Fixing the Jays' roster in light of MLB's updated roster rules (and PECOTA's projected standings!)

Over at the Athletic, Ken Rosenthal has all the details on MLB's updated health and safety protocols for 2021. There's a lot to chew on in there for anyone who really wants to dig into the details — Potential fines for players or staff in the dugout wearing a face covering below their nose or mouth? About time! — but there are two in particular that are going to change the way the Blue Jays' roster is composed, and how the team will function throughout the year.

To wit:

• The limitations on the number of pitchers on the active roster and the restriction on position players pitching shall not apply. The roster size will expand to 28 on Sept. 1. On and after that date, a club may expand its 28-man roster to 29 for any split or regular doubleheader.

• A club is permitted to carry up to five additional players, including at least one catcher, on all road trips as a major-league taxi squad. Players on the taxi squad will not receive major-league service and will be paid at the minor-league rate, but will be entitled to major-league allowances of $110 per day while the club is on the road, regardless of whether the club provides meals. They are permitted to work out with the major-league club, but not permitted to be in uniform and in the dugout during games.

In recent weeks, whenever I’ve written about how the Jays’ roster will setup, I’ve said that, given that the league and the players weren’t negotiating, the assumption should be that the league’s pre-pandemic 2020 roster rules would be in place for 2021; meaning a 26-player roster and a maximum of 13 pitchers. This obviously changes that. The addition of a taxi squad will make for some interesting machinations as well.

Projecting the Roster

Let’s think about where the Blue Jays’ roster is actually at right now. First, we have the nine basic starting position players.

1. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (DH), 2. Danny Jansen (C), 3. Rowdy Tellez (1B), 4. Marcus Semien (2B), 5. Cavan Biggio (3B), 6. Bo Bichette (SS), 7. Lourdes Gurriel Jr. (LF), 8. George Springer (CF), 9. Teoscar Hernández (RF).

We can fairly easily add five starting pitchers to that group, so let’s do that.

10. Hyun Jin Ryu (LHP), 11. Nate Pearson (RHP), 12. Robbie Ray (LHP), 13. Steven Matz (LHP), 14. Tanner Roark (RHP).

That’s not the greatest group, and ideally at least one of those guys will get bumped back in to the bullpen, but for now it’s what the Jays have.

OK, so what else?

On the position player side we know they'll need an extra outfielder, a backup catcher, and an extra infielder. For now, I think that will look like this:

15. Randal Grichuk (OF), 16. Reese McGuire (C), 17. Santiago Espinal (IF).

If McGuire wasn't out of options I might be inclined to have him on the taxi squad, with Alejandro Kirk replacing him on the bench. I certainly wouldn't rule out Kirk taking McGuire's job this spring, though. For now, though, I think McGuire as the backup has to be the assumption. Same with Espinal, for the time being. Grichuk, unless they trade him to somewhere he'll have more of an opportunity, has to be here as well.

Anyway, regardless of what happens with these particular players, someone will have to be in those roles.

We can also pencil in several relievers who are locks to be on the roster.

18. Kirby Yates (RHP), 19. Rafael Dolis (RHP), 20. Tyler Chatwood (RHP).

There are a few more relievers that I think are pretty close to locks, but I’m going to list them separately because they all have minor league options remaining, and with the addition of a taxi squad this year, it’s possible that those types will end up shuttle between there and the big leagues. That would certainly be the ideal way to handle the pitching staff in a vacuum, I think. But because these are some of the Jays’ better relievers, I don’t think it will be quite so easy.

21. Ross Stripling (RHP), 22. Jordan Romano (RHP), 23. Ryan Borucki (LHP).

Stripling is a veteran with over four years of service time. If he gets to five full years by the end of the season, he’ll be allowed to refuse an optional assignment next year. That, unfortunately for him, won’t be the case in 2020. I could see him getting optioned down for a fresher arm at points. The same goes for the Borucki, particularly if the Jays add another starter and drop one of their mid-rotation lefties, Ray and Matz, into a bullpen role. (For the record, I expect this to happen to Nate Pearson at times as well, just as a way to help manage his innings.)

