Mail Bag (Part One): Bo's Plans, Chapman's Comfort, and Bassitt's Comments

On the "unfixable" Blue Jays and the latest tempest in a teapot.

It turns out that you’ve all still got time to submit a question for my next mail bag. Or, perhaps I should say, for my next mail bag. This post you’re reading right now is technically my next mail bag—as in, the mail bag that is arriving immediately after my last call for mail bag questions. But it’s also not my next mail bag. It’s not a mail bag at all, really. It’s only part of a mail bag. Part one, to be specific. Which clever readers will likely have noted from the title of the post.

Confused yet? Good. Because confusion is the name of the game in this technically-not-a-mail-bag. Chris Bassitt’s confused interview with Chris Rose. Fans’ confused reaction to what he said. The confusing decision to ignore the Streisand Effect and amplify the story by trotting him out to clarify things. Bob Nightengale.

It’s all here!

You see, I got a bunch of great questions for the mail bag, and in the course of putting together thousands of words in response to them I realized that one led me to an answer that went beyond the specific question itself and could easily stand as a post of its own. I also realized that this happened to be an answer that could use a bit of immediacy anyway. Will we still be talking about Bassitt and Rose and Bo and Bob by the time I finally get through the rest of the mail bag? Doubtful, to be honest. Or, at least, I certainly hope not.

And so… well… here we are. A taste of bag, if you will (please don’t). Keep your eyes peeled for the rest of it in the coming days…

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What do you make of the reporting re: Bo being considered for trade, as he has no plans to stay in Toronto, etc.? This quote alongside Chapman—I forget his words—but to the effect saying that he was happier with the environment in San Francisco? And Pearson saying he needed a change of scenery? Rumblings of discontent with the organization or just natural reactions to poor team performance? — Julie M.

Nick and I discussed the Bo aspect of this stuff on this week’s episode of Blue Jays Happy Hour, but I think this is a great place to start the mail bag—and thanks so much for the question and the support, Julie.

The thing about these sorts of stories is that while they certainly make for eye-popping headlines to slap into, say, some obnoxious clickbait title for a YouTube video, there just isn’t a whole lot there. The recent comments from Chris Bassitt also belong in that bucket, though because it was actually him speaking, in multiple sentences over multiple sessions, it was a little bit different, and we’ll deal with that separately.

With the stuff you mention, I get it. Fans are understandably frustrated with this team, and no one is going to lack for social media likes by implying to the mob that its incoherent rage might be valid. But nobody worth taking seriously is talking about this stuff for any reason other than they feel obliged to acknowledge that for the moment it’s become a part of what has mostly been a very exhausting conversation about this team.

If Bob Nightengale had some sort of scoop about Bo Bichette’s unhappiness with the Jays, why wouldn’t he write that? Why would he bury it after 1,200 words on Jackson Holliday’s kid brother in a line—“has no plans to stay in Toronto once he’s a free agent after the 2025 season”—that could just as easily be Bobspeak for “he hasn’t signed an extension”?

Why would any player have plans to be somewhere beyond the expiration of his contract? Why wouldn’t the Jays entertain—i.e. give consideration to—trade offers on him this winter? Why would a team ever not? And have we not already been talking about all this stuff for years?

Also, was it not long thought that Chapman seemed to have a likely preference for going back to his native state of California, or somewhere on the west coast, and spending spring training near his offseason home in Phoenix?

Could the fact that he liked playing for Bob Melvin simply mean precisely that and not be some kind of indictment of John Schneider?

Could his statement this week to Evan Webeck of the Mercury News—“I don’t think I was as comfortable maybe in Toronto the last couple years as I am here. Sometimes your environment has a lot to do with that, and it’s just a good environment for me. I definitely enjoy playing on the West Coast. And playing for BoMel, I’m comfortable.”—not actually just mean exactly what he’s saying without some hidden criticism of the Blue Jays couched within?

Was Pearson not precisely a change of scenery candidate? Does anybody think he’s gone for behind-the-scenes reasons and not the simple fact that he’ll be out of options next season and potentially would have otherwise been lost for nothing? Am I going crazy?

