News and notes: Rumours, renovations, and more!
On Juan Soto, Patrick Corbin, long-term finances, Jays All-Stars, dome renovations, an ASG bid, Sergio Romo, Vinny Nittoli, Luis Castillo, Yosver Zulueta, Michael Conforto, Shannon Curley, and more!
The MLB world is still in the middle of it’s All-Star break pause, but extremely mid Blue Jays news never stops! Here’s some news and notes!
Juan Soto
Yeah, I used the 1991 All-Star Game logo at the top of this post, and we’ll definitely get to that, but everybody is still talking about the Juan Soto circus, so let’s start there. Thank you, Ringmaster Boras!
I wrote a little bit about the Jays and Soto in my piece earlier in the week, noting that I just don’t see how Gabriel Moreno (who plays the same position as Keibert Ruiz, the top prospect acquired last summer when the Nationals sent Max Scherzer and Trea Turner to the Dodgers) and/or Bo Bichette (who doesn’t really fit Washington’s timeline) would make a lot of sense in a deal like this. While I certainly wouldn’t expect Soto to ultimately end up in Toronto, the more I think of it the more I wonder how much of a road block those factors really would be.
Boras is very good at his job, and the spectacle this situation has become would seem to have his fingerprints all over it. For example, since Soto’s victory in Monday’s Home Run Derby, we’ve learned that the player was “forced” to fly commercial — like a commoner! — for the event, rather than being chartered a flight by his club.
A frayed relationship! Cheap owners! Clearly Soto needs to get out!
Whether that came from Soto’s camp, we have no clue, but it’s certainly fed into the idea that this is an untenable situation — and that’s one that Boras has clearly been stoking for his own reasons.
“I don’t think anybody wants to work for someone they don’t know,” the uber-agent told James Wagner of the New York Times, referring to the fact that it’s expected that the Nationals will be sold in the very near future.
Boras also spoke about this on a recent podcast with Jon Heyman and Joel Sherman of the New York Post, as relayed by MLB Trade Rumors in an excellent roundup.
“Juan Soto has a ring on his finger and he has had people that he knows and trusted ever since his inception with the franchise, but now that group of people has said, ’We’re going to move on and assign this team to another group,’” he explained. “When you’re a player, you can talk about being offered things, but it doesn’t carry with it the intentions [of ownership] and the security of winning — the goals of the player that are beyond economic.”
MLBTR notes that Boras also suggested that a new owner would likely see having Soto as a huge asset, and would appreciate the opportunity to decide for themselves whether to build around him — something the piece tells us ESPN’s Buster Olney disputed on a recent podcast. Olney reportedly said “that executives around the game believe new owners will want the situation resolved one way or another before taking over. [And] with an extension likely off the table, that would mean completing a trade before the sale of the team goes through.”
The Lerner family, owner of the Nationals, seem in this scenario that they’re damned if they do, damned if they don’t, and perhaps damned by any resolution that doesn’t involve getting a signature on the exact contract Boras wants for his client.
Ah, but just in case that wasn’t going to heap maximal embarrassment onto the Nats, this week we also had Heyman — who, shall we say, has occasionally been known to hear rumblings that Boras just so happens to want out there — writing in the Post about the package Washington will be looking to fetch.
“Early unconfirmed speculation is that the Nats would request a team’s top four prospects and/or young major leaguers and perhaps a willingness to take Patrick Corbin’s bloated contract,” he writes. “With this kind of player, almost anything in the ask should be considered fair game.”
To review: The Nationals are jerks. They’ll be jerks if they don’t trade him. They’ll be jerks if they do trade him. They’ll be asking for a jerk-y haul of players in return for him.
And they’ll be jerks when they don’t get it.
I’m merely speculating about what might be going on in the background, of course. But Jays fans old enough to remember Bill Caudill have long known that embarrassing a franchise is very much in Boras’s playbook.
Given that Boras is out here playing extreme hardball in public, is always happy to take his clients to free agency, and that the value of dealing Soto will never be higher than in the next two weeks, do we really think the package it will take to get Soto will be as extravagant as the Heyman suggestion that sent Baseball Twitter into a tizzy?
I have my doubts.
Obviously it will take a massive amount to land him, but my mind keeps coming back to one of the deals I mentioned above — the trade that sent Scherzer and Turner to the Dodgers last summer.
Maybe this is a warped way to look at it, but in that one the Dodgers got a half season of Scherzer — OK, technically it was a third of the regular season, plus October, which I think is fine enough for our purposes to call a half — plus a year-and-a-half of Turner.