However they get used throughout the year, though, I think for now we have to pencil them in for opening day.

That leaves us with three open spots, at least two of which will go to relievers. For the time being, however, I think we have to do this:

24. Shun Yamaguchi (RHP), 25. A.J. Cole (RHP).

The big question now goes back to the position player side: Is a three-man bench going to be sufficient?

If not, we could go with Derek Fisher to round out the roster. If so, I’d guess the last slot would be occupied by a pitcher with options who can be flipped back and forth from the taxi squad with another pitcher with options. That likely limits the possibilities to guys the team doesn’t feel will be better served working as full fledged starters in Buffalo. My best guess is that’s someone like Jacob Waguespack, T.J. Zeuch, or Anthony Castro.

Before we move on, just for the sake of completeness, I’ll go ahead and do this:

26. Derek Fisher (OF).

I mean, sure. Why not? The Jays obviously like Fisher, he’s a lefty bat, and if the season started tomorrow they probably wouldn’t want to lose him for nothing.

Fixing the Roster

The Jays have obviously put together a pretty good roster here, adding a whole bunch of talent over the course of this winter. It is, however, quite obviously not without its flaws.

Here on Tuesday we got a big reminder of that, as Baseball Prospectus, home of the PECOTA projections system, released their PECOTA Standings for 2021.

PECOTA has the Jays going 85-77 (technically 84.9-77.1), which puts them about a win-and-a-half behind the Rays (86.4-75.6). That's hardly a damning projection, but it does also put them on the outside looking in on the Wild Card race, as their behind both the Angels (86.8 wins) and Cleveland (85.7). A good White Sox club is also right in that same tier (83.1).

Another thing that's maybe not great: BP's Rob Mains published the 2021 edition of "Why PECOTA Hates Your Favorite Team" on Tuesday, and while he notes that the system was four wins too light on the Jays in 2020 (and six wins too high on the Angels), the Rays outperformed their projection by eight wins.

Mains doesn’t include the Rays among teams that have consistently outperformed their PECOTA in recent years, so we can’t just assume it will miss in a similar way again. But this is interesting to note because Mark Shapiro himself has spoken about these sorts of projections, and needing things like a strong culture to beat them.

Here’s what he said in an interview with Fast Company in August 2019.

Ultimately, in midsize or smaller markets, we have to outperform objective expectations. We have to beat the Red Sox and the Yankees, even though we’re never going to have the resources they have—and their resources are among the top few teams in the game.

To outperform objective expectations, you need extraordinary people committed to doing extraordinary work. You need a well-run organization, top to bottom: a performance department that keeps players on the field better than other teams; an analytics department that helps develop competitive advantages across a broad spectrum of decision-making and deployment. Moreover, everyone has to understand how important everyone else’s work is. We have to ensure that efforts and decisions aren’t being made in an isolated way but instead that they’re connected to something bigger. That requires being obsessively focused on making the best decisions possible at every level, with no energy spent on credit, blame, or hierarchy.

When you simply buy or collect talent, you have a limited window of opportunity. But when you build a true team through developing a winning culture, you create the conditions for sustained success.

The firs thing that jumps out here is that it’s interesting to see Shapiro talking about being a mid-market team, as opposed to the potential “behemoth” he’s called the Jays in more recent times. As for projections, clearly he believes in them — though that doesn’t mean he necessarily believes these projections.

Last winter it was pointed out to Shapiro that Vegas had set the over-under on Jays wins for 2020 at 75. “We have ourselves higher than that,” he told reporters. “We do run our own projections multiple times in the off-season in order to get an understanding of what that means for framing everything from budgets to planning, but we have ourselves better than that.”

The Rays, of course, are a team with similar ideas and a longer history of trying to implement them. It’s hardly impossible that the Jays could “outperform objective measures” better than the folks in Tampa — and Anaheim, Cleveland, and on the south side of Chicago — but it also seems likely that they still have the resources to separate themselves from this pack. And they should!

So, going back to our projected roster, where can they do that?

