Shapiro Speaks!: Crisitunity!

OK, folks, show's over. Nothing to see here. Show's... Oh, my god! A horrible plane crash! Hey, everybody, get a load of this flaming wreckage!

It was a week ago—yeah, I know—that Blue Jays President and CEO Mark Shapiro spoke with assembled members of the media on the field at Rogers Centre to discuss the state of the team, and the way forward after 2024’s status as a bitterly disappointing season was officially confirmed by way of eight members of the big league roster being shipped out the door in exchange for 13 prospects (and Ryan Yarbrough) at the trade deadline in late July.

It was Shapiro’s first meeting with reporters since March 21st, according to Shi Davidi in his piece on it for Sportsnet. Shi’s piece is also where we can find a clip of the full 17 minute session.

And if the full presser is online, that means I can transcribe it—which is precisely what I’ve done below, adding in a bunch of my own thoughts for good measure. You know the drill. It’s Shapiro Speaks!

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Why did you fall short of expectations?

Well, I mean, it's not a mystery why we fell short of expectations. The bullpen's been a challenge for us all season long. Significant injuries to the three guys we expected to anchor the back-end, and then the backfill just wasn't there. So, the bullpen's been an Achilles for us all year. And then there are a number of guys in the lineup we projected to have carrying levels of performance; it didn't happen. I think the greater focus for us is what can we learn from that? What role did we play in that? How we can construct a team that's better next year. But, yeah, there's no doubt, it's very disappointing.

The Jays’ bullpen is second-last in baseball by ERA and last by FIP. The lineup is 15th by wRC+, but 22nd in runs scored and 28th by home runs. So all that tracks. And while my first instinct here was to wonder why the starters got a pass, I think what Shapiro is saying actually maybe does make some sense.

The club's rotation ranks 19th by ERA and 21st by FIP, down from third and seventh last season, but a major part of the issue there appears have its roots in the bullpen.

Jays relievers have been so unreliable this year that the starters have been forced to pitch deeper into games than they clearly should have. As a group, the starters have faced MLB’s third-highest number of batters when going through an opponent's lineup for the third and fourth time, and when they've done so it's been an absolute disaster: a 6.83 ERA, MLB’s second-worst.

The first two times through the order Jays starters have actually been quite good, producing a 3.51 ERA as a group, ranking ninth.

Only two teams’ relievers currently sport a negative fWAR as a group: the Rockies at -0.4, and the Blue Jays at a remarkable -2.3. Only four teams in the last decade have produced marks that bad or worse. Those teams averaged 102 losses.

In a way, then, maybe you could call these Blue Jays overachievers!

Shapiro was in remorseful mode for this answer, though. So I can’t say I’m surprised he didn’t try it.

Do you need to adjust the way you project player performance or the way you construct rosters?

Absolutely. In the nine seasons I've been through this is the biggest disconnect from expectations. Doesn't mean we haven't had difficult endings to seasons, doesn't mean we haven't had seasons where we knew we were going to have a challenge competing, but this has been, by far, the biggest disconnect from our expectations, and the biggest disappointment. So, we need to learn. We need to get better from it. I think the trade deadline was the start of that. Making sure we get better from challenges, adversity, and disappointment. But that has to happen in the way we put the team together for next year, for sure.

Not that this is much of an excuse, but the Jays themselves were hardly the only ones that missed on their projections for this group. FanGraphs' Depth Charts only had them winning 85 games, though that was good enough to put them in a tie with the Orioles for the sixth-highest total in the American League. And PECOTA had them at 88 wins back at the end of March, which was the fourth-highest mark in the AL.

Is the answer to project better? Partly, yes. But, at the risk of sounding a little too much like one of those weirdos that labels everything they don’t like or understand—which is a lot—“analytics” and then goes around dumping on analytics, I do think part of the solution is also to better incorporate skepticism when it comes to those projections.

It was not remotely difficult for people to look at this team as it headed into the season and wonder if it would be able to score enough runs, wonder if the pitching would stay healthy enough, wonder if the guys expected to bounce back really would, or if guys who were surprisingly good in 2023—Kiermaier, Jansen, Schneider—would continue to be the best versions of themselves. (It also wasn’t difficult for fans to look at the Orioles’ projections and believe they were coming in awfully light.)