Like, I’m not saying it’s not possible that there could be some discontent among Jays players. We saw it with Bassitt, and that’s to be expected to an extent after a couple of disappointing seasons. I suppose it’s also not impossible something worse than that is going on. But fans love to fantasize that the people they hate for making a few honest missteps that have undermined their team’s on-field success are therefore toxic monsters incapable managing players or doing literally anything right. And in that spirit they’ll read innocuous statements in the most bad faith way possible so as to be able to tell themselves, “Aha! The players hate them just like I do!”

I definitely don’t think any of this is helped by people covering the team who are willing to indulge and validate it in the most cynical way possible—hey, maybe there’s something to the infantile black-and-white worldview you seem to run all this stuff through in your mind, Kevin!—but that sort of thing has been going on since day one with this front office, and surely a lot longer than that if we’re talking about it more generally as a human psychological phenomenon. It just gets especially bad when a season goes sour, frustrations build, and there’s little positive to think or talk about.

Thing is, I think Bassitt’s comments show us precisely that this is not the case. But it’s much easier to get to that takeaway if you actually read or listen to them in full, rather than snippets selectively highlighted to send dullards into a frenzy.

So, uh… let’s do that. Here is the most quoted section of Bassitt’s appearance on The Chris Rose Rotation in full-ish (i.e. with a brief exchange about Rose’s pre-season predictions omitted and his questions paraphrased) and some of my own thoughts mixed in. Yes, apparently this mail bag answer has become a Bassitt Speaks!…

Did you think you were being traded?

No. I mean, they—there was a lot of articles, and there was a lot of people saying that I was leaving or should be leaving. They told me I wasn't leaving. So, I never thought I was leaving.

So they told you pretty early in the process or, like, the day of the deadline?

No, I knew for a while. I think, um, we had a number of people who had meetings and were told, like, “Hey, you're not getting traded.”

OK, we’ll take our first pause here because there are some interesting things to explore about what Bassitt is saying, even if they don’t necessarily fit with my overall point or the mail bag question I’m ultimately trying to answer.

First of all, I wondered above why a team would ever not entertain trade offers on a player, and I feel I have to acknowledge that maybe this meeting Bassitt had makes that seem untrue. Evidently the Jays were pretty explicit that they wouldn’t be moving him, as well as several other players. But I use the words “seem untrue” here quite deliberately, because it’s not exactly like any of what was said in that meeting was binding.

Now, a team going back on its word with players is probably not a good habit to get into, and doing so probably could lead to some actual behind-the-scenes strife, rather than just the imagined kind. But if the Astros had offered the Kikuchi package for Bassitt, and also offered to take on all of the money owed to him next season, I have a hard time believing that Ross Atkins and Mark Shapiro wouldn’t have given strong consideration—at the very least—to going back on their word.

Of course, part of the reason they likely gave Bassitt the assurances that they did was because they’d taken the temperature of the market and knew that they were never going to get the kind of value back for him they’d require anyway.

Second of all, as Bassitt makes clear in his next answer, the way the Jays approached this was appreciated. Let’s try to keep that in mind as we proceed here.

Thirdly, kinda sucks for the guys who didn’t get one of these meetings, huh?

Is that a good thing because it puts your mind at rest, or did you want the opportunity to get back in the race?

There's, like, obviously two sides to every coin. The first side, I'll just go over the negative. Like, the first side is like, man, I don't know how many opportunities I'm going to have to win a World Series. That's my number one goal, to win a dang World Series. And to feel this is a lost year already is, like, gosh, dang, that sucks. That's a hard pill to swallow. But on the other side, yeah, I would say I have a lot of respect and a lot of gratefulness that (the organization was) like, “Hey, we're going to try to build a winning team next year, to win a World Series, and we truly believe that you're going to be a part of it.”

So, I mean, for them to think you're part of the solution, not the problem, so to speak, yeah, I don't know how you don't feel good about that. But the situation sucks. There is no way around that. The situation sucks.

