Off-season catch-up!
Hey there everybody, it’s good to be back. Now let’s dive right into this! Except for on Twitter, I haven’t written a word about the Toronto Blue Jays since October. That is by far the longest break I’ve taken since starting Drunk Jays Fans way back in late 2006. Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for just about every other Blue Jays fan, not a whole hell of a lot has happened since then.
A few things of note have happened though! And I figure a good way to kick this site off is with a semi-chronological and not-at-all-comprehensive run-down of the major Blue Jays news items to have flickered across our screens over these last few months.
Atkins talks a big game
I can’t fault Jays GM Ross Atkins for being honest, or being excited at the possibilities this winter could bring. He’s been working for five years to bring his team to precisely the kind of position they ended 2020 in, with the roster pointed in the right direction and loaded with the kind of “flexibility” he so craves. But teasing fans with the possibility of adding “talent that is condensed in one player, and a super high impact,” as he did back in October, wasn’t exactly a masterstroke in terms of managing expectations. Fans tend not to hear all of the more neutral words a GM says before and after a statement like that, and so it has turned out that the frustration of this slow-moving off-season has only been heightened by what Atkins said.
True, he may yet pull off another coup like the one he managed last year by signing Hyun Jin Ryu. And let’s be clear: he should. But if he doesn’t fans aren’t going to easily forget those early promises — even if, when you go back and read the full quotes, that’s not really what they were.
Bichette says he’d be open to switching positions, sort of
There were some caveats involved when Bo Bichette said in an October radio hit that he’d be willing to move off of shortstop if it would help the team — so much so that in the title of Sportsnet’s piece on the comments it was stressed that he is reluctant to switch or platoon. “I would say that I’ve worked really hard at that position and it would be definitely disappointing if I had to move off,” Bichette said, “but at the same time if there was someone that’s a huge upgrade and could help us win a championship it’s something I wouldn’t get in the way of.”
Francisco Lindor would certainly fit that bill. But does anybody believe that Ha-Seong Kim would have? Or how about Andrelton Simmons?
It’s a tricky situation, perhaps made even trickier by Bichette’s early December appearance on teammate Ross Stripling’s podcast, when he gushed about free agent second baseman D.J. LeMahieu.
"I think DJ LeMahieu is the best hitter in baseball, and I don't even really think it's close from what I've seen,” Bichette said. “He's probably the number one player I'd want to play with in the league."
Clearly his preference for someone who won’t push him off of shortstop. And you know what? Unless it’s Lindor or someone of that calibre, so is mine.
Putting Vladdy in a corner, but which?
I honestly can’t remember if it was ever explicitly confirmed that there was a link between Vladimir Guerrero Jr. being suddenly shifted to first base at the opening of “summer camp” and the acknowledged fact that Guerrero had not returned to the club in ideal physical condition, but it wasn’t exactly difficult to surmise that one existed. It may not have been a permanent move, though. After Vlad showed good progress over the course of the 60-game season, working hard with the Jays’ strength and conditioning staff and visibly improving the shape he was in by the end of the campaign, Ross Atkins suggested on Bob McCown’s podcast that the door was still open for him to return to the position he played throughout the minors.
“Obviously, it’s more likely that he’ll be at first base,” he said, “but we haven’t closed the door completely on third base depending on how his off-season goes.”
His off-season, it soon became apparent, was going very well. At least from a conditioning perspective.
Vlad’s designs on returning to third base were serious enough that he played there during his brief turn in the Dominican league this winter. And if the hope of returning to third is a big part of what’s driving him to improve his conditioning, I’m all for letting him try. To a point. The only problem with that is the fact that he’s still bad there — he made four errors in nine games for Leones del Escogido, though such numbers need to be taken with gigantic grains of salt — and that he’s not using this development time to put work in at first base.
First is, of course, a much more realistic long- and short-term position for him, and one that he very clearly hasn’t mastered yet. And the lack of reps there would be less of a concern if it wasn’t for the fact that he’ll likely play there a lot in 2021, and if the Jays are going to return to the playoffs they’ll almost certainly have to do so by some thin margins. He’ll figure it out eventually, but they’re going to need him to figure it out soon.
At least there’s a relatively simple way out of all of this: find an elite third baseman who can make the position his own for years to come. Failing that, how about Justin Turner as a stopgap until Jordan Groshans is ready for his shot?
Small scale early moves
It’s now January and the heavy lifting the Jays need to do this winter is still incomplete, but that doesn’t mean they’ve done nothing this whole time. Back in late October the team announced that they had exercised their club option on Rafael Dolis, ensuring that one of their better high-leverage relievers would be back in 2021, and that they had declined the $9 million option they had on 33-year-old right-hander Chase Anderson.