That’s two years of control. The Nationals are offering up 2.5 years of Soto. They’re not the same, but I’m not sure they’re as far apart as we think. And so what did the Nationals get in that deal? Ruiz and right-hander Josiah Gray, who MLBTR tells us were the number 16 and number 56 prospects on last year’s mid-season top 100 for Baseball America. They also got Gerardo Carrillo, a hard-throwing right-hander who looks destined for the bullpen and was given a 40 FV rating by Eric Longenhagen of FanGraphs when ranking him the Nats’ seventh best prospect heading into this season, and then-25-year-old outfield prospect Donovan Casey, who didn’t make Longenhagen’s list of the Nationals’ top 29.
Even if the secondary guys aren’t all that impressive, that’s a haul. And the Nationals should get an even bigger one for Soto — not just because of the extra stretch drive that the acquiring team will get him for, but because all the value he provides occupies one roster spot instead of two, and because the expanded playoff field means that there are more buyers out there to drive the price up. How much bigger likely depends on how desperate the Nationals are to get out of this mess, and whether rival executives think they’re actually willing to go into the winter with Soto still on their roster.
This week’s Boras-flavoured gamesmanship certainly seems to be indicating that they should not do that, and you can’t blame him or his client for trying to force a move to a winner. It hurts the Nationals’ leverage, though. Maybe even enough for a team like the Blue Jays to realistically get in on the bidding (though I think the farm-thinning trades they’ve made for José Berríos and Matt Chapman over the last year have hurt their position relative to others).
And if they really insist on adding the Corbin contract to the mix — a terrible idea for the Nationals’ front office, but an incredibly billionaire-y thing to do, especially with the sale of the club and all its assets on the horizon — who even knows how much lower than what’s been speculated the price might go.
Patrick Corbin
I guess if we’re entertaining this we’re entertaining this. So… what if the Jays did somehow manage to land Soto — apparently they’re a betting favourite! — but were required to take the poison pill of Corbin’s contract in order to do so?
Well, for one it may be a non-starter, at least if some of Corbin’s dumbass anti-vaxx social media posting, or dumbass social media likes…
… is any indication.
Then again, perhaps the threat of being put on the restricted list and losing half his salary (in this hypothetical) would change his mind. However, having just scrolled through his Twitter likes, I’d say the brain worms are in there pretty deep. Ben Shapiro for fuck sakes!
Putting that aside, Corbin also sucks in a completely different way. His awful 4.66 ERA in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season does not appear to have been a blip, as it sunk to 5.82 last year, and is at 5.87 this year. I’d rather give the ball to Yusei Kikuchi at this point!
Putting that aside — because he’d merely be acquired as ballast, not necessarily to pitch — how might his contract fit the Jays’ financial picture? Not super well, it turns out!
Corbin is owed $7.7 million for the rest of this season, $23 million next year, and — Jesus Christ! — $35 million for 2024, with $10 million of that deferred (to be paid between November 2024 and January 2026).
Add in the fact that Soto is owed about $5.7 million for the rest of this year’s $17.1 million contract, then will go up to something like $25 million through arbitration next year, and likely something like $33 million the year after (give or take a few million in both cases), and that’s a lot to be added to what’s already a very healthy Blue Jays budget.
That $13.4 million in prorated salaries for this year would take the Jays up to $184.4 million in payroll, which is nearly $20 million higher than the club's highest-ever spend ($165 million spent on the year-end 40-man in 2017, per Cot's). Mark Shapiro has always demurred when asked about the club pushing the luxury tax threshold, and while that wouldn’t get the Jays to this year’s $230 million limit, it would push them closer than I suspect they’d be willing to go. Maybe it’s something an Edward Rogers would allow the club to do, but that would have been easier to see before the fell back to the pack (and briefly out of) the wild card race. A lot would probably depend on the next couple weeks of results on the field, honestly.
Next year things would get even uglier, because they'd need to add $48 million to a payroll Cot's already has starting at estimated at $119.3 million. That takes it to $167 million before we get to arbitration raises due to guys like Teoscar Hernández and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (probably about $30 million), plus smaller arb awards for guys like Bo Bichette, Cavan Biggio, Danny Jansen, Adam Cimber, Tim Mayza, Trevor Richards, and Santiago Espinal.
It would theoretically be just a one-year crunch, as money for Hyun Jin Ryu, Matt Chapman, Teoscar Hernández, and Lourdes Gurriel Jr. will be off the books after 2023. However, with Soto entering his last year of club control in 2024, and Vlad and Bo due to hit free agency the year after (provided they're not signed long-term by then), the Jays would be forced to spend much of what would be cleared in order to replenish the roster anyway.