As down as I can be on overly negative fans, it felt like the folks in the Jays’ front office were probably the outliers when it came to believing they could thread this needle.

Then again, maybe I’m thinking about this all wrong. Because it’s not as though MLB front offices don’t know about the very large error bars it’s necessary to place on any of this stuff. Way back in 2018, when he was still at FanGraphs, current Rays baseball development analyst Jeff Sullivan wrote a piece called Let’s Make Sure We’re Honest About Projections that looked at exactly that. In it he showed that, based on projections from various systems he’d collected since 2005, the R-squared for projected versus actual wins was just 0.36. Using simpler terms, he explained:

Looking at the overall sample, the average error has been about seven wins, with a median of six. Looking at just the last five years, the average error is still about seven wins, with a median of five. I don’t think we’re yet to the point where we can assign individual teams specific and individual error bars, but we know there are error bars, and they’re fairly long.

The Jays, currently on pace for 76 wins, will likely represent a larger-than-average error. But just about every team, every year, could technically say that their projections were inaccurate; the error bars built into every one of them—even internal ones that ought to be more refined than what was publicly available as many years ago as this data goes back—say otherwise. Teams know full well that seasons like this one are possibilities, which is why it's so frustrating when it feels—as it did last winter—like a team isn't pushing hard enough to lift itself out of the mushy middle. Or when Mariners GM Jerry Dipoto gives away the whole game by admitting that his FO’s goal over 10 years is to win 54% of the time.

Funny thing is, if fans want to take issue with the way the game has embraced analytics, that Dipoto quote—and the cost-benefit analysis it implies—would be a much better place to start than being annoying cranks about things like pitcher usage, lineup construction, or “load management.” The influence of analytics on those latter things may make decisions look strange at times, but the purpose is ultimately about winning as many games as possible. That’s obviously not the case for the former.

Now, to be fair, the 2024 Jays potentially had other reasons for not pushing harder for more projected wins. The market simply didn’t offer a lot of help in their areas of need, trading from their weak prospect pool wasn’t especially palatable, and financially they didn’t appear to have a ton of wiggle room. So, I want to be careful before diagnosing them with full-blown Dipoto Disease. Still, even if we’re talking about projections on a more granular, individual level, a thorough review and some tweaks would seem to be in order. I mean, when you hand $10.5 million to a 34-year-old centre fielder with a rough injury history, who is coming off his best offensive season since 2017, and he tells the world that you were basically bidding against yourselves, something about your way of calculating would certainly appear to be off. Or, as I suppose my point originally was, something about how you’re interpreting those calculations.

Projections, like everything termed “analytics,” are just a tool. You don’t blame the shovel when the hole you just dug collapses in on itself, you know?

How do you evaluate the job the front office has done?

Evaluations are fluid. I think the most important part of them are using them to get better, and that's what I think the focus of my conversations with Ross—and with our baseball operations—are. What can we learn about the way we put a team together? How can we be better moving forward?

This is hardly the only statement from Shapiro’s presser that could function as a Rorschach test for the kind of fan a person is, but it’s maybe my favourite. On one had it feels borderline insulting to boil this season—this lost, vital, penultimate season of the rapidly closing Vlad-and-Bo window, which represents Shapiro’s ninth in charge—down to little more than some interminable slog of “teachable moments.” On the other hand, 29 teams go home after every season with similar thoughts. And I don’t think fans often appreciate just how many things—both controllable and purely down to dumb luck—have to break right every time a team lifts the Commissioner’s Trophy.

The story of a baseball organization in the eyes of a front office is one of making incremental steps forward in terms of process and hoping that results align with expectations. For fans it is very much not that.

The idea that sports must always be a purely result-based business seems to be fading, though I’m not sure if that’s because executives communicate in such an anodyne way as to do a better job of insulating themselves from those pressures than they once did, because the most engaged fans better understand how front offices actually operate—or what’s actually controllable—than they used to, or because reacting too severely to bad outcomes has genuinely shown to be counterproductive. Probably some combination of the three, plus the fact that salaries for coaches, managers, and executives are likely high enough these days—and contracts long enough—to make most cheapjack owners think harder than ever about paying guys to go away. Whatever it is, I think the notion is fading, and probably rightly, but that’s still really hard to square with fans’ completely understandable demands that their team have goals that, whatever they may actually be, don’t look quite so much like “just try to win 54% of the time.”

