Quick thoughts: The offseason begins
On the Braves' win, upcoming Qualifying Offer decisions, the looming CBA situation, the Rogers mess, fall prospect watching, and more!
The Atlanta Braves are World Series champions. The off-season has begun. Next up? Qualifying offers. Looming over everything? That the CBA expires in less than a month. The state of the company that owns the Blue Jays? Still a gigantic mess. Gabriel Moreno? Lighting up the Arizona Fall League.
So let’s talk about it!
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Braves win
It’s incredible how easy it is to feel conflicted about the Atlanta Braves being crowned World Series champions, especially if you’re a Jays fan.
For a long time Alex Anthopoulos was “the one that got away” for a lot of us, and while you have to feel good for him for earning a ring, you also have to feel at least a little bit wistful for what might have been had he stuck around. Or, at least, you would have to feel that if not for the fact that his Braves won 88 games this season in a garbage division, while the Jays missed the playoffs despite winning 91 in the toughest division in baseball and playing on the road for nearly four months of the year.
Do you feel good about the stupid cheating Astros coming up short? Absolutely.
Do you like seeing good things happen for the fan base that’s out there doing the racist “Tomahawk Chop” in 2021 in the suburban ballpark they left downtown Atlanta for four years ago? Nope! Not if you’re me, at least.
It’s nice to see Anthopoulos have success, especially since we need not worry about the direction of the Blue Jays or pine for his return any longer. It’s nice to see Freddie Freeman, who plays for Canada internationally despite being born and raised in California, add a championship to his illustrious list of accomplishments. And it’s absolutely awesome to know that former Jays manager John Gibbons, who joined Anthopoulos in Atlanta in 2020 as a “special assignment scout,” will be getting a ring to go along with the one he presumably earned as a late-season call-up of the 1986 Mets.
The Braves put together a fun roster of players that played their asses off throughout the most difficult part of the season by far. They have fans who abhor the “Chop” as much as any other right-thinking person does, I’m sure. But the many, many ones who don’t and the 88 win thing are a hell of a one-two punch for me. I’m stung. Do not like.
Fortunately for the Braves and their fans my whining obviously doesn’t mean anything and can’t take anything away from their victory — even if I’d argue that it should!
Congrats to Alex & co.
QO decisions
Teams have five days from the end of the World Series to issue qualifying offers to any of their impending free agents, which this year means making a one-year offer of $18.4 million. Robbie Ray and Marcus Semien would obviously reject those, so the Jays don’t have much to think about there. They’ll offer, Ray and Semien will will reject, and if they sign elsewhere the Jays will receive a compensation pick in the draft (assuming something similar to this system continues to exist under the terms of the next CBA).
As we all know, Steven Matz is a much more difficult question.
Matz has made $14.5 million in his career so far (excluding his draft bonus). Would he take a bet on himself at $18.4 million for 2022 knowing that, worst case Ontario, even if he has a bad year he'll surely still be in line for at least another big league deal in 2023? Or will he look at the fact that he's coming off the best statistical year of his career heading into his age 31 season and try to cash in as much as he possibly can on this winter's market?
Jon Becker of FanGraphs/RosterResource and his assistant Scott each recently added contract predictions for 90 free agents to his excellent and meticulously detailed Offseason Matrices spreadsheet. One has Matz getting a three-year, $36 million deal this winter. The other has him getting $26 million over two years.
Their guesses are obviously not gospel, but I bet that's a pretty good representation of what the industry thinks, and that makes it a tough question for both Matz and the Jays. A one-year deal at $18.4 million is probably the worst outcome for both sides, but it could work for Matz, and making the offer could work for the Jays as long as they know he won’t accept (or that he’ll accept something more like 2/$26 or 3/$36 instead).
My guess at the moment is that they won’t do it — that the potential for an additional draft pick just isn’t worth the extra $6 million of risk. I’d also think that if they do and he accepts that will have been a mistake.
We’ll see soon, I guess. The clock is ticking.
CBA thoughts
In his end-of-season session with the media, Jays president Mark Shapiro sounded optimistic that a deal between the league and the players might actually get done before the collective bargaining agreement expires on December 1. That was encouraging to hear, even if there was all the reason in the world to believe that such an MLB high-up wasn’t about to cast a pall over the ongoing playoffs by saying anything negative.
I think it’s going to be fascinating — not to mention telling — to see how quickly it takes before we start seeing some real sabre-rattling in the media. If that doesn’t start happening right away, maybe that’s good. But if it does that will certainly take a lot of the shine off of Shapiro’s mid-October optimism.
My selfish hope here is that, because of the revenues and salaries lost only a year ago due to the pandemic, neither side is especially interested in hunkering down for a protracted work stoppage anytime soon. Unfortunately, that may not become apparent until much closer to the start of next season.
That’s selfish, of course, because the system needs to change in some pretty profound ways. Money needs to be shifted into the salaries of younger players because teams have become exceptionally good at paying players as little as possible for as long as possible, and at pushing their free agency back to avoid having them hit the market for too many of their most lucrative potential years.
The luxury tax has also become way too much of a de facto salary cap. For example, the Yankees first ran an opening day payroll above $200 million in 2005 when they reached $208 million, yet they haven’t been over the $208 million mark since 2016. This is despite the fact that the league had record revenue growth for 17 straight years through 2019. MLB as a whole made $4.73 billion in revenue in 2005 and $10.37 billion in 2019! Clearly a top team’s payroll shouldn’t have gone down over that span!
There have been other cheapskate teams out there too, of course. Like the Toronto Blue Jays, who in 21 years have only signed five bigger contracts than the four-year, $68 million extension they agreed to with Carlos Delgado in October 2000. And two of those were signed in 2006 (Vernon Wells) and 2008 (Alex Ríos).