Ideally they'll have some prospects by then ready to fill in the gaps cheaply, but without a commitment well beyond the levels they're at right now — something that obviously should happen but can't be counted on — it's a bit of a financial house of cards. Feels like the kind of thing a bad team would do! Or a team like the Yankees, Mets, or Dodgers, for whom money means nothing.
At the very least, if you're the Jays and you're taking on all of Corbin's contract, you'd better not be giving up much in the way of prospects.
Jays pushing for an All-Star Game?
To answer the question posed by the above subheading… uh… I don’t really care.
Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t! The All-Star spectacle we witness this week in Los Angeles was pretty incredible, both for fans, and for players.
How fun is that? And the home run derby? The Futures Game? The draft? And the circus of it all. Espinal courting Juan Soto! Alek Manoah stealing the show?
I can dig it! Hell, I loved it when the All-Star Game came to Toronto the last time, though I’m sure it didn’t hurt that I was 10.
Anyway, we learned this week — rather appropriately — that the Jays are angling for an All-Star Game of their own. Shi Davidi of Sportsnet reported as much on Wednesday, telling us that the club is looking to show off a newly-renovated Rogers Centre as hosts of the league’s showcase event in 2027.
That’s all well and good, but for me the fun bit of Shi’s report was in the new details he’s provided about those renovations.
“Final plans aren’t yet known,” he writes, “but initial discussions included the outfield being redone with elevated bullpens and asymmetric walls this winter (some season-ticket subscribers were recently informed that they’ll be relocated in 2023). The rest of the lower bowl reset will start in the off-season to follow.”
Are these new details? I think they are. Or, at least, the timeline is. As is the fact that season ticket holders have been informed that they’ll be sitting elsewhere.
And they sound potentially pretty awesome, if you ask me.
I mean, sure, it’s just a wall. But it’s asymmetrical!
To get rid of the cookie-cutter feel of the building, to give it a little character, to make some better use of the ground-level space between the foul poles? For next year? I’m into it.
The lower bowl stuff will have to wait, which I guess means that those down the base lines will just have to keep staring out at the 55 yard line. This makes some sense given what appears to be the scope of the project — and the fact that some of the details may not yet be entirely finalized.
Jays Twitter's @JoshuaHowsam noted on Wednesday that he'd received a survey email from the club about a possible premium lounge under the seats behind the plate. In a thread on the subject he added, "The idea (as it seemed to be presenting itself) was a lounge that's dug out with viewing at basically field level, sort of like what they have in the outfield in Denver."
Very interesting. Just don’t mess with Home Plate Lady’s seats!
Transactions!!!
The Jays have made some moves!!! Of the extremely minor variety!!!
On Wednesday the Blue Jays outrighted reliever Sergio Romo, who was recently designated for assignment. While it was reported at first that he’d cleared and been assigned to Buffalo, because of his service time he was actually able to elect free agency, which the club confirmed on Wednesday night he had done. Godspeed, Sergio. May it always be an even year in your heart.
Meanwhile, Fansided’s Robert Murray tweeted this on Thursday:
“Right-hander Vinny Nittoli is signing with the Toronto Blue Jays. Nittoli, who recently opted out of his contract with the Yankees, had posted a 1.61 ERA with 33 strikeouts in 28 innings with Triple-A Scranton Wilkes-Barre since May.”
It really should be in the CBA that if your name is Vinny Nittoli you can only play for the Yankees (or possibly the Mets of Phillies), but I suppose they’ll have to get that in there in 2026.
Nittoli has actually been with the Jays before, signing as a free agent in May 2019 after being released by the Diamondbacks, and pitching for New Hampshire. He was granted free agency that winter, signed with the Mariners — the team that originally drafted him — then ended up with the Twins, and then the Yankees. Seattle had him in the big leagues for one inning last year, during which he walked two, struck out one, and allowed just one hit — a two-run homer to Trevor Story.
His fastball registered at… uh… 93.1 that day. But hey, whatever sticks, amiright?
Nittoli can be optioned, and I would certainly expect that if this even is a big league deal, requiring a 40-man spot, that will be the route the Jays take with it — if not now, then real soon. I guess we’ll see!
