George Springer plays for the Toronto Blue Jays. So what have we learned?
On Shapiro's vindication, the Jays as contenders, the weird world of MLB news-breaking, and the arrival of an Astro
It has been a pretty special couple of days for the Blue Jays, and even though they didn’t quite pull off a deal to bring Michael Brantley into the fold, the front office has made the club a whole lot better with the additions of closer Kirby Yates and, especially, outfielder George Springer.
Now the biggest free agent signing in Blue Jays history, Springer represents the huge splash that Jays fans had patiently — and sometimes not so patiently — been waiting for this winter. It’s bright day for the club, and it feels inevitable that more big moves are still to come.
Before they do, though, let’s take a little bit of time to reflect on some things. Namely, just what the addition of Springer means for the club, the industry, and the way we think about both.
Here are some things that I think we’ve learned in the day or so since Tuesday night.
Shapiro and Atkins are who we thought they were
OK, maybe “we” isn’t the right word here, because since literally day one of the Mark Shapiro era there have seemed to be two camps of Jays fans. On one side were those who were willing to give Shapiro and his handpicked GM, Ross Atkins, the benefit of the doubt. On the other were fans who, to put it politely, were significantly more reluctant to do so. I’m going to try not to turn this post into an airing of grievances dating back half a decade, because everyone reading this knows exactly what I’m talking about, but I’ve still got to touch on it at least a little.
There was always some way these guys were supposedly cheating the fan base, disrespecting the franchise, or dooming it to failure through austerity or ineptitude. Absolutely there have been legitimate reasons to be frustrated along the way to this moment, but the truly outlandish and venomous stuff got a lot of traction. And the way that some of it was able to seep into mainstream channels is especially embarrassing.
To anyone willing to be reasonable about it, however, it has always seemed like the point of hiring Shapiro was to make the Blue Jays act more like a big market club, not less like one. To have him import the concepts that made his Cleveland organization a modern, efficient, and successful one, then actually give him a budget. And, well, here we are.
That all wasn’t just idle speculation, either.
When MLB's collective bargaining agreement with the players union expired in December 2011 the league and players decided to change the revenue sharing process between clubs. Where teams had previously been categorized as high-revenue and low-revenue teams, the 2012 CBA began to gradually disqualify teams in the largest markets from being eligible for revenue sharing regardless of their local revenue. By 2016, the Jays were no longer eligible for payouts, and under the current CBA — which uses a tweaked formula that, according to Cot's, is "based on a market score measuring each market to the average MLB marked based on population, income and cable television households" — they remain excluded.
"(In the 80s and 90s) I never worried about the revenue sharing,” then-president Paul Beeston told ESPN in 2015. “And then when I came back we were one of the largest recipients.”
The business model, which for a time also involved accepting currency equalization payments, had to change. The CBA basically forced the Jays to act like a big market team by removing the main incentive to do otherwise. (I’d speculate that Edward Rogers’ influence has probably had an impact in this regard as well.)
And so, again, here we are.
The Blue Jays are already contenders, and they’re not finished
For a while on Monday, with Michael Brantley erroneously pencilled into the Jays’ lineup as well, it felt like the Jays’ playoff chances had really taken off. It’s a shame, frankly, that the Brantley affair seemed to suck a lot of the wind out of a day that deserved to be hugely celebratory for Jays fans based on the signing of Springer alone.
Still, Springer is on board. Kirby Yates is official, too. And the Jays, according to Dan Szymborski of FanGraphs, the Jays have jumped from having a 26% chance of making the playoffs to now having a 48% chance, per his ZiPS projection system. And FanGraphs’ depth charts page now has the Jays as the sixth best team in the majors by projected WAR, and third in the American League.
They’re not perfect, obviously, but that’s a seriously significant jump. The move, Szymborski says, has put the Jays “into the thick of the Wild Card hunt without needing much in the way of additional help. It also opens up a lot more scenarios in which the Blue Jays take the AL East, important under our current playoff structure. After all, the Rays just traded Blake Snell and the Yankees have a rotation that’s very reliant on Gerrit Cole. Even if the Jays don’t do anything else, this is at least enough to make Tampa Bay and New York look over their shoulders a lot more often, and there have been no indications given that Toronto’s finished.”
No, there have not! In the day-and-a-half since the Springer signing was announced the Jays were not only showing serious interest in Brantley, but they’ve also been linked to Trevor Bauer, as well as Brad Hand.
They still need an infielder, and they still need at least one starting pitcher, so there’s more work to be done. And you can be confident that it will get done. Just like how you don’t give Hyun Jin Ryu $80 million one year then fritter away the off-season the next, you don’t give George Springer $150 million and stop there.
Springer and Ryu are two of the Jays’ four most important players (Bo Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. being the others), and with Ryu turning 34 in March and Springer already being 31, there is no sense in waiting until next winter for before adding more reinforcements. That probably won’t mean J.T. Realmuto, and I’d be very surprised if it was Bauer, but there is still a whole lot of talent out there to be had. And not a lot of teams willing to be as aggressive as the Jays are right now either. It took a long slog to get here, but it’s looking more and more like they’ve played the market very, very well.