What I guess I mean is that I think the idea of bringing Atkins back and expecting him to learn and grow from this season is probably a lot more reasonable than many fans think, and Shapiro has done about as good a job as he could here of setting the table for exactly that eventuality. But, uh, good luck selling it in the Sportsnet comments section, my dude.

What have you learned from this season that will be different next year?

Continue to learn. I mean, the focus of my conversations with Ross has been around roster construction. Handedness. Balancing offence and defence. But it's a work in progress. I think there's still a good portion of the season left, so to make final conclusions now would be premature. And that's more for Ross to discuss at the end of the season than me to provide details on. But those are conversations we're having now. Most importantly just making sure that we don't let a crisis go to waste. I think, again, that the deadline set the tone for that. We need to make sure we get better.

Will Ross Atkins be back as the GM next year?

I very rarely am unequivocal about anything. Commenting on job status during a season, throughout my entire career when I've been asked about those things, is not something I have or will ever do. That being said, contextually, I'm a huge believer in stability and continuity, and that those are competitive advantages in professional sports. That reacting and change don't necessarily mean improvement. So, we need to be better. We have to be better. And, again, I think stability and continuity and making adjustments are where I'm focused right now.

I’ve said before that a new pair of eyes couldn’t hurt and that I don’t think Ross will ever be “the one that got away” for this franchise. (It kinda seems to me like we already have one of those anyway). I’m not going to weep if he’s let go after this season—though, as I said in a recent piece, I have very much come to enjoy his ability to make even smart people be hilariously stupid about this team—and I get that people understandably feel that they’re owed their pound of flesh. But Shapiro really isn’t wrong here. He just, as I was saying above, clearly doesn’t think about these things the same way that fans do. If he did he’d be on at least his fourth manager by now, and his second or third GM.

That wouldn’t be bad, necessarily. Except maybe for Shapiro’s own job security. But when a core objective of team-building is getting everybody pulling in the same direction, I don’t think that kind of self-induced tumult is particularly good either.

Fans tend to think things like “this guy is dumb and another guy would be less dumb,” as though people are static and don’t learn or change or grow—which they do, and which, speaking of, is exactly what we saw with Alex Anthopoulos across his tenure, and then after he went and spent some time in the Dodgers’ front office as well. I don’t mean that to be any kind of full-throated defence of Atkins, who maybe doesn’t deserve more time and more teachable moments, but the idea that it’s clear and simple and that the massive energy people are going to expend being mad about it if he’s brought back is going to be justifiable? I’m not so sure. I think it’s fair to be open to the idea that he’s fine.

At the same time, you can’t not be very cynical about hearing this stuff coming from Shapiro, too. I mean, if Atkins is a failure it’s Shapiro’s failure. Naturally he’s going to be willing to be a whole lot more patient than most.

Is this more of a retool than a rebuild?

I'm not fixated on language, Griff. You know, terming it a rebuild, terming it a retool. We just need to get better. Our decision on whether we retool, rebuilt, or whatever you want to call it, was based upon our belief in the talent in place next year. That being said, we had an open mind going into the deadline, and that was evidenced by the IKF and Nate Pearson trades. We were open to trading players that had control beyond this year. But ultimately we believe in the players that we have, we believe the foundation between the young players that have transitioned, the players we acquired, and the veteran players we have in place. Now we need to evaluate and make sure we have a core in place that is championship calibre, contending calibre for next season, and then supplement where we need to supplement.

To say that getting to championship calibre from here isn’t going to be easy is surely an understatement, but if I’ve said it a million times, I’ll say it a million more: a rebuild is just an excuse to let Rogers pocket a bunch of money that would have otherwise gone into payroll. Yes, having higher picks and bigger bonus pools helps, but you actually don’t want to try to become the Orioles, because sometimes you end up becoming the Rockies. Or any number of rebuilding teams that we’ve seen get stuck spinning their wheels for the better part of a decade.

That may happen to the Jays anyway, but they shouldn’t do it intentionally just so Eddie and the boys can have a few more ivory back-scratchers.