Anderson is a better pitcher than he was able to show as a Blue Jay, but his 7.22 ERA in 2020 was a long way from inspiring. Shit, it was worse than Tanner Roark’s awful 6.80 mark. And with the market looking especially cold at that stage — only days earlier 29 teams had passed on Brad Hand, a dominant reliever placed on waivers because his $10 million option was deemed too expensive for the folks in Cleveland — there was no controversy when the Jays chose to let him go.
The move made even more sense when, about a week later, the Jays announced that they had used $8 million of their savings on Anderson to re-sign left-hander Robbie Ray.
There are flaws in Ray’s game, and with all the walks he surrenders it can be difficult to watch him pitch, but it’s easy to see why he appealed more than Anderson. He misses bats, has generally been durable, and always feels like he’s one good tweak away from really unlocking something special. Better still, if he doesn’t figure it out in the rotation he can still be useful in a relief role — as he did in the Jays’ game one loss to the Rays in their Wild Card series back in September — or as an “opener” on a tight leash. Anderson can’t say that, and while there are sexier names the Jays could have added, there’s something to be said for this particular roll of the dice.
The rumours start flying
Over the course of the winter the Jays have been linked to just about every major free agent and player available in trade. They even did some of the linking themselves, with Ross Atkins admitting in November that the team had been “close on another deal” — speculated to be Kevin Gausman, who instead took a qualifying offer from the Giants — around the time of the Ray signing. Since then there has been a ton of talk, and, as we’re all aware, not a whole lot of action.
According to Jon Becker’s 2020-21 MLB Matrices, the Jays have been linked in some way or other to 18 free agents who still remain available: J.T. Realmuto, Trevor Bauer, George Springer, D.J. LeMahieu, Marcell Ozuna, Michael Brantley, Justin Turner, Liam Hendriks, Andrelton Simmons, Jackie Bradley Jr., Tomoyuki Sugano, Kolten Wong, Brad Hand, Jake Odorizzi, Kyle Schwarber, Garrett Richards, J.A. Happ, and Mike Fiers.
Another, James Paxton, seems like a potential fit, though evidently there haven’t yet been any reports of contact between the two sides.
The Jays will wind up with someone, let there be no doubt. The shouts of “do something!” into the void of a stagnant market will be as pointless as they always are. But there is certainly a big difference in quality among those names, and as much as three or four of the lesser ones might help, fans see what everybody else in the industry sees. The Jays appear to have money to spend and few big-spending teams standing in their way. This winter isn’t merely a fantastic time for them to go out and reel in somebody elite, it’s an opportunity that must not be missed.
A 40-man full of catchers can only (maybe) mean one thing: trades
Near the end of November, the Jays made five additions to their 40-man roster: catchers Riley Adams and Gabriel Moreno, outfielder Josh Palacios, infielder Otto Lopez, and right-handed reliever Ty Tice.
Beyond the obvious first question raised by that group (can Ty Tice dunk?), one can't help but wonder what the Jays are going to do with so many roster spaces occupied by backstops. In addition to Adams and Moreno — both of whom were good bets to be lost to other organizations if they had been left exposed in the Rule 5 draft — the Jays have Danny Jansen, Reese McGuire, and Alejandro Kirk occupying spots on their 40-man.
It's not impossible that the Jays could go through the whole season with that many catchers, but it would be unusual. A quick look through every MLB team's official 40-man reveals that 23 clubs have either two or three catchers listed, and only one team has more than the Blue Jays' five. (The Brewers are, for some reason, carrying six catchers at the moment, having added prospect Mario Feliciano in November before signing former Jays catcher Luke Maile in early December.)
The Jays are not only going to look to the free agent market to improve their club this winter, and by using the catching depth they have they’d be dealing from a position of strength. There have been other Blue Jays we’ve heard speculated as potential trade chips this winter — Lourdes Gurriel Jr. in a potential Francisco Lindor swap, for example, or maybe even Randal Grichuk, should the team actually manager to land George Springer — but based on the way their 40-man is currently constructed it’s hard to see them doing anything major without at least one of their catchers going the other way.
The one guy who probably won’t be leaving — at least not for anyone not in the spectacular category — is Kirk. Even before his tantalizing surprise cameo at the end of the 2020 season, Kirk was generating interest from other teams. According a 21 predictions for 2021 piece from TSN’s Scott Mitchell, Cleveland tried to pry Kirk away in a trade for Corey Kluber last winter, as did Pittsburgh (possibly in talks involving Joe Musgrove) over the summer. Both times the Jays said no.
