Here we go again...

This winter has felt a little too much like the last one so far, but should it?

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Ross Atkins is playing a game of chicken with the Blue Jays’ most important player, which is entirely fine as long as he wins it.

But the thing is, despite what you might be hearing, the situation with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is not necessarily coming to a head. Not yet, at least.

Yes, here on Thursday at 1 PM ET we’ll pass the deadline for clubs to exchange arbitration numbers with their eligible players. And yes, that is as good a time as any for team to get an extension done—and it would be nice as hell if they did—because both sides sides are compelled to talk to each other about a player’s value. But Vlad himself has put a deadline on extension talks that is still several weeks away. And the Blue Jays, as a “file and trial” team, have always left open the possibility of discussing long-term deals beyond the deadline—they just won’t discuss a one-year agreement after that point.

Though we’re already hearing, and will inevitably continue to hear in the coming hours and days, about the terrifying spectre of another potential trip to the arbitrator for Vlad and the Jays, that won’t be locked in no matter how this goes, nor would it be the death knell for the relationship that a whole bunch of people are going to act like it is. Failing to compromise on a number would seem to be less good than if they did—it would suggest common ground is farther off than we’d like—and having to go to a third party to present the case that Vlad’s not worth what he thinks he is would be a little uncomfortable, for sure. But not nearly as much as people have allowed themselves—and been encouraged—to believe.

As much as anything, I suspect that’s because there just isn’t anything else to turn into content at this point on the calendar.

I mean, the same exact thing happened last year and Vlad’s still been very vocal about wanting to stay. The same thing happened with Marcus Stroman, who remained similarly adamant about wanting an extension. Some of that could have been business-related gamesmanship, and there are examples of relationships that appear to have soured because of arbitration hearings—Corbin Burnes and the Brewers would seem to be a famous example, though it’s not like Milwaukee was ever going to pay him enough money to stick around anyway—but the way fans think about this process is simply detached from the reality that most people get through it just fine, and at the end of the day money almost always talks loudest.

Of course, it doesn’t help that, with the team on its way to potentially a second straight disappointing winter, the conditions are ripe for people to be baited into a frothing rage about literally anything.

Hell, I saw people outraged last month that, according to Vlad’s now infamous Spanish language podcast appearance, the club sent an underling to last year’s hearing rather than having the GM himself do it—the former practice being not just common but practically universal. Outraged that he said he wasn’t offered an extension after 2022 or 2023—years where his performance made him virtually impossible to value, or at least impossible to pay the kind of money it would have taken to get a deal done anyway. Outraged that the club would have only offered him $340 million in a world where Juan Soto has more than doubled that—an offer that Richard Griffin and Shi Davidi have both now reported was made before the Soto deal happed.

An offer that was entirely serious and fair!

And, to be clear, that’s not me just blindly defending the front office here. I tackled the question of Vlad’s value in a mail bag back in August and came in at about exactly the same place. To wit:

I think Jeff Passan had it right that Rafael Devers’ contract is the natural starting point with Vlad.

Devers was 26 when he signed his 10-year, $313.5 million deal in January 2023, which is the exact same situation Vlad will find himself in this winter at the exact same age.

By that stage of Devers’ career he had produced 18.0 fWAR, had a 123 wRC+, and had hit 139 home runs; Vlad has put up 16.3 fWAR so far in his career, producing a 137 wRC+ and 157 home runs. Devers' additional value came from his defence at third base but, as Passan points out, the expectation was that he'd eventually have to move off of the position. This is not only bearing out—of the 32 players with at least 400 innings at third this season, Statcast ranks Devers third-last with a -5 FRV (Fielding Run Value, which combines metrics for a fielder's range, via Outs Above Average, and arm)—but was surely priced into the offer.

It's incredibly comparable for those reasons, but also, I think, because of the pressure in place to get a deal done. Boston had lost free agent Xander Bogaerts to a mega-contract with the Padres earlier that winter. And with the sting of dealing away Mookie Betts and watching the Dodgers sign him long-term still being felt, it seemed especially important in that moment that the Red Sox get a Devers deal done. Just as it obviously feels that way with the Jays and Vlad right now.

So where does that leave us financially? Devers had already agreed to his salary for 2023 via the arbitration process, meaning the extension didn’t kick in until this year. That effectively made it a $331 million commitment over 11 years. Vlad makes $19.9 million this year and should be going up to at least $25 million in his final pass through arb, which would be $7.5 million above Devers’ $17.5 million last pre-extension salary, so we’ve got to consider that higher baseline too.

So… I think you start there, account for a bit of inflation, and that’s basically the number you’re comfortable with. Like $350 million over 11 years, maybe? Obviously you don’t begin your negotiations there, but that feels like a reasonable place to land. And then you accept that it might take even more than that. You obviously don’t want to get into bidding against yourself, making offers that no other team would even get close to, but, for me, I’m not going to let him walk over the cost of a single middle reliever in terms of AAV. If it has to be $370 million, or $380 million? $390 million? I suck it up and do that—though obviously I’m more emotional about the need to get this deal done than any executive should ever be.