Regardless, this Jays team isn’t going to be rebuilding until Bo and Vlad are playing elsewhere anyway. And as much as they obviously shouldn’t run it back in the same sense as they did last winter—i.e. doubling down on a seemingly flawed, frustrating formula—adding some short-term pieces again this offseason and turning their rentals into prospects at the deadline if things don’t work out isn’t the worst path forward they could choose.

Did you need all eight trades to slip under that CBT threshold and was that important?

Very secondary. The primary concern, and the relentless focus, was infusing talent to our system. The CBT was something that we were cognizant of because of the baseball benefits—you know, the draft picks, where we pick—but not something we were focused on. Saving money and the CBT were very secondary. Infusing talent into the organization, the 13 players we got, that was our focus.

I wrote about this after the deadline, and just as I did with Atkins, I have a hard time believing what Shapiro is saying here. If getting under the luxury tax threshold wasn’t such a priority, and getting the most talent possible was the “relentless focus,” why not send out more salary in order to increase the calibre of prospects coming back?

I get that there probably wasn’t a whole lot more to squeeze out of the Astros in the Kikuchi deal, and that maybe they liked Jonatan Clase so much that they were happy to jump at the Mariners’ offer for Yimi García. Maybe they would have been willing to eat money in those deals if they had to, and maybe the fact that it wasn’t required provided them the opportunity to try to get under with the moves that followed, and changed the way they approached their other deals. But for me it still strains credulity, at least a little bit, to suggest that it was all about the prospects.

Thing is, they also seem to have done well enough in their deals for me not to be terribly bothered by it if they did choose to make more of an effort to get under once the threshold was in sight. As I said in the post-deadline piece, removing any sort of potential impediment to signing a QO-rejecting free agent this winter—a Juan Soto, a Pete Alonso, an Alex Bregman, etc.—can only be a good thing.

Something about it maybe being unfortunate to have so many new guys?

Infusing as much talent as possible. Again, taking advantage of this juncture in time, that we didn't want to be at, by infusing as much talent as possible was important.

Some of the reporters were farther away from Sportsnet’s mic than others, so this question was tough to pick up, but I think we get the idea and don’t have to spend any more time on it than this, eh?

So you did get under the luxury tax threshold?

It's fluid, Kaitlyn. Like, so, any number of mechanisms during the season. Roster claims. The calculation's not straight salary. So, whether we're under it at this moment or not—which we are very slightly—those things can change throughout the rest of the year. So I caution that jump to the conclusion. But right now we are just underneath it.

There was some question after the deadline about whether the Jays had managed to get under the threshold, so it's good to have it confirmed. But Shapiro is right that it’s fluid, and given that it’s likely no coincidence that they ended up “very slightly” under, I expect that they'll be trying pretty hard to keep it that way.

One unfortunate thing they might be able to do to this end is holding back Joey Votto. We obviously don't know how tight to the CBT they are at the moment, but Votto's on a minor league deal that will pay him like a $2 million player (plus incentives) if he's in the big leagues. I phrase it like that because he won't make that full salary if he's added to the roster, but will still pull in $333K per month. The incentives in the deal are almost certainly no longer reachable (the CBA prohibits achievement-based bonuses, so they're likely about plate appearances or games played), but it doesn’t seem impossible that Votto’s prorated salary could make a difference to the eventual luxury tax hit.

According to one of Shi Davidi's latest pieces for Sportsnet, Votto hasn't reached the point in his ramp-up where he's ready to think about playing in the majors yet anyway, though there have been rumblings of late—including in Shi’s piece—that a rather poetic return to action when the Reds visit Rogers Centre next week could be on the cards. It would be a shame if something like this gets in the way. But given where the Jays are at as an organization, I couldn’t blame them for letting it. (I also hate myself for writing that!)

Why has development been such a challenge for your organization?

We've done a good job developing position players. I think where we've fallen short is certainly identification and development of pitching. There's no doubt about that. But as I've talked about with Ben—where is he? Ben?—I think any evaluation of our job on the amateur front needs to be done contextually, and rarely is done contextually. Where we pick, what our signing bonus pool was, number of picks we had, losing picks due to signing players, young players traded away; all those things impact the depth of a system. And, again, yeah, I still feel really good about the position players that we've developed, signed, and transitioned to the big leagues. We just need to be better on the pitching side, and there's a lot of energy and time being spent on that.