Wilner out!
One of the most unfortunate stories of the winter so far was Sportsnet’s out-of-nowhere decision in late November to part ways with Mike Wilner, the longtime host of JaysTalk who had in recent years worked his way up to his dream job in the team’s radio play-by-play booth. Wilner is unquestionably polarizing, due in large part to his refusal to suffer fools gladly back in his radio call-in days, but he’d paid his dues for an inordinately long time and was as passionate and knowledgeable a broadcaster as the Jays will ever have. Pairing him with the more staid Ben Wagner, another voice who has no playing background, was an unorthodox but poetic call back to the days when Tom Cheek and Jerry Howarth provided the backdrop to our summers. Beyond just the disrespect to the two decades of great work he had put in for the company and the completely original and authentic voice he had been for them, Sportsnet did its audience a disservice by dismissing him.
I’m dreaming of a newwww ballpark
I’d been hearing whispers for over a year about the Jays potentially building a new ballpark at the south end of the SkyDome site, as part of a bigger real estate development that would see Rogers try to recreate something like Maple Leaf Square a couple blocks west and adjacent to the space that’s to become Rail Deck Park. I could never quite get confirmation enough to run with what I was being told as an actual report, but on more than one occasion I managed to speculate about some of the things Rogers might want to do with their aging ballpark.
Then, at the end of November, Andrew Willis of the Globe and Mail managed to get enough sources to go on record and spill the beans. “The partners would build a new, baseball-focused stadium on the foundations of the southern end of the current facility and adjacent parking lots,” he wrote. “The northern portion of the 12.7-acre site would be turned into residential towers, office buildings, stores and public space.”
The pandemic we’re currently mired in has put all of this stuff on hold, so we don’t need to get too deep into the details right now. But what I did find particularly interesting about this news cycle was Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro’s response to it.
“From my perspective, it’s not in my windshield. It’s certainly one of the things that I thought we would attack when I got here. And then at some point, the scope and the magnitude of that project got much bigger than the deal that the Toronto Blue Jays could put together alone,” he told reporters at the Virtual Winter Meetings (TM). “When they move forward on that, at the time it involves baseball operations and a baseball perspective and the stadium piece of it, we and I will be involved.”
Part of the reason I felt comfortable speculating as though what I had been hearing was accurate was the fact that it made so much sense. Shapiro is entering his sixth season as president of the Jays yet has made little progress on the one project that it seemed should have been first on his task list. His usual answer about it had essentially been that it was above his pay grade, and even after the Globe’s story broke he maintained that stance. What else could be “not in (his) windshield” if not exactly the kind of major real estate play the report suggests Rogers is planning?
We’ll see where this all goes, but count me as a believer that this is what the people with the money want to see happen. I’ll probably be at least 50 goddamn years old before it ever actually comes to fruition, and I don’t exactly feel good about wanting the whims of a billionaire corporation to be fulfilled, or the massive carbon footprint of all that SkyDome concrete to simply go to waste, but I think it could turn out to be something really special.
Curbing our enthusiasm
Another thing that happened during Mark Shapiro’s Winter Meetings chat with reporters was that he seemed to make an effort to pump the brakes a little on the idea that the Jays are going to have some kind of audaciously expensive off-season.
“The only reaction I’ve got is that to place all of the emphasis on a successful offseason on a few names is probably not the right way to focus on it,” he said, before emphasizing that he is certain that the team will get better in one way or another. “That could come in the form of four very good players. It can come in the form of two elite players, but we’re going to get better.”
That’s not a whole lot different than what Atkins was saying at the start of the winter, but given the timing it felt like a bit of an admission that the off-season of Jays fans’ dreams might not be on the horizon. That feeling has only continued to grow as we’ve rolled into the new year, with the Padres executing a series of moves that would have been perfect for the Jays if they’d have been able to pull them off (trading for Blake Snell and Yu Darvish then signing Ha-Seong Kim, who the Jays were reportedly a finalist for, and who Hyun Jin Ryu had personally wooed back in December), and the newly flush Mets continuing to loom over the Jays’ most obvious targets, George Springer and Trevor Bauer.
Bauer outrage
OK, so, about Trevor Bauer. The reining NL Cy Young winner met with the Jays just last week, and if he was a different person — less terminally online perhaps, less of a MAGA build-the-wall asshat, less prone to online bullying or harassment, say — with the same resume and repertoire there would have been a whole lot more excitement about the possibility. The guy can pitch. After a somewhat uneven start to his career, he has been lights out since “mysteriously” adding a ton of spin to his pitches around the end of 2019, an effect he had long said was only possible through the use of foreign substances — something he has vocally groused about other pitchers doing over the years. (Back in September he denied specifically using pine tar. Around that time Defector’s Chris Thompson penned a delightful piece on the matter titled “Trevor Bauer Should Just Admit It,” which you should read.)