As I noted above, clearly there’s no animosity here for anything except “the situation.” And I think, just as clearly, the “situation” is that the team, as constituted, isn’t good enough. That shouldn’t be news to anybody.

If you sat down at the end of the year and said "Where did it go wrong?" how would you explain it to Blue Jays fans?

I'll say this. I've been a part of four organizations. The four organizations I’ve been a part of, they all had—some had a lot of problems, others have had a lot of problems, like a LOT of problems. I think we do a lot of things right here, but, like, to me, like, everybody has issues. It's just like, I don't want to be one of those guys that talk about the team's issues publicly. I see players do it and I don't want to identify the problems because some of the problems I don't think are fixable. And that's for, like, teams even that I played on in the past. So, it's like, so-called beating a dead horse if I'm talking about the issues that we have, or the issues that other teams I have been on have had. Because, like I said, some of them are, like, doom and gloom. So I try to be more positive than negative.

OK, definitely some inelegant phrasing here, and I understand why some people got a little bit confused about the type of problems he was talking about. “I think we do a lot of things right here” implies that there are things he thinks the organization does wrong. And when he adds that “some of the problems I don’t think are fixable,” I don’t think it’s outlandish for fans’ minds to start racing.

I mean, it’s still an absurd leap from there to, “HE MEANS THAT THE GUY THEY HIRED TO BE THE BENCH COACH TWO YEARS AGO SOMEHOW MADE EVERYBODY STOP HITTING HOME RUNS, EVEN THOUGH HE WAS NEITHER A HITTING COACH NOR THE HITTING STRATEGIST, AND THEN THEY MADE HIM THE ‘OFFENSIVE COORDINATOR’ A YEAR LATER AND LOOK WHAT HAPPENED!”

It’s also a bit silly to think that there aren’t always going to be things players don’t think their organization does as well as it could.

But talking about process-y stuff, and then immediately saying certain things are “unfixable”? It does leap out at you. At least until you think about it for, like, two seconds.

Process is always fixable. Ideas can change, people can change, jobs can change. Definitionally, this really can’t be what he was talking about. What it can be about, though, is exactly what he said in his follow-up interview, in which he clarified that “there are variables in the game that you cannot change.”

Specifically, he cited the fact that he and Kevin Gausman are getting older, that José Berríos has a ton of innings on his arm, and that sometimes guys—like Bo Bichette or Jordan Romano—are going to get hurt. Others that he didn’t bring up could be geographic, like that there are guys who’d rather not come to Canada, or who—as I referenced regarding Chapman earlier—may not want to spend six weeks every spring in central Florida.

I understand that fans are suspicious that there isn’t more to the story because of the way these comments were “walked back,” but when Bassitt says that it would be like “beating a dead horse” to talk about the club’s issues, I think that partly he means that there’s no changing them, but partly it’s that these things are known, obvious, understood, and that it would be “doom and gloom” to recite them at this point. That aligns perfectly with the follow-up answer he gave.

OK, but in my work life, if I feel like something can be changed, I bring it up. Will you do that?

Yeah, no doubt about it. No doubt about it. I had meetings with the front office last year. I'm sure I'll have a conversation with them again for next year.

The one thing I will say about the Blue Jays, for this year, is we put, I think, $700 million into Shohei Ohtani's basket and didn't get him. That was the reality, and then I think our pivot was... we didn't really have a pivot to, say, another elite-elite-elite player. Because in today's baseball—this is the reality of the landscape—is that you need three or four superstars. That's just the reality. You look at all the really, really, really good teams, they are not doing it with one superstar, they're legit doing it with three or four superstars.

That's just the nature of this game now. The way that pitching is, the way that bullpens are setup, if you have one hitter or two hitters in your lineup, you literally cannot be good, I don't think. No matter how great the player is, I don't think it's possible.

We're starting to get to the nut of it here, I think. First, Bassitt mostly brushes off Rose's attempt to get him to dish on what he’d hypothetically say to the front office about the disastrously run organization he may have been—but I don't think actually was—hinting that the Blue Jays are. Then he gets into the Ohtani stuff, which... yeah, there was no second Ohtani for the front office to pivot to after that didn't work out.