I mean, Shapiro is right about evaluations needing context. But, for one, outside of grumbling fans and tourist columnists puking out bad takes, is anybody actually not doing that? And for two, should the Jays feel good about their development of position players?

That second one we can at least try to answer. I know the draft isn't the only apparatus for acquiring amateur talent, but it's the easiest one to look up. So, for a quick comparison, if we look at the position players drafted and signed by the Jays, Yankees, and Red Sox in the Shapiro-Atkins era (since 2016) we do find that the Jays have done comparatively well—even, I think, when considering that they won the fewest games of the three over that span (608 compared to 684 and 650 for Boston and New York respectively) and therefore had better picks on average.

The Jays have had 13 position players reach the big leagues, compiling 28.7 WAR as a group, according to Baseball Reference. For the Red Sox it's five players and 14.7 WAR. For the Yankees it's 13.2 WAR from eight.¹

Now, Bo Bichette accounts for a lot of the difference, and my quick-and-dirty calculations here ignore how heavily tilted toward pitching each team's drafts may or may not have been, or any number of other factors. And the numbers for the Rays (23.8 WAR from 10 players) and Orioles (44.5 with a whole lot more coming from 13 players) don't flatter the Jays in the way the Yankees and Red Sox ones do. But still, this aspect of development genuinely doesn’t seem as catastrophic as a lot of fans think—especially considering that Orelvis Martinez would have been a 14th graduate on that side had he not been dumbly suspended for PEDs. Plus, I think attrition on the pitching side makes the failures there a little more understandable. Injuries have obviously derailed them, but a Cy Young finalist (Manoah) and a couple guys who were considered top-10 pitching prospects in the sport (Pearson, Tiedemann) isn’t nothing.

Like, clearly none of this is great. The Jays needed by now to have more cheap, homegrown talent filling out the roster so that they could focus their free agent dollars on top-end talent at fewer positions rather than having to spread it around so much. But context does matter.

The plan is still to compete to win in 2025?

Yeah, I mean, I think the decision coming out of the deadline—and the decisions that we made there that are representative of that—was that we believe that there's enough talent in place to build a contending, championship calibre team next year. Had we not we would have made a different set of decisions. That being said, that work will need to be done to both make sure we continue to develop the players here, identify players that could possibly contribute that are in our system but aren't here, and understand what to expect what to expect from our veteran players. And then do a better job of putting that all together and supplementing it externally. So there's a lot of work still to be done before we can make definitive statements about '25, but that intent is clear.

Sometimes I wonder if Shapiro really is good at his job, or if his basic competence as a communicator simply makes him look like a towering figure of the artform compared to Atkins. I mean he’s not saying a whole lot here, and he’s careful not to say anything that might paint himself into a corner—you can never quite shake the sense that he’s speaking to an audience of Edward Rogers and Tony Staffieri as much as he is to fans—but he’s so clear and purposeful with his words and projects such confidence that I find it very easy to go along with what he’s saying, even though he’s certainly underselling how difficult the task ahead will be.

Whether the people dishing out mountains of cash for season tickets, or investing three hours of their leisure time every night watching on TV, will be as willing to overlook the last couple of years as I am is much different question, I think. And man… so many of those people can’t even get over pulling José Berríos last October—good lord it’s like the fan base chose to have collective amnesia about similarly lifting Matt Shoemaker for Robbie Ray way back 2020 because they so badly wanted to freak out this time—that I’m not exactly confident.

As was the case last year, though, a marquee free agent signing would go a long way to changing the mood around here I think.

Does a championship-calibre team look like the Orioles or the Phillies, or can it be more like last year's Diamondbacks team?

It's dangerous when you try to copy what someone else is doing. 

I mean you can just look at the number of wins that it takes over a period of time with this playoff format, average that out, and that's about what it takes—winning that number of games to get in.

(We have a) good enough core to do that.

And here, finally, we find MLB’s inescapable new reality smashing us in the face. The new playoff format is just two years old, so there’s not much to average out, but here goes: The third AL Wild Card team won 86 games in 2022 (Rays) and 89 games last year (Jays). Add in that the team holding the third WC spot this season is on pace to win 88 (Royals) and Shapiro’s basically talking about an 88-win average. In the NL it’s 86. Well within those error bars for just about everybody.

