Moreno and Gurriel for Varsho!!!
Thoughts on a massive trade, and the Blue Jays' continued outfield overhaul...
During a Wednesday podcast appearance, Blue Jays president and CEO Mark Shapiro had a pointed message for concerned fans:
“Don't panic. Assume that we've got an understanding of the market to get better — that means, could be trade, could be free agency. And assume that we're still going to make moves.”
On Thursday the team proved that his words were more than just wishful thinking to calm the nerves of a frustrated fan base, walloping the trade market out of its pre-Christmas slumber with a shocking trade that was, in actual fact, not terribly shocking.
The Arizona Diamondbacks were one of the teams that seemed like a very natural fit as a trade partner for the Blue Jays this winter. Maybe their roster wasn’t pored over by Jays fans quite as often as the St. Louis Cardinals’, but only because the scale of a trade with Arizona would have needed to be much bigger than with St. Louis. The Jays needed a left-handed-hitting outfielder and had catchers to offer back. The Diamondbacks needed a catcher and had left-handed-hitting outfielders to offer. Yet a trade with Arizona would have required trading the kinds of players that rarely get traded for each other. That rarely get traded at all.
In the end, they found a deal.
Going from Toronto to the desert is the Blue Jays’ top prospect, catcher Gabriel Moreno. Not quite 23 years old, one of the top prospects at any position in the entire sport, impossibly athletic, elite pop times, an outstanding contact hitter with the potential for some power, and under club control for six more years even if he never sees the minors again.
Coming our way from Arizona is a five-win players right now, outfielder Daulton Varsho. Elite defensively, power from the left side, a top-25 base runner by BsR over the last two years, with potentially still-untapped offensive potential and four years of team control remaining.
Greasing the wheels of the trade is fan favourite Lourdes Gurriel Jr., who will play out his final year before free agency acting as cover, and lineup balance, for remaining young lefty-hitting Diamondbacks outfielders Corbin Carroll and Alek Thomas.
It was a hefty price for the Blue Jays to pay, but it checks a lot of boxes for them without actually surrendering a whole lot, if that makes sense. If it doesn’t, let me at least try to explain.
A real baseball trade! A long-term centre fielder! A win for everybody, somehow!
Let’s talk about it…
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Back in November, when the GM Meetings began in Las Vegas and Jon Morosi was fishing for radio hits by reporting that the Jays were "expected" to trade a catcher this winter, I took the opportunity to spend several paragraphs groaning at the notion that this actually rose to the level of "news."
"We’ve been talking about this for at least a year already," I wrote. "It’s obvious. No matter how Ross Atkins tries to spin it, Gabriel Moreno can’t be held back any longer, and there is no justification for having three everyday catchers on your roster when so much of a catcher’s value lies in the fact that they can actually handle the rigors of the position."
This always seemed like it would be the key to the Blue Jays' offseason.
Incredulously, I added:
You’re telling me that Moreno — who has elite pop times (a skill that’s going to grow in importance due to upcoming rule changes that have led to a significant increase in stolen base attempts in the minors), outstanding athleticism behind the plate, whose bat is big-league-ready, who looks like a guy who could be an All-Star calibre catcher for years, and who already missed a ton of reps in 2020 due to the pandemic, 2021 because of the thumb injury, and 2022 for a variety of reasons (he only started 67 times behind the plate between Buffalo and Toronto) — is going to be asked to spend the age-23 season of his development in a three-man catching rotation? Because the team couldn’t bring itself to trade Danny Jansen???
Obviously Jansen isn't the catcher who has ended up being moved here, but — at the risk of quoting myself just a little too much here — that doesn't mean I was off the mark.
The thing about dealing Jansen is that the Jays won’t have to “win the trade” to win the trade. Going into 2023 with Moreno, Kirk, and just about anything else will be a net gain over going into the season with all three of Moreno, Kirk, and Jansen. Frankly, the Jays’ catching barely takes a hit in that scenario.
Oh no! More games played by the two other guys who are also very good!
Obviously if the Jays can swing a blockbuster with one of their other catchers that’s certain to make the team better too, but those deals are a lot easier to pull off in practice than in reality. What would be even harder to pull off — maybe even impossible — is carrying three guys who can each only provide the team with the full value of their skillset 33% of the time and calling it anything but a failure of roster management.