I mean, had Ohtani’s contract represented merely the salary to be paid to a generational baseball talent and not a massive and unique business opportunity for Rogers, or had the Jays been able to match what the Yankees offered for Juan Soto—they couldn't—there might be a criticism to be made here. Otherwise I don't really get this stuff. I think the team ultimately allocated their money very poorly last winter, and part of why the fan base is so down on this front office right now is that a lot of them thought so too. But the market didn't offer a lot that fit this team's needs, that $700 million wasn’t going to simply be added back into to payroll after Ohtani went elsewhere, and I think fans—or in this case Bassitt—often lose sight of that.

I mean, yeah, it's precisely the job of the front office to put a better team on the field than what we’ve seen 2024, but for all the we-saw-this-coming sentiment it feels like has been out there in the fan base, in this very interview we have Rose saying the Jays’ failure “surprised the hell out of me, in fact I think it's the biggest surprise in baseball,” and that he predicted them to make the World Series. You know?

And then we have the talk about superstars, which brings us to what I think could very well be the real thing Bassitt is trying to leave unsaid: George Springer is cooked.

The Jays’ problems go beyond that, of course. There’s the bullpen, the aging rotation, the lack of depth, the fact that both Varsho and Kirk have not been the offensive players they were expected to be two years ago, and that Bo’s output was miserable before he got hurt. But money’s coming off the books, depth is coming, Varsho and Kirk still have a ton of value, and Bo is just 26—he should eventually be fine.

Springer, on the other hand, will turn 35 in less than a month. He makes superstar money, or close to it—the average annual value of his contract is in the top-25 among position players—and even three homers in his last two games has only brought his wRC+ for the month of August up to 87, and his mark for the year to 97. And there’s still two more years left on the deal after this one.

Forgive the doom and gloom and that I’m beating a dead horse by bringing it up, but that’s the sort of unfixable problem I think he’s talking about—and the superstar tangent doesn’t dissuade me from that thought.

He continued…

So, yeah, we have to get more hitting to protect Vladdy, and then the pitching has to be a lot better. Bullpen, I mean we literally lost our whole entire bullpen from last year, so. There's just so many things that you can talk about. I mean, I could literally talk for 45 minutes on this—on things that didn't go great, and I can talk about things that literally I don't know how to fix, right? With our situation. But, again, I just don't think saying those things publicly is what is best for this organization.

And even if I leave I still don't think I would ever be like, “Hey, the Blue Jays have this, this, and this.” Just because I've never done that with the White Sox, or Oakland, or the Mets. I have too much respect for the players, like say in Oakland or New York, and also I have too much respect for, like, the coaches and stuff like that, that just like, if say something negative about the organization, I'm not saying it about the organization at all. Like, I'm saying it about the people there. Because the organization's just a name. By saying negative things about the organization, you're talking about the people, you're not talking about the name of the team. So, I just feel very uncomfortable talking about that, just because I love all the guys that I've ever played with. So it's just like, I'd rather protect them than hurt them.

One particularly insulting piece that I read on this subject said that “just the fact that the Blue Jays are being lumped in here with the White Sox, A's and Mets says a lot,” before adding that “obviously, those are the teams Bassitt has played for, but they also haven't exactly been model organizations in recent years.”

That indeed seems to be how a whole lot of people want to take all of this—incredibly stupidly. But even if we ignore the clarifications given in the second interview, Bassitt is really suggesting nothing like what’s being implied here. He is, in fact, very clearly saying that he really respects the people he works with and works for.

“I think we do an unbelievable job here,” Bassitt told Sportsnet’s Shi Davidi and Arden Zwelling in that follow-up. “I don't think anyone in the league takes care of families better than the Blue Jays. From a front-office standpoint with the players, we have unbelievable discussions all the time. From the coaching standpoint, they love to listen to us. I think they do an unbelievable job. But there are variables that are issues. The reality is you can't fix them.”

He can’t be much clearer than that.

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