And Shapiro’s not wrong about that being all that matters. The 87-win Phillies in ‘22 and the 84-win Diamondbacks last year both went to the World Series. Hell, under the old format the 88-win Braves won it all in 2021, too.

Just get in. Welcome to Manfredball.

Do you expect spending to be to the levels it was this year?

Never do we commit payroll in August, but what I can say is I wouldn't characterize—whatever that payroll ends up being, I would not characterize there being any large-scale pull-back on payroll.

Things can certainly change between now and April, and already we’re a long way from last winter’s supposed “unicorn budget,” but I think this is a pretty clear statement that the attempt to half-ass a rebuild by targeting the most half-assed of playoff spots will not likely be undone by too much of a half-assed commitment from ownership. Or at least not completely undone.

So that’s probably good? I mean, those premium seats won’t sell themselves!

Do you see enough opportunities in the market to be able to fill all the holes you have in your roster?

That's not necessarily the formula you approach it with. The opportunities to impact the team are fluid. There are obviously main junctures that exist—those junctures are trade deadline, offseason, and next trade deadline. So, I guess the answer to your question should be we felt like there's enough talent in place in our system, on our team, and accessible to us elsewhere to put that type of core together.

Yeah, OK. But how about you go and add enough projected wins to look like a legit contender for the division title by mid-January and then don’t talk to me about the 2025 trade deadline until, like, June?

Is your intent to find a way to keep one or both of Bo and Vlad?

I'm not going to comment on those guys, specifically, but it certainly easier to build a sustainable championship team with talent like that in place for extended periods of time.

Correct. Pay him. (You can trade the other one for all the cheap years of control your heart desires if you really want to. This is the bargain we have all agreed upon.)

Is it important to make impact moves early to quiet the disgruntled fan base?

It's important to get better and win.

Also correct. But also also, please make a goddamn impact move. Early would be good!

What have you made of John Schneider's job?

I'll leave Ross, specifically, to comment on that, but I think one of the more encouraging aspects of going through challenges and adversity has been the way that our coaching staff has stayed solution-focused. There's been no finger-pointing, no blaming. They've stayed consistent. They've stayed determined to get better, and find solutions and be a part of how we can continue to get better. They've been a source of strength throughout a very tough year. As have our players.

I saw people groaning about this one but, like, I hope that by now we’re long past thinking there’s any sane way to blame John Schneider for this mess. Or that we’re at least at the point of no longer taking seriously the people who do think that.

There’s only so much you can do when you have entrenched, veteran, everyday hitters (Bichette, Springer, Kirk, Varsho) projected by ZiPS to post OPS+ marks of 122, 110, 109, and 109 respectively, who actually end up laying down a 70, 90, 84, and a 94. Especially when your bullpen is a tire fire on top of that.

Collectively that’s an 86 wRC+ for that group, spanning 1,448 plate appearances—almost exactly a third of the Blue Jays’ total. The group produced a 103 wRC+ last season, and 10.2 fWAR, compared to this year's 5.1. In 2022, when Varsho was of course a member of the Diamondbacks, those numbers were 125 and 17.7. They combined for 90 home runs that season, which is down to just 35 this year.

Ugh.

Are you happy with the different structure to the staff this year as compared to previous ones, or is there room for improvement?

Always room for improvement, but it's up to Ross to to address those things specifically.

The jury is still out on the offensive coordinator then, I suppose. I hope he stays, if only to make everyone who has convinced themselves that he’s some kind of massive problem lose their minds. Vlad’s approaching 2021 levels of production and he’s hitting the ball the other way more than ever. Will that get anyone who decided the coaching staff was hellbent on hammering square pegs into round holes, and that the solution was to hammer round pegs into square holes, to reflect on the complexity of all this stuff or the agency players have over their own careers? Doubtful.

I mean, maybe the overall strategy really is bad, but keeping Don Mattingly would tickle me regardless. Because, no, the guy they hired to be the bench coach and kept in that role for a full year while Dave Hudgens served as hitting strategist (after years of only nominally being the bench coach anyway, because he’s a hitting coach), and who only got the title “offensive coordinator” this season, has not spearheaded a years-long project to ruin the Blue Jays’ ability to score runs.

You mention how you value stability...—

It's not just me. You look at the best in class organizations and sports teams, they are sports teams that weather pressure and weather challenges and stick with people and allow them to make adjustments.