Like, what are we doing here?
The answer, it turns out, was simply waiting for the right deal to come along.
That’s not to say that the deal is a perfect one, and we’ll definitely get into some reasons for concern, but it certainly is elegant in its simplicity — which is why it’s the exact kind of deal fans have been chattering about for months. A player the Jays weren’t going to be able to maximize the value of in exchange for a long-term fix at a premium defensive position they had no realistic solutions for in the pipeline. If Varsho doesn’t hit the way you’d hope, he’s still going to provide a lot of value with his glove. If Moreno turns into a perennial All-Star, well, you probably weren’t going to be able to give him the playing time he needed anyway.
And you could say almost the exact same things, with the names reversed, from Arizona’s perspective.
So, the Blue Jays have their long-term centre fielder. In three short big league seasons Varsho has gone from a catching prospect to an elite outfield defender. In just 378 2/3 innings in centre in 2022, Varsho was +8 by OAA and +5 by DRS, and in 541 2/3 innings in right field he was +10 and +14.
We're not talking about very large samples there, but those aren't the only tests he passes. According to Statcast, in 2022 he ranked in the 99th percentile overall by OAA, and in the 97th percentile for outfielder jump. He also very much passes the eye test.
In the abstract, he’s going to create a ton of value with his glove. For these Blue Jays, specifically, he compounds the floor-raising project that began with Kiermaier, giving them one of the best defensive outfields in the game — especially when Springer is out there with the two of them. That is, as Ross Atkins would say, pretty powerful.
Was the plan all along to have two elite gloves in the outfield? Could they have spent the Kiermaier money more wisely if they’d been able to make this deal earlier? Those are interesting questions. But I’ll say that I at least like the idea of going somewhat all-in on outfield defence more than I do simply plugging in Kiermaier in hope that he’ll be able to cover for the deficiencies of the guys on either side of him.
Kevin Gausman lost 10 decisions in 2022 despite pitching to a 2.38 FIP, largely because his .363 BABIP was the highest allowed by any qualified starter since the introduction of the DH in 1973. That was always going to regress naturally somewhat, but the Jays are smart to protect against anything anywhere close to as absurd happening again.
This is maybe oversimplifying, but there's a common thread among many of the teams who did the best job at suppressing BABIP in 2022 — they're good. The Dodgers, Yankees, Astros, and Guardians rank one through four on that leaderboard, with the Rays and Mariners coming in at six and seven. There are too many factors that go into BABIP to really use it a proxy for a club's ability to prevent runs, but the Jays ranked 20th. However you want to analyze defence, it’s an area that the Jays have long felt they need to tighten up. Now they have. Well, with one pretty glaring exception on the left side of second base.
Obviously the offensive questions are louder here. The main one being, “Is Varsho ultimately a platoon player?”
Varsho’s offensive numbers don’t overwhelm on their face, but his 106 wRC+ in 2022 belies a wild divergence in his splits. Against right-handers he was quite good, producing a 121 wRC+ from a .240/.317/.484 slash line, hitting 26 of his 27 home runs (in 463 PA), and walking at an above average rate. Against left-handers his wRC+ was an abysmal 52. That was something like the reverse of where he was in 2021, when he had a 92 wRC+ against right-handers and a 117 wRC+ versus lefties.
We're talking about pretty small samples here, especially the ones against LHP, but looking at his average exit velocities — which have been quite a bit lower versus left-handers than right — doesn't give me a ton of hope.
Still, dating all the way back to the minors there have definitely been years when the difference in the splits has been reversed, or at least less pronounced. And he was a strong hitter over his time in the minors (.899 OPS for his career), playing mostly as a catcher, which could mean that there’s maybe still more development to come with the bat. Or maybe the banning of the shift will help him out.
Even if not, his 2022 numbers against right-handers were very encouraging, and there’s still always going to be a ton of value in an elite CF glove who hits this well from the left side, even with limitations against same-sided arms. Kiermaier, whose splits are generally more even, may take some at-bats away from him this year against tough lefties, but that’s fine. Particularly if the Jays turn their attention now to one of the many lefty-mashing corner outfield types that are always more readily available than the types of upgrades the had been seeking up until this point. A Robbie Grossman, A.J. Pollock, Adam Duvall, or Jurickson Profar would look pretty good in place of one of Varsho or Kiermaier in a Jays lineup tailored to face lefties. Whit Merrifield is a less exciting internal option there, as well.
