo’s willingness to compromise, as well as the breathing room that the deal has afforded the two sides. He feels that settling the matter for the next little while, eliminating all kinds of distracting chatter on the subject, could make it easier for a bigger agreement to be reached.
• The rosters for this year’s version of the World Baseball Classic were announced on Thursday, and for those of you not especially enthused about Canada’s lighter-than-usual roster, there will be plenty still to follow during this year’s tournament. Nine Blue Jays will be playing at the tournament, including four crucial members of the big league roster: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Yimi Garcia (Dominican Republic), Alejandro Kirk (Mexico), and — most interestingly — José Berríos (Puerto Rico).
Brennan Delaney of Blue Jays Nation takes look at all nine of the Jays players who will be there this year, and for good measure lets us know of a whole lot of old friends who’ll be suiting up this spring as well. Meanwhile, D.M. Fox of Future Blue Jays takes a look specifically at the Jays prospects involved — including a pair who will play for team Canada: Otto Lopez and Damiano Palmegiani.
• Shi Davidi shares part of the reason why Canada’s roster is a a bit disappointing this time around.
• Though it’s unfortunate that so many excellent players will be missing out — Jays farmhand Sem Robberse won’t be pitching for the Netherlands either! — it’s unlikely that any of those players’ teams will be upset by the news. This is, sadly, a problem that the WBC is probably always going to have. (Though I think there might be a better chance for true best-on-best international games if they at least moved the semifinals and finals to the All-Star break). Related:
• Turns out one of the players who won’t be suiting up for Canada has undergone something of a name change. I won’t spoil Mark Bowman’s tweet for those who haven’t seen it yet…
• Into this!
• Lastly, Ken Rosenthal has a truly fascinating one in his latest for the Athletic, in which he follows Atlanta’s Austin Riley to Baton Rouge, La., where he visits a place called the Baseball Performance Lab at the headquarters of Mariucci Sports. The purpose of the visit? To get hooked up to a motion capture machine that will ultimately lead to him getting a “fitted” bat. The bat he’ll end up with will have its weight, length, and balance, as perfectly tailored to Riley’s swing movements as the rules and the technology Mariucci is using will allow. Which, with 26,000 data points to work with, is apparently a lot.
It’s a hell of a process, and the piece takes you deep into some of the next frontiers of hitting at the major league level — even if there isn’t necessarily any proof yet that this stuff actually helps guys hit any better. Very intriguing though!
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Technically the Blue Jays will play 33 games this spring, but three will be split squad games, which of course will be played at the same time as a Jays home game.