I think this is pretty clearly true! Self-serving in this context? Absolutely. But true.

I mean, I don’t think Shapiro has suddenly found religion on this topic. He’s talked about stability plenty in the past, demonstrated it in Cleveland, and has been open about his admiration of the San Antonio Spurs organization, which may have the most stable and long-serving leadership group in all of professional sports. Still, even he’d have to admit, I think, that stability is a pretty good crutch to lean on for a guy with zero playoff wins in eight seasons—ineffectual a criticism as that may be. Both things can be true!

How do you weigh when stability makes sense versus changing direction?

If you're certain you can be better, you make a change.

Oh yeah Ross is staying.

How do you assess that?

I'm not going to go through that with you now. It's personal, and a process I would go through.

A mildly defensive answer? Oh yeah, he definitely staying.

You called last year an outlier, offensively, is it safe to say that "blip" is no longer an outlier?

Clearly.

Clearly.

What can you do to address that?

I think that's what I talked about: roster construction is what we're working on right now, and it's what Ross will spend more time describing. But we have some ideas and thoughts. Have to do with the delineation between—we've done a good job identifying talent individually, we have not done as good a job collectively placing that talent on a roster together to win. So, it's that connection, Arden, between identification of talent, where I think we actually have done a pretty good job individually, but they haven't come together to produce the numbers that we would expect from a championship offence.

Turn up the good, turn down the suck. Turn down the suck knob. I think you got suck all the way cracked to ten.

Uhh.. beyond that, I think giving the keys to centre field to Varsho and finding actual, honest-to-goodness mashers for left field and DH would be a very good start. No more of this contact-oriented, doubles-power, 15-20 home run, second-division trash either, thanks.

Have you fielded questions from players with regard to where the organization is going?

Ross is really good proactively talking to them. I know there were moments that the frustration bubbled up, but those were really isolated moments. In general our players have been great. They have been focused on what they can control, and they recognize that there's moments that are really tough. When you're losing teammates that you care about and believe in, those are hard moments in the game for all of us that have been in it for a while. It's never easy seeing someone you care about and believe in and like, and enjoy coming to the park every day seeing, leave. Those are tough things to go through, but they're professionals. They're pros. And this is professional baseball, it's not amateur baseball. And part of that professional environment is understanding there are changes, and the changes are a direct result of how we've played.

Merrifield is in Philly now, so this is all probably fine.

What can be done, or what isn't being done, to prevent pitching injuries that you—like the rest of the industry—have dealt with this year?

I'm on the on-field committee, and one of the main areas that we're focusing on post- the major rule changes is looking into pitching injuries and what we can do. The first thing is to understand why it's happening. Reflexively you kind of lean towards the way that we train and develop pitchers now, with maximum velocity and pitch design, and the kind of things we're doing that's subjecting them to more harm. The amateur game certainly could be part of the issue that we're dealing with—the way guys are used in showcases, the fact that they don't have any down-time. So, I guess that's a long-winded answer that we need to look at where all the levers are, from the time the kids are eight to 10 years old, to  going through high school and university level. We need to think about potential rule changes at the major league level that could impact pitcher usage and durability. Thinking about it from every angle, from 10 years old to the major leagues, to address the issue. And I think, as an industry, we will roll out those solutions when we have a clearer understanding of where the opportunities are.

Sure.

Is sending all the recently-drafted guys down to Dunedin for intake a result of having the PDC or alt-site work during the pandemic shut-down?

Yeah, we believe in—it's not unique to us—having a mini-camp is an opportunity to kind of introduce them to the Blue Jays' system, philosophy, ideas, expectations. Transition them. Get some baseline assessments so we understand where they are physically. It's just a mini-camp.

That's been the case for 25 years that I can think of. Post-draft mini-camps. They're more meaningful now because players are all signed. They didn't used to be as meaningful because guys didn't sign all summer.

Sure!

What's the priority for the next eight weeks, before the season wraps up?

Yeah, I think getting a grip on our veteran players and what we can expect from them next year. Having the same kind of understanding of the young players we've transitioned over this year—what the expectation and what can count on them (for) as we build a team next year. And assessing the players that are closer to the major leagues that we acquired at the deadline. Those three things, combined with learning from the mistakes that we made this year and ensuring that as we blend that talent with any talent we acquire externally, we do a better job.