They’ll likely need to find him another platoon partner in 2024, but that’s a small scale problem compared to having no centre fielder in sight — or still somehow having three viable starting catchers on the roster.
Speaking of the Jays’ now-former catching problem, I hope I’ve made clear that when I said above that the Jays haven’t surrendered a lot here, I was talking about their ability to fit Moreno on the roster and not his talent. He’s obviously a fabulous prospect, and someone the Jays could ultimately regret moving just so they could keep the less-exciting duo of Danny Jansen and Alejandro Kirk. But this was the win-now move to make, and they’re very much in a win-now place.
Now, as always happens when a prospect gets traded, it has instantly become a little bit easier to see the warts on his game. There’s risk here for the Diamondbacks, too.
Before the deal happened we had been ready to believe that the power outage Moreno experienced in 2022 was likely due to the broken thumb he suffered in June of the previous season. I don’t necessarily think anyone should stop believing that. Moreno missed time this August with thumb soreness that, for all we know, could have been related to the previous issue. And it’s not uncommon for it to take some time for a player’s power to return after hand/thumb/wrist injuries. But the numbers aren’t going to be met with excitement by Diamondbacks fans. Four home runs over 350 plate appearances is not what you want, even from a catcher with a whole lot of other excellent attributes.
There are also those who believe his game calling needs work — something Arizona should at least be better able to allow him to develop in the majors than the more win-now Jays.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. It’s maybe interesting, though, how the Jays also got out of the Austin Martin business over a year ago after concerns about his power continued to dog him.
Anyway, I don’t think we need to dwell on Moreno too much here. You’ve got to give something to get something, and clearly everything lines up quite well on both ends here. The more interesting aspect of the deal may actually be the inclusion of Gurriel — who, actually, is another guy that saw his power take a hit in 2022.
I don’t want to go as far as suggesting that he’s mere ballast, because the Diamondbacks will find uses for him in their lefty-heavy outfield mix. The Jays do get $5.4 million off their books, with Varsho and his $2.8 million arbitration projection going the other way. So there’s a bit of savings there. Notably, though, it’s really only savings in terms of real dollars. With respect to the Jays’ luxury tax payroll — the number that’s really worth paying attention to at the moment — not a whole lot changes, as the average annual value of Gurriel’s contract (which is the number that counts toward the CBT) comes in at just over $3.1 million.
And now the Jays are potentially going to be looking for a right-handed-hitting corner outfielder to take Gurriel’s place?
It’s hard to see this and not wonder, at least a little bit, if the departure of both Gurriel and Hernández — two guys who were clearly big parts of the Jays’ Team Vibes culture over the past few years — was something the club sought out as a way to help change the culture. It’s certainly going to be a different, less fun, group without those guys next year. Though, to be fair to the front office here, there are plenty of purely baseball and economic reasons to have made these deals. Gurriel and Hernández are both limited defensively, overly similar to the club’s better hitters, and would have potentially left for nothing as free agents next winter anyway.
I’m not exactly holding my breath, but perhaps we’ll learn more about that — and about what comes next — when Ross Atkins meets with the media on Friday morning.
The Jays’ GM clearly still has work to do this winter, but the heaviest lifting surely is now done. He’s made a genuinely transformative move here. There’s risk. There are questions. But there’s also a power threat who hits from the left side and plays elite outfield defence — two things that have been noticeably absent on this roster over the last few years.
Ross had just better hope that Varsho’s next four years versus right-handed pitching look more like 2022 than 2021…
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Gadzooks! Big ass trade! We've got our CF for the next half decade. And we're set behind the plate, as we had just about the best catching tandem in the league last year that we can run back. Extend Janny Dancin' and we'll be set there for the next half decade too. Strong up the middle. The FO believes in Kirk. So do I.
High cost depending on how you value prospects (in general, and Moreno in particular), but also a good return. I think the point about team culture is important, too. I don't object to them having fun - I love the home run jacket, for example - but there are countless examples of where Hernandez failed to leg out a play, and Gurriel isn't exactly the most focused defender. These are positive changes, IMO.