No Glove, No Love: The Jays acquire Andrés Giménez

Stop me if you've heard this one before: The Jays have added an elite defensive player with a questionable bat. But at least they now owe him more guaranteed money than anyone else on their roster!

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After a couple of days at the Winter Meetings that only produced predictably exhausting reactions to things—the Jays not landing Juan Soto, the Jordan Romano decision turning into a fiasco sooner than even the biggest pessimist could have expected, Ross Atkins saying... literally anything—that I haven’t been especially interested in ranting about just yet, we have ourselves a genuine, bona fide, fascinating, honest-to-goodness baseball trade.

Sort of.

We have a trade, to be sure. But it’s maybe a financial one as much it is a baseball one. Certainly it is for one team, at least.

Heading to the Cleveland Guardians are 1B/DH Spencer Horwitz and Nick Mitchell, a left-handed-hitting outfielder who was the 136th overall pick in this summer’s draft. Coming north to Toronto are 2B Andrés Giménez and right-handed reliever Nick Sandlin. (Horwitz has since been flipped to the Pittsburgh Pirates, much to the delight of people everywhere who have parasocial relationships with Matt Hague.)

Giménez is the headliner and easily the most polarizing player in the deal. Acquired from the Mets as part of the Francisco Lindor trade ahead of the 2021 season, Giménez immediately went out and made the Guardians look like geniuses. His first year in Cleveland saw him start for the AL in the All-Star Game, win his first of what are now three straight Gold Glove awards, and finish sixth in AL MVP voting on the back of a 141 wRC+/6.1 fWAR season. His .353 BABIP was definitely on the high side that season—it ranked fifth out of 130 qualified hitters—and his marks for exit velocity, barrel rate, etc., were pedestrian, but with his elite speed and defence, Cleveland saw fit to sign him to one of those supposedly team-friendly pre-arb contract extensions: seven-years, $106.5 million.

In the first year of the new deal his BABIP dipped to .289 and, even more alarmingly, his average exit velocity went from the 29th percentile to the first. He slashed .251/.314/.399 (96 wRC+) over 616 plate appearances. His exit velo rebounded into the ninth percentile this past season, but it didn’t help. His wRC+ dipped to just 83. His ISO sunk below .100 for the first time in his career. He hit just nine home runs in 633 plate appearances.

The Blue Jays are now on the hook for the $97.5 million remaining on his deal—$10 million this year, $15 million next year, and then $23 million each for the next three (plus a $2.5 million buyout on a $23 million club option for 2030, and a $1 million assignment bonus for being traded).

Thing is, Giménez was still nearly a four-win player in '23 and nearly a three-win player in '24, at least according to FanGraphs. Baseball Reference puts him at 9.3 WAR over the last two seasons combined (5.3 and 4.0), and at 7.4 WAR in '22. And he's only just turned 26 years old in September. He's a year younger than Horwitz.

If he truly can’t rediscover his form at the plate—even just a facsimile of what he did in 2022—those $23 million years could get really ugly. But $23 million ain't what it used to be. And even if it was, a three-to-four-win player—assuming that's his floor—with the upside to be even more is a pretty dang decent way to spend it, regardless of whether its shape fits the needs of the unfinished, December 2024 version of the Jays’ roster.

And if it isn't his floor? If there are further depths to plumb? Well, I suppose it would at least cement Ross Atkins’ legacy quite nicely—especially if Vladimir Guerrero Jr. isn’t manning the right side of the Jays’ infield alongside of Giménez beyond 2025.

While the shape of his production doesn’t necessarily appear to be ideal for the Jays’ roster at this exact moment, the shape of his contract very much is.

Uh… probably?

Getting three or four projected 2025 wins for $10 million is some very efficient work, especially considering what financial constraints might be in place for the club outside of any “unicorn budget.” But is it really $10 million?

Roster Resource now has the Jays projected to $228 million in terms of their payroll number for Competitive Balance Tax purposes, which leaves them just $13 million below the $241 million CBT threshold, and only $22 million south of the $250 million estimate given to them after their offseason spending was complete last winter. That includes Giménez at his deal’s average annual value of $19.3 million, not the $10 million he’ll actually make, meaning that there's potentially even more wiggle room there. Though if we’re going down this road, it must then be noted that Bo Bichette's “real” number of $17.5 million is well above his CBT number of $11.2 million, which evens some of that out. (The figure also includes Yimi García’s new deal. Welcome back Yimi!)

Are we worried about the CBT dollars or the real dollars here? Both, to an extent, I suppose. Either way, it feels like an affront that we even have to think this much about payroll stuff—don’t make the decision months ago to try to be competitive if you’re not going to have the resources to do it properly, especially if you’re going to wave this self-defeating unicorn nonsense in all of our faces and not just let the baseball people build the roster as they see fit!—and yet here we are.