Quickly…
• While the focus of trade talk everywhere has been on Juan Soto, for obvious reasons, there still are a whole bunch of very interesting players out there, many of whom make sense for the Jays (unless you're one of those "this isn't their year anyway" types, in which case I'm sure hockey season will be starting very soon for you). The Reds' Luis Castillo is an outstanding pitcher who is under contract for both this year and next, and should be hitting the market before the deadline. What will it take to get him? The Athletic's C. Trent Rosecrans suggests a Berríos-like package, but asked beat writers following nine potential suitors to come up with their best offers and maybe didn't quite get that.
Kaitlyn McGrath wrote this one up from the Blue Jays' perspective, noting that while the Jays' rotation's biggest issue right now is their fifth starter, Castillo's extra year of control will help them fill the void next year caused by Hyun Jin Ryu's absence and Ross Stripling's pending free agency (and, I might add, Nate Pearson's being Nate Pearson). Her offer was Jordan Groshans and Yosver Zulueta.
Keith Law, who graded each of the writers' offers, was perhaps surprisingly more into this one for the Reds than most. "Fairly sure the Reds would do this, with Zulueta emerging as a potential starter now that he’s fully healthy."
I also would do that. In a heartbeat.
• One thing about Zulueta, though, relates back to what I was on about earlier with Patrick Corbin and the Jays’ long-term financial picture. Both Zulueta and Ricky Tiedemann are now in Double-A. Gone are the old Anthopoulos days, when the club was happy to skip top prospects past a Buffalo team that was regarded more as a big league taxi squad, but being in New Hampshire does make those guys pretty close to the majors. I don’t think Tiedemann is going anywhere this month, or during the winter, but even losing Zulueta could mean losing some really cheap and really good innings going forward — potentially as soon as next year. I don’t think the Jays would be looking at penciling him into a 2023 rotation spot or anything, but insurance for a second Kikuchi disaster? That could work. As could having him pitch out of the bullpen down the stretch this year.
It’s maybe a higher price than it feels like, is what I’m saying.
• A potential add that the Jays could make without sending any prospects out would be taking a look again at free agent Michael Conforto. Now that the draft is over, and the issue of losing a draft pick in order to sign him moot, teams are apparently interested. Friend of the site Darragh McDonald wrote about this for MLBTR on Wednesday, highlighting the Blue Jays’ connection — the previous interest and, of course, the need for a left-handed hitter to better complement their heavily right-handed lineup. Could be a fit!
• On the other hand, while I certainly don’t think a couple of hot streaks from flawed players are something that should stop the Jays from going out and adding a lefty stick, it's worth pointing out that since May 15th, Cavan Biggio has a 133 wRC+ in 130 plate appearances, and Raimel Tapia has a 125 wRC+ over 146 PA. Maybe the urgency isn't there the way we think?
• Like everyone else, I loved David Singh’s latest for Sportsnet, in which he profiles the Jays’ “secret weapon in free-agent talks,” Shannon Curley. Though her official title, per the club’s front office directory, is Senior Manager, Player Relations and Community Marketing, Curley does a whole lot more than that — as is obvious from the piece, which details her role in helping take care of players’ families (and making those players and their families feel welcome, both when with the club, and when being recruited). A great read on a really interesting aspect of what the Jays are building behind the scenes, and a real unsung hero of the Jays’ recent free agent successes.
• One last All-Star bit that must be mentioned is how cool and moving it was to see Ken Rosenthal (and Vladimir Guerrero Jr.!) name Sportsnet’s Jamie Campbell and Buck Martinez during the Stand Up To Cancer tribute after the fifth inning of the big event. Love it!
• Lastly, OK… one more All-Star thing, as Nick Ashbourne took a look for NorthStar Bets at how Alek Manoah has taken the promising start to his MLB career last season, and built on it, becoming a very deserving All-Star in the process.
Nick, of course, is my cohost on Blue Jays Happy Hour, and we’ll be back live and taking your calls and questions twice this week: first, today — Thursday at 5 PM ET!
Be sure to get Callin and follow Blue Jays Happy Hour so that you can join us then — and on our next one, which will be at the conclusion of Sunday’s Jays game against the Red Sox!
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fyi the latest episode of the Wag the Doug podcast discussed a recent public opinion survey commissioned by the Ontario PCs. These surveys apparently hint at future policy positions of the government.
Anywho, buried in the middle of this survey was a question about whether the province should spend billions of dollars on a new stadium in order to get an NFL team. If our fail-son-in-chief decides to open that money spigot, I wonder if Rogers also gets in line (assuming they’re not behind the NFL plans) to do something more ambitious with the SkyDome?
Starts at about 12:30:
https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/45-will-ontario-ever-have-a-truly-left-wing-party/
Soto no go. The 1991 All Star game was a lot of fun from memory! Lots of cool events. I think.