But yeah, build in some deferrals, which the Devers contract has, lower the AAV for luxury tax purposes, and just get it done.

Soto’s deal, and the lure of free agency a year from now, has probably raised the price somewhat, but I don’t think that changes the equation nearly as much as Vlad actually, finally, looking this season like the guy we thought he was in 2021 did.

Based on what Vlad said himself, clearly the reason that an extension hadn’t been reached before this winter was that he went out and put up a 132 wRC+ in 2022 and a 118 wRC+ in 2023. Not the Jays’ reluctance to go to an astronomical place financially, but the Jays’ reluctance to go there for a guy who had a 112 wRC+ over 970 plate appearances from the start of September 2022 through the end of April 2024. Miss me with every ounce of the “he’s not their guy” garbage, please.

I think it’s equally as clear that Vlad needed all of the runway 2023 allowed in order to put himself back into the position to be genuinely valued at the kind of money we’re talking about here, and that by the time the season ended there was little chance of getting a deal for him done without seeing where Soto’s market landed first. And, again, I’m not just blindly defending the club here—I predicted this exact scenario, among several other fairly safe big picture things that have pretty much been on the mark, back in mid-September.

The real junctures are still ahead of us: the filing deadline, the arb hearing, and the start of spring training—after which Vlad has said he won’t negotiate. Next winter could be a juncture, too.

So, the time has finally arrived to get serious about this. But that goes both ways. Vlad says he has a number he’ll take, but Vlad is not Soto, and there’s risk for him that simply never existed to the same extent for the Mets’ new $765 million man. He's not been as good a hitter at his best, he’s been a far lesser hitter at his worst, statistically he's a terrible baserunner, he’s much more of a liability in the field relative to his position, and he plays a less valuable position. He’s had conditioning questions Soto has never faced. And he's not been anywhere near as consistent. Even if we toss out 2019 and 2020, when Vlad struggled to get his feet under him (0.6 fWAR) while Soto was hitting the ground running (8.0 fWAR), Soto’s been better by more than 15 points of wRC+ (161 to 145) and more than eight wins (24.6 to 16.4). In his career Vlad has produced two great seasons, one good one, and three that were deeply underwhelming.

If he’s about to have another year like 2023, he could end up kicking himself for not taking the $340 million when it was on the table. I wouldn’t blame him for betting on his own talent, and I will blame the Blue Jays for not allowing themselves to get uncomfortable enough to get a deal done with their franchise player—because we know that coming up with the money won’t be the issue. But I think, and hope, that all this should have put both parties in the right place to sort this out now that the chips are almost down. And no matter what happens with the arbitration filing, that will still be the case, regardless of what all the rage bait will try to tell you.

Granted, until a deal is done—until the roster starts to actually look better than the one that managed just 74 wins last season (and it’s not far off)—none of that stuff is going to matter to a fan base absolutely crawling with fans desperate to believe every negative, bad faith interpretation of every single thing about the team that flashes across their screens. Fans who think calls for basic objectivity about how well the front office has done in, like, eight of the last nine winters/trade deadlines, or about how the playoffs are a crapshoot, amount to full-throated defence of what they’ve already decided is indefensible. Fans who like to act like they’ve been subjected to a decade of hopeless incompetence when a year ago the team was coming off a second straight playoff appearance with an 89-win roster that likely would have had several more if not for three months of brutally dumb RISP luck, all after a rebuild that turned around much faster than most do. Fans who watched Yusei Kikuchi sign with the Angels and Luis Severino with the A’s yet believe the Jays are such a disaster that no one will take their money and there couldn’t be something else—Soto getting an absurd offer from the Mets, Teo wanting to stay a Dodger, Burnes wanting to spend the offseason and spring near his Arizona home, Santander not having taken anyone’s money yet—going on. Fans who will be in awe of Andrés Giménez a few months from now but discount his potential impact because it’s on the “wrong” side of the ball.

Fans who will nevertheless be completely correct if the team actually follows all the way through on what has so far been a maddeningly lifeless offseason. If they full-on choose Jerry DiPoto’s just-win-54% nonsense over genuine job-saving ambition. If they embrace ownership-pleasing financial discipline over fan-pleasing excitement.

Given the way last winter played out, I can’t blame anyone for being queasy about where things stand. But that’s different—and much less exhausting—than being absolutely convinced of the outcomes of processes that have yet to fully play out. Something worth remembering on a day that’s about to be dominated by Vlad Discourse, I think!

Might I suggest some fried chicken to ease you through? Hey, and speaking of queasiness, once you’re done you’ll be able to use that bucket for something else if you really need to.

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