OK, that’s maybe not the greatest example, because the Jays were rebuilding in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2018, and 2019. They also will likely add another bigger deal this winter, and sure look like they’re going to have to pay up very soon for Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette. It’s still kind of insane though!
The players should fight. I’m just not sure I’m ready for what that will entail.
The Rogers mess
I don't really have a whole hell of a lot else to say about this mess except that I'm hopeful we actually get a resolution to it on Friday. That's when a B.C. judge is expected to rule whether or not Edward Rogers' move to remake the company's board of directors — which he made unilaterally last week in a written resolution through his position as chair of the Rogers Control Trust — is valid.
The family-owned, Edward-chaired trust controls about 97% of the company's voting shares, per Bloomberg. However, the company, including Edward's mother and sisters, argue that the chair of the trust can't simply change the board by a written resolution at any time of his choosing. Rather, they say a shareholder meeting is required to remove directors and elect new ones.
I have no idea which side is more likely to win, but even as a layman I can see that this is a real desperation move from Edward. If he thought all along that he was able to change the board on a whim, why would he have gone to the all trouble of scheming to oust CEO Joe Natale in order to replace him with his own ally, Tony Staffieri? To avoid the perception of instability hurting the stock price? Because he sure as hell doesn't seem very concerned about that!
Since I last wrote about this the Rogers family's crisis PR firm leaked that Edward nearly got in the way of attempts by MLSE (which is 37.5% Rogers-owned) to re-sign beloved Raptors president Masai Ujiri — an utterly incredible piece of work by the firm, as it instantly destroyed any chance of sports fans believing that Edward is on their side.
Should that make anybody think it's the rest of the family that has fans' interests in mind? I don't think I'd go that far just yet. But I don’t think anybody’s confidence in Edward should be high — not that it ever was.
The Toronto Star report on the Ujiri debacle from Christine Dobby and Doug Smith also had a tidbit relating to the Jays.
The MLSE sources said Rogers wanted Bell and Tanenbaum to agree to a complex and potentially contentious plan that would see Rogers Communications take its 37.5-per-cent stake in MLSE (which owns the Raptors, Toronto Maple Leafs, Argos, Toronto FC and other teams), and combine it with the Toronto Blue Jays to create a separate company.
The Blue Jays are wholly owned by Rogers Communications and investors have long said that holding the team as part of the much larger telecom and media company undervalues the franchise.
So that’s interesting. Getting the Jays out from under the purview of a publicly traded company and into a murkier outfit like MLSE would be good for the team, but trying to roll them into MLSE somehow while also keeping them the property of Rogers seems weird!
Would it work? I have no idea. And I’ve also got no dog in this fight. Watching a bunch of rich ghouls eat themselves alive is all I need to get out of this — even if I’ve already been doing that every Sunday night at 9 on HBO. Largely that's because it's seemed for a long time now that Mark Shapiro knows how to play the game with these types and that the business plan he's outlined would fly under anyone's watch. If he's seen these sniping, backstabbing freaks up close, surely he's known enough not to be too aligned with one faction or the other. Right?
That’s the hope, at least.
Prospecting
OK, OK, time to look at something actually fun. Namely, watching Gabriel Moreno hit baseballs.
Both of those hits were from Tuesday. Moreno entered play slashing .351/.444/.541 (.985 OPS) over 45 plate appearances in the AFL so far. The two doubles (and a walk) raised his OPS to 1.045.
It’s not all just doubles power either. Last week he hit one off the batter’s eye in straightaway centre.
He’s been doing it on both sides of the ball out there, too.
I think the Jays may really have something here.
Josh Norris of Baseball America spoke about Moreno on BA’s podcast during an AFL preview episode a couple weeks ago. You might want to sit down for these. (h/t @_bkuh_)
“The reviews we were getting on Gabriel Moreno were, I think, the best reviews I’ve gotten on any player in my 8 years at Baseball America. I have him as best catcher in minors.”
Other evaluators will not necessarily agree of course, but it’s worth noting that there are a ton of great prospect catchers out there right now, including the Orioles’ Adley Rutschman, the first overall pick in the 2019. So that’s utterly huge. And yet, I am completely ready to believe it.
And the prospect stuff doesn’t just stop there. We had a couple of great ones this week from Future Blue Jays, who declare Orelvis Martinez the Blue Jays’ minor league player of the year, and Trent Palmer their minor league pitcher of the year.
I wrote about both of these guys in my prospect stock watch piece recently, but these are definitely worth a read because there’s a whole lot more inside knowledge in them than I can impart — such as Martinez nearly taking Alek Manoah deep on the first pitch he saw at the alternate site last summer. (!!!)
Lastly, another good prospect piece this week came from Baseball America, where Carlos Collazo provided us with a Blue Jays draft report card now that BA’s evaluators have had a chance to take a look at the Jays’ picks in pro ball. Most interesting among the various blurbs was the one on third-rounder Ricky Tiedemann, who was sitting 89-92 and touching 94 in college, but can already now top out at 98.
Not bad!
Also not bad? Keep an eye out for the return of Blue Jays Happy Hour later on this week!
I'm happy for Alex, but how cruel he couldn't be there due to testing positive for Covid. As for Freddie Freeman, I'd never seen him interviewed before, but how can you not like the guy? Talk about genuine. As for Moreno..if he continues to crush in the AFL and impresses in spring training, does he make the team?
“The reviews we were getting on Gabriel Moreno were, I think, the best reviews I’ve gotten on any player in my 8 years at Baseball America.”
So…… better reviews than Vlad’s?