The transaction-breaking world is… um… complicated
First of all, kudos to the man, Brendon Kuhn (aka @_bkuh_), for reporting the Springer signing before anybody else was even able to pick up the scent. It was a fun few hours watching Jays Twitter wildly speculate on Tuesday night about whether there was anything to the report, whether Brendon was some kook (or some kid LOL), and to watch the rest of the industry scramble to catch up.
It takes balls to be out there on a limb like that with such information, for reasons that came into painfully clear focus during Wednesday’s Michael Brantley debacle.
On that subject, I must admit that even though I know Brendon a little bit from online, know he’s not a kook, and really enjoy and respect his thoughts on the Jays and the work he’s occasionally done for Blue Jays Nation (such as his excellent rebuttal to the 2018 “exposé” on the Jays’ deal with StubHub), I didn’t have the nerve to come out and say on Tuesday that I believed what he was saying to be true and that there was no need to wait for the any of the major national guys to say so. I was hedging.
And it turns out I wasn’t the only one.
I can understand someone whose livelihood requires breaking news being concerned about getting scooped on what is going to go down as one of the biggest transactions in all of baseball this winter, but I’m sure going to have a hard time taking at tweets referring to “momentum” or other such terms at face value again.
Then again, as the Brantley stuff showed, sometimes confirmations aren’t even confirmations.
As for how it’s possible that unknown locals can break stories before the big guys do, Gideon Turk wrote a great piece on that very subject for the Hardball Times back in 2019. A word of advice, however. If you’ve never read someone’s work anywhere before, if this is the first time they’re showing up in your Twitter feed, or if it’s Joey Vendetta, proceed with extreme caution before believing anything.
Some people will never be happy
It doesn’t take long after your team signs a $150 million contract with the World Series MVP for the 2017 Houston Astros before the word “cheater” starts popping out at you. This is particularly funny when it comes from people perfectly willing to overlook Trevor Bauer’s entire Chudley Do-Wrong persona because wins, but I think it is a fair thing for someone to be a little alarmed about.
Personally, I’m much less bothered by Springer in a Blue Jays uniform than I am by, say, hitting coach Dave Hudgens. Springer wasn’t a ringleader, and he wasn’t in a position of authority. That doesn’t absolve him, but much like the issue of PEDs in a previous era, my biggest issue isn’t with players who are looking for whatever edge they can get. That’s always going to happen, especially when they feel that there are other teams out there gaining unfairly themselves — and don’t forget that both the Yankees and Red Sox were fined for similar (albeit less egregious) infractions in 2017 (New York for improper use of a dugout phone, and Boston for electronic sign stealing), and that the 2018 Red Sox were also eventually caught, resulting in the loss of a 2020 draft pick and the suspension of a replay room employee.
No, my biggest problem is the systemic stuff. The staff members who knew and looked the other way. And the league that did far too little to curb what was going on before it even started, then came down too lightly on the organization, preferring instead to single out a small number of individual “bad apples” for severe punishment.
What the Astros did was wrong, and they knew it was wrong, but the league allows so much room for moral grey area elsewhere — pitchers constantly using illegal substances, for example, or the entire scandalous system of talent procurement in Latin America — and the explosion of video access in and around the dugout was such a loophole waiting to be exploited that I just think it’s a bit much to cast a guy like Springer as forever a villain or overlook the totality of what this issue is about. What the Astros did was the logical extension of the good kind of sign stealing — the kind that comes from within the field of play, where the onus is on the team laying down the signs to prevent theirs from being picked up, and that someone like Cito Gaston has become revered as a master of — and MLB should have been aware that it was obvious teams would start doing it.
So, for me, despising the Astros is a bit selective. A bit like despising individual PED users from the early-2000s rather than the industry as a whole that let it happen. That MLB prefers to keep it that way — like how Barry Bonds remains persona non grata while Bud Selig’s plaque hangs the Hall of Fame — should tell you a lot.
Of course, our reaction to cheating is incredibly visceral. We’ve all been cheated in our lives at some point or another, and yes it fucking sucks. But some people would dismantle entire social safety nets out of fear that a few might abuse the system and end up getting something they don’t deserve. That is way over the top. Letting ourselves be guided entirely by those most primal reactions does us absolutely no good.
Yes, George Springer was a baseball player for a team that succeed in part through cheating and got caught. George Springer is also the baseball player in the clip you can see at Instagram by clicking the image below.
“A few years ago, a little boy and a man talked about life as a stutterer,” Jesse Sanchez writes in the caption of his video. “The boy now gives presentations on stuttering to his classes. The man is on his way to Toronto.”
He is, and it is unquestionably a great thing.
Good stuff as always Stoeten. If I become a founding member can I crash on your couch when in the GTA?
I'm "AA trades for Tulo and Price" levels of excited right now.