Quick Thoughts On the Vlad Mess
Ughhhhhhhhh
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“Winning will fix everything, without a doubt. There's no question in my mind. Ultimately that's the only thing that will satisfy people.”
That was Blue Jays president and CEO Mark Shapiro back in early August of 2019, discussing fan unrest after the club had shipped out popular stalwarts Marcus Stroman, Aaron Sanchez, and Joe Biagini, among others, at that year’s trade deadline. You may remember it as the one where Shapiro’s hand-picked GM, Ross Atkins, bragged about having “turned 14 years of control into 42 years of control”—a line that has proven to be even dumber than it sounded at the time, with the players the Blue Jays received having so far accumulated a total of just 2.1 WAR combined in their MLB careers.
In the five-and-a-half years since Shapiro uttered those words we’ve seen that this is a baseball operations group that, even though they’ve put together some rosters that have been better than a lot of people will give them credit for, doesn’t understand nearly as much about winning as they like to think they do, but remains steadfastly committed to the principle of not giving even one tenth of a shit about satisfying fans in any way outside of what happens on the baseball field. (And if they did, they wouldn’t still be shoving Atkins in front of a microphone at every crisis point to further inflame things.)
In a vacuum—and it’s the vacuum these guys are living in—that commitment may seem like a good thing. It probably is most of the time. And it certainly was a more understandable—and sellable—idea back when the team was in its ascendancy and there could be nothing but hope. Let the baseball people do the ruthless baseball things and it will all pay off in the end. But out here in the reality of 2025, with fans already having nothing to look forward to but a half-decade of Wild Card slop, band-aid solutions, or the full-on abyss, it would have been nice, just for once, for the team to not piss in their faces for the sake of another of the valuations this front office so often treats as sacred despite a long track record showing little reason to do so.
And it would have been nice to not continue to let this franchise slide into becoming even more of a punchline. Because combining that perception with having to play in the AL East, having a bottom-third farm system, and not having Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is going to make acquiring the kinds of free agent talent that might be able to keep this house of cards standing come 2026 and beyond even harder than it has been to this point. It will matter.
Vlad was your tentpole. Your lifeline. Your way to keep fans from eating each others’ brains or simply giving up. A way to halt the slow-moving train wreck that you alone seem to fail to grasp the gravity of. And you’d rather risk losing that than deviate more than just a little bit from thinking about his importance strictly in baseball-value terms?
Overpay him, you morons. Overpay him and you’ll still have more leftover payroll to work with than you thought was even possible three winters ago, when you threw cold water on the idea of ever going over the first CBT threshold! Every team has unique challenges—let a possibly-too-high contract for your homegrown superstar be one of those challenges, for fuck sakes!
Granted, yes, I’m probably being a little dramatic about a saga that isn’t necessarily over yet and that we know very few of the particulars of. And I’m surely projecting at least a little bit about how the insufferably poisonous atmosphere among fans—which matters a lot to me, in that I live in it and it makes me want to claw my eyeballs out—might really matter to the bottom line. Shapiro is probably correct that if the team has the right kind of year, people will be a whole lot more satisfied. But by this point it feels like that idea has worn incredibly thin, especially considering these are guys who’ve been here getting too much of the “winning” part wrong for nearly a decade. And if you keep sucking the fun out of it for any and all at every turn what the fuck was all the discipline even for?
To make money and improve franchise equity for a billionaire owner is the answer there, I suppose. And in a way you could say that, thanks to that owner, in recent years Jays fans have been lucky to follow a team that at least has shown the pretense of trying to win and trying to improve its standing in the game. They’ve spent money. They’ve chased stars. I’m setting the bar somewhere within the earth’s mantle here, but they’ve at least not scoffed at the idea like the Mariners or Cubs, let alone the Rockies, Guardians, or Pirates. Still, in this very moment, with the spectre of Vlad’s departure, and the shambles of a franchise he would leave behind, not just looming but seeming significantly more real than ever, it doesn’t feel quite so lucky to be a Blue Jays fan, does it?
Fuck.
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My first reaction was honest surprise. I really thought they'd get him signed.
My second reaction was just plain old depression. Guess I'll be living here for a while.
Yeah I think you pretty much nailed things here. I shudder to think how quickly things will get ugly if the team starts off slowly and then just becomes mediocre. Even if we make the playoffs, what will 2026 and beyond look like? Like him or not, this will be a faceless team without Vlad and Shapiro's comments about thinking about winning both this year and future championships and 'we'll get one of those free agents one day' ring exceptionally (channeling my inner Ross there) hollow to me.
One thing is for sure. I don't think Shapiro is much of a Vladdy fan.