Starting pitching is obviously one spot, and I think the place they’re most likely to make an improvement. I wrote about the pros and cons of the remaining free agent starters (and David Price) back on Saturday, and while everyone mentioned in that piece has some very evident flaws or red flags, that’s true of literally every pitcher in the sport. The bigger question is how much of an upgrade a free agent will be on the Jays’ worst internal option.

Or, that would be the question if not for the fact that Jays seem a bit stuck with their worst starter. Tanner Roark, though he’s only a tenth of a WARP (BP’s version of WAR) behind Ray and Pearson, has the worst projection among Jays starters, but with a $12 million salary he’s not exactly easily replaced. You can’t just sign James Paxton for $15 million then cut Roark, because that effectively means you paid $27 million for Paxton.

The Jays could certainly sign Paxton — or Taijuan Walker, Jake Odorizzi, Matt Shoemaker, Rich Hill, etc. — and bump Robbie Ray or Steven Mats back into the bullpen. Both guys throw hard enough and generate enough strikeouts to make sense for a role back there, and the fact that they can be asked to throw multiple innings would be an asset back there.

If that’s all the Jays were to do, I think that would likely bump Fisher off the roster. But is that really ideal? I’m not sure that losing a lefty bat off the bench is, even if it’s just Fisher’s, the way to go here. It would maybe make more sense, though, if the Jays did end up landing someone like Marwin Gonzalez — who they’ve reportedly been sniffing around — in place of Santiago Espinal.

As a switch hitter who can capably handle either corner outfield spot, either corner infield spot, as well as second base, Gonzalez could basically take take the place of both Fisher and Espinal while taking up just one roster spot. Move on from Fisher, send Espinal to Buffalo, find another Rubén Tejada type for your taxi squad and you’re maybe not laughing, but you’re probably better off.

Let’s go even farther than that, though. How about you move on from McGuire, find another Caleb Joseph type for your taxi squad, then make Alejandro Kirk the backup catcher and a key bat off the bench?

Better still, do all that, and then — provided you’re comfortable with Teoscar Hernández and Cavan Biggio being cover for George Springer in centre field — move on from Grichuk and add a second guy like Gonzalez, who can cover spots in both the infield and outfield.

Or, better even still, make Biggio that guy and go out and get a real third baseman of some sort. Justin Turner, maybe. Or Kris Bryant. Or, if you absolutely have to, someone slightly less expensive.

The problem with all that, of course, is that — as with Roark — we can’t just wave a magic wand and make Grichuk’s salary disappear. His contract, Roark’s contract, and Shun Yamaguchi’s contract are all pretty much under water at this point. That makes the job of improving their roster spots a bit trickier.

It’s fun to think about, but the possibilities to even just take on other teams’ problem contracts are few and far between, and not really all that realistic.

Just to spitball here, Jason Heyward is a left-handed hitting outfielder who the Cubs owe $65 million over the next three years, and though he's definitely not the Cubs player Blue Jays fans have been dreaming on this winter, could the two teams figure out a way to make the dollars work if the Jays took him on while sending Grichuk and Roark (and the $41 million still owed to them) the other way?

Does Nick Castellanos of the Reds, who can sort-of-but-not-really play both third base and in the outfield, make sense at $48 million over three years if the Jays send Roark and Grichuk back?

Are the Jays made better enough by doing either of those things and then signing a replacement for Roark in the rotation to justify the cost?

I don’t know! Fun as they might be, probably not. But I do think, with or without Roark, finding another starter is a must. Adding a versatile veteran who can hit from the left side to the bench would make real sense. Finding a way to bring back a proper third baseman while moving out Grichuk would be huge. And then not letting Yamaguchi’s contract stand in the way of improving on his spot would be good as well.

Three of those four things should be fairly easily accomplished, at least.

Will it be enough to get the Jays back to the playoffs (which, Rosenthal’s piece also notes, will go back to their usual format this season)? Maybe, maybe not. But I’m sure it will be a whole lot of fun watching them try.

Top image: Screengrab via YouTube