Sure?

I mean, those were some very Atkins-y sentences at the end there (derogatory). And I truly don’t know how much they really believe they can learn over the course of six weeks or a couple of months. Obviously you want to get your young guys’ feet wet and your veterans pointed in the right direction again—Schneider, Springer, Kirk, Varsho, Bichette if he makes it back. But how much of what we’ve seen from that group this season could a hot few weeks undo? Especially when you’re already admitting that last year’s offensive blip—largely driven by three of those guys—was “clearly” not an outlier, and acknowledging all over the place that roster construction is something you need to get better at.

I guess I don’t know what else one could say about this—“we’re really just dicking around out here while we play out the string,” doesn’t have the kind of zing to it that the marketing department would hope—and obviously the more data they can gather on what they have, the more work they can do to get players going well, the better. But we already know now most of what we’ll be able to learn about this group by the time offseason decisions need to start being made.

Has the losing season had an impact on the business side?

Absolutely, yeah. When you lose your sales are impacted. I think the renovations were done with the expectation that, from a long-term perspective—not one year, over 10 to 15 years—we can buffer ourselves somewhat from year-to-year volatility. And it's done that, 100%, you know? But there's a direct correlation between winning and fans coming to the ballpark. So we need to win.

At least 54% of the time over those 10-15 years, right? HEYO!

But I should also say: Good!

Since the moment they arrived the decisions this front office have made have been underpinned by the notion that whatever anger this fan base may have, whatever hard feelings, whatever concerns about a lack of sentimentality with favoured players or personnel, or with ever-rising prices, all will be forgiven as long as they win. They’ve tested Jays fans in all of these areas, and though their regular season success prior to this year deserves more credit than the “zero playoff wins in eight years” stuff they tend to get, you can’t blame fans for voting with their wallets. And it’s not like there’s a better lever to pull if anyone wants to very clearly send the message that this isn’t good enough.

I think they know! But it can’t hurt to remind them.

Does that have a direct impact on baseball decisions going into next year?

Very marginal impact if any. I mean, that's been ownership's track record. Just look at COVID more than anything. It's belief in this team, and they've been solely focused on wanting to win and asking how they can support that.

Last one! And, again, it sounds like he’s talking to the Rogers board. Again this is obviously the only thing he was ever going to say. And, again, he’s not wrong. One of the things we can genuinely say Shapiro has been excellent at during his tenure is getting financial commitments from ownership beyond anything we could have dreamed of under Pauls Beeston or Godfrey. COVID did show a lot, because every excuse to stop spending was served to ownership on a platter and they spent anyway, but so did the luxury tax stuff. And as long as that remains the case—as long as Shapiro can manage to have the ear of ownership in this way, on this specific subject—I think fans should be happy to have him around.

Increasingly, the sense is that he hasn’t done a good job with his key hire on the baseball operations side, and that everything from Atkins on down on that side of the org chart could use a rethink. Fair. But a wise man once said, “If you're certain you can be better, you make a change.” Otherwise, you’d best be very careful what you wish for.

Especially, I’d say, when you consider the track record of the people who’ll be hiring the next guy.

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1. Blue Jays:

2016
Bo Bichette (17.4), Joshua Palacios (-0.5), Cavan Biggio (7.0)
2017
Riley Adams (1.7), Kevin Smith (-0.2), Ryan Noda (1.7), Davis Schneider (2.0)
2018
Jordan Groshans (-0.1), Addison Barger (-0.3), Cal Stevenson (-0.3), Vinny Capra (-0.2)
2019
Cam Eden (-0.1), Spencer Horwitz (0.9)
2020
Austin Martin (-0.3)

Yankees:

2016
Nick Solak (0.6), Armando Alvarez (-0.2)
2017
Canaan Smith-Njigba (-0.2)
2018
Nick Wells (2.5)
2019
Anthony Volpe (5.9), Josh Smith (4.3), Oliver Dunn (0.2)
2020
N/A
2021
Ben Rice (0.1)

Red Sox:

2016
Bobby Dalbec (-0.6), Santiago Espinal (5.7)
2017
N/A
2018
Triston Casas (2.5), Jarren Duran (7.9)
2019
Jordan Beck (-0.8)