Going above the CBT, of course, shouldn’t be an issue regardless. A bunch of money will come off the books next winter, allowing the team to easily get back under should they want to. But nobody seems to know what the situation actually is here, adding some discomfort to how we think of a deal that hardly comes off as an obvious slam dunk to begin with.

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Is it a risk? Oh, it is absolutely a risk. A second Daulton Varsho who, instead of being non-tenderable if the cost-benefit analysis goes too far sideways, is owed $97.5 million over the next five years is indeed risky! Adding another guy who might not hit to a lineup with too many of those as it is? Definitely risky. Do not ever say that Ross Atkins is risk averse.

But let’s not forget that WAR is a thing for a reason. We talk about projected standings in terms of projected WAR for a reason. And the Jays just turned a guy projected to 2.0 wins for a guy conservatively projected to 3.2—and did so while likely selling high on the outgoing player and buying low on the incoming one.

Or one could look at it this way, which I think is pretty fair.

Or like this…

Or this…

OK, granted, looking at it that first way ignores the loss of Horwitz, and also the fact that MLB Trade Rumors predicted Kim’s deal to come in much lower than suggested. But FanGraphs very much had him in that territory, and there’s no certainty that he would have been willing to structure his deal in as potentially favourable a way as the Giménez one is, or that the Jays would have been able to sign him at all.

And in the case of both players, though Kim has certainly played there more in recent years, I think the ability exists to take over for Bo Bichette at shortstop should he depart after 2025. While Statcast likes Giménez less than Kim in terms of arm strength, they’re both well ahead of Bo. And Kim recently underwent labrum surgery on his throwing shoulder, which forced him to miss the playoffs and certainly raises some questions about how he’ll bounce back.

As for Horwitz, I’ve already seen fans getting precious about giving him up, which is maybe understandable seeing as he’s a nice story, seems like a really good dude, and if you squint you can maybe even see the kind of left-handed middle-of-the-order bat it feels like the Jays have long been chasing. But let’s not go nuts here.

I dislike the instinct, natural as it may be, to start seeing all the flaws on a player the second he goes out the door, but fans would do well to remember that this was a guy essentially made redundant by the number three piece acquired in the Yusei Kikuchi deal. Will Wagner’s arrival put to bed any notion of Horwitz being a second baseman for the Jays in any kind of meaningful way. While one might quibble with their preference there, it’s undeniable that the appeal of Horwitz is mighty limited if you only see him as a 1B/DH—especially if you’re a team like the Blue Jays that has to do better than Spencer Horwitz in those spots.

He’s a really nice hitter, and Pittsburgh is a great place for him to actually get the kind of run that he deserves to see if he can make his skillset work at the big league level, but that’s simply not something he’s proven yet. The 123 wRC+ projection from Steamer looks nice, as does his career 125 wRC+ through 425 plate appearances, but—to use an overly extreme example—after 417 big league plate appearances, Davis Schneider’s wRC+ was 129. Now it sits at 103. You know?

Anyway, overall I don’t think this move necessarily has to be read as a doubling down on a defence-heavy tilt that hasn’t worked the last two seasons, or further rejection of power for another punchless hitter. I understand why people determined to constantly be giant gormless wangs about their favourite baseball team probably won’t have any interest in seeing it this way, and I could be wrong here, or they could fail to execute on the next steps, but I see it as using their financial heft to open up a DH spot for a hitter with a much more reliable track record—and, I hope to god, legitimate power—while meaningfully adding to their projected win total (with genuine upside), improving their baserunning, adding an actual stolen base threat, building in some insurance for Bo’s likely departure next winter, and picking up a low-cost, optionable reliever (who really started using his splitter to right-handed batters in the second half of this season) to boot.

Don’t get me wrong, they’ll have actually do the thing before I can get excited for anything like this. Frankly, they should do the thing twice, then add a starting pitcher just to be safe. But there are things still to be done.

That said, I’m well aware based on last winter that they may do something dumb like not replace Horwitz with an even better hitter and then also not add a big enough bat in left field. This Jays front office is not as useless as the most tiresome, unfunny pessimists in the world have convinced themselves they are, but they clearly do have it in them to screw things up. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here. I have my doubts, too. It hardly seems possible that anyone in such an ultra-competitive industry could watch the end come for their dream job so passively and pathetically, but at this point I wouldn’t necessarily put it past this lot.

And Shi Davidi hints in his latest at patience and bargain hunting and tough choices ahead, so… maybe the haters are on to something. I don’t know.

What I do know is that the move has strongly reminded me of something I wrote about last year’s Justin Turner signing, which was that it was “either a good start or a terrible finish to their offseason work.”

This one is at least happening in mid-December, not late January.

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