Bauer, assuming he doesn’t go back to abhorring the use of foreign substances after signing a big contract, would undoubtedly be a huge asset to the Jays on the field. Many Jays fans I’ve spoken to and interacted with online over these last few months are willing to overlook everything else about him because of that and want to see him on their team. For me, the problem is that there are a great many Jays fans who can’t overlook that stuff, nor should they have to. The Blue Jays should have the good sense to not ask their fans to cheer for this guy, and while I’m aware that there are plenty of players out there with “politics” that are just as odious (I’ve put politics in quotes there because I don’t actually believe that opposing consideration for others in all forms is a valid political position), Bauer’s one of the few who uses (or has used) his huge platform to vocally spread his. That’s a significant difference.
The hardest of passes.
Sugano soon?
“Star pitcher Tomoyuki Sugano has arrived in the U.S.,” tweeted MLB Network’s Jon Morosi on Saturday, suggesting that the Jays are one of the teams that have interest in the 31-year-old who sports a career ERA of 2.64 in NPB.
Jon Heyman affirmed this on Monday, tweeting that a decision is expected by Tuesday, with the Jays, Mets, and Giants in the running (though the Mets are now considered out of the mix and focused elsewhere), but adding that Sugano has an offer to stay in Japan to consider as well.
I’ll admit that the prospect of adding Sugano isn’t as exciting as last week’s thoughts of adding Ha-Seong Kim, a 25-year-old with some eye-popping projections at the plate and a glove good enough for some to believe he could play shortstop at the MLB level. I also have to admit that the prospect of adding Sugano seemed a little less exciting to me when I saw that in 2019 he was outpitched by his Yomiuri Giants teammate Shun Yamaguchi. *COUGH*
To be fair, however, 2019 was injury-riddled, as he battled back and hip problems. His 3.89 ERA that year sticks out like a sore thumb. Between 2015 and 2020 his next highest ERA was 2.14, and in his most recent season it was 1.97. He has twice won the Eiji Sawamura Award (the NPB equivalent of a Cy Young) and was the Cenral League’s MVP in 2014. Nobody in Japan has been better since Masahiro Tanaka left for the Yankees.
He’s a guy with plus command, a great slider, and someone who impressed majorly while holding the USA to one run over six innings in the 2017 World Baseball Classic.
In other words: I think it’s OK to get excited about this.
Last month Mike Axisa of CBS Sports provided a great primer with all kinds of outbound links to reports and quotes about Sugano’s prowess, which is definitely worth a read — and will be especially valuable if the Jays end up being the team he picks.
Of course, if the Jays do sign him, I’ll be here writing about it too. Not gonna lie: that’s a pretty good feeling to start this new year off with.
LATE BREAKING: Liam Hendriks pays a visit
Just as I hit publish on this first post a bit of intriguing news came down the wire by way of Sportsnet’s Shi Davidi, who reported that free agent closer Liam Hendriks was spotted on Monday visiting the Blue Jays’ complex in Dunedin.
Hendriks, of course, is familiar with the Jays, having pitched for them in 2014 and 2015 before being traded to the A’s in the ill-fated Jesse Chavez deal. But one assumes that he hadn’t yet seen the new digs the club (and the taxpayers of Florida) have built for themselves, hence the recruiting trip.
For those of you who lost touch with our old friend, during his time in Oakland, Hendriks managed to get himself designated for assignment back in 2018, only pass through waivers, make his way back to the A’s, then transform into an All-Star and one of the best relievers in the league. He was worth 3.9 wins in 2019, according to FanGraphs! In just 85 innings! By fWAR it was the best reliever season since Eric Gagne in 2003, and Hendriks picked up right where he left off in the shortened 2020 season.
He showed promise with the Blue Jays, and was a key man in the bullpen during that great 2015 run, but whereas he struck out 9.88 batters per nine innings that season, in 2019 and 2020 that mark has jumped to over 13.
He throws harder than ever, is just 31, and would be a welcome addition to a Blue Jays bullpen that was in disarray at the best of times in 2020, and currently stands to have Jordan Romano and Rafael Dolis pitching the club's most high-leverage innings.
"Hendriks lives in Fort Myers, Fla., a roughly three-hour drive from Dunedin, so a trip north wouldn’t be done on whim," Shi notes. *eyes emoji*
Hat tip - welcome back to the show.
Hell yes, welcome back Ol’ Reliable