Shapiro speaks!: On "heavy lifting," ownership, next winter's free agent class, acting like a big club, where they'll play in 2021, clubhouse food, exponential offence, and more!
Shapiro speaks!: On "heavy lifting," ownership, next winter's free agent class, acting like a big club, where they'll play in 2021, clubhouse food, exponential offence, and more!
It was yet a newsworthy week for the Blue Jays, and on Thursday afternoon, president and CEO Mark Shapiro — who’s comment on “heavy lifting” only added to the spectacle — joined Jeff Blair and Stephen Brunt on Sportsnet’s Writers Bloc to talk about it. Then on Friday he joined Bryan Hayes, Jeff O’Neill, and Jamie McLennan on TSN’s Overdrive as well.
Here are some highlights from both interviews.
On “Heavy Lifting” and the future
Clearly the Blue Jays could really use another starting pitcher, and there are certainly ones out there. But it doesn’t sound to me like anybody should expect anything beyond maybe a one-year deal with someone at this point. Here’s the beginning of Shapiro’s answer on his “heavy lifting” comments.
It does not mean that we think our team is complete. It does not mean that we're stopping the effort to get better. It does not meant that we think we're a finished product. It just means that, you know, everybody still has limitations, Stephen, and that I think within the next week to 10 days that the bigger moves for us — not to say that we're not going to still do things — but the bigger moves for us are probably done.
As I’ve written elsewhere, some of this could be — hopefully is — the Jays drawing a line in the sand for some of the remaining free agents. I’m fine with them not wanting to go multi-year with any of the pitchers still out there. I’m much less OK with the idea that they may not even be looking at some of the remaining options.
The second part of Shapiro’s answer to the “heavy lifting” question fell back on the same “continuum of opportunity” stuff that we’ve heard both him and Ross Atkins talk about this week. He expanded a little bit on this in the TSN interview, articulated it a little better, I think. And, most importantly, did a better job of emphasizing the part of it that’s actually incredibly exciting.
I think two things to keep in mind. One is, the base of alternatives. So, free agents, trades. We knew that the starting rotation was a great need for us, but bottom line is, we needed to get better. And the greatest areas of opportunity to get better were in the position player market and the bullpen. So, we got better. That doesn't mean that getting better — and this would be the second part to the answer — all has to happen in one off-season. I think we need to be cognizant of the windows of opportunity that we have to get better. This off-season, the trade deadline, next off-season.
We're trying to build a sustainable champion where every single year we when leave spring training we've got an objective reason to believe we're going to contend for a World Series championship. If we try to do that all in one off-season — and probably, maybe, even in an off-season before we had expected — then we're going to limit our flexibility, we're going to limit our opportunities to adapt to one of the best free agent markets in history coming up next year. (And) to make the trades we need to make at the right time.
So, yes, it's a work in progress. Our rotation probably needs to get better. It's a little too much of a heavy burden on young pitching right now, and its less than perfect. But we are better. We have a strong core. We have good young pitching in our system that's just behind our position players. And we're on track to do what we're going to do. So I guess I just say that if you're looking to artificially construct an entire championship roster in one off-season or in two off-season, you're going to make a lot of mistakes and you're going to pin yourself down with a lot of contracts and a lot of lost flexibility. We're trying to maintain that flexibility.
Unless a bunch of huge contract extensions get handed out over the next ten months, next year's free agent class is indeed going to be spectacular. Excluding several other options who could hit the market because of club options, or because they signed one-year deals this winter (like Marcus Semien, for example), here's a partial list of the players due to hit the open market: Francisco Lindor, Javier Báez, Carlos Correa, Corey Seager, Trevor Story, Freddie Freeman, Noah Syndergaard, Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, Zack Greinke, Lance Lynn, Eduardo Rodriguez, and Lance McCullers Jr.
There is a massive amount of game-changing talent on that list, even if some of the better starting pitchers are already starting to wind down their career. The Jays thinking about being serious players on that market is incredible news.
Of course, that’s all predicated on the league not shooting itself in the balls and actually starting at some point to negotiate with the union in good faith on the next CBA in order to avoid a work stoppage. And considering how much some of these owners love shooting themselves in the balls (hello, Colorado Rockies fans!), it’s hardly a given that a proper 2021-22 off-season will even happen. But let’s just put that aside for a moment, because holy shit it sucks to think about right now.
What Shapiro is saying here seems ambitious by the usual standards of the Toronto Blue Jays, but we saw last winter, and we’ve seen again this winter, that this front office is absolutely willing to get aggressive for the players they want most. And, as far as next winter goes, he told Blair and Brunt on Sportsnet that he thinks “that we should be positioned among the best of all teams in major league baseball, both contractually and talent wise.”
The idea of the Jays continuing to act like a big market team dovetails incredibly well with a couple of the other things Shapiro said this week.
First, it dovetails with what he said about trying to make this a compelling place to play, not just in terms of talent — though offering a realistic chance to win certainly goes a long way — but in terms of how players are treated and who they work with.
Speaking to Overdrive, he addressed both challenges the Jays face when it comes to selling players on Toronto, and the plan the club has for overcoming those challenges.
I think location and geography are one of the — when a player sits down and says, 'OK, what are the things that are important to me?' a lot of times geography is in it. I've kind of said since I've been here, it's not Toronto and Canada, it's usually east-west, north-south, Arizona spring training. Those kind of things that for some guys are really important. But certainly for the Blue Jays, some of the impediments — some of the unknown for guys of what might be different for them or their families in playing here — the situation gets more compelling when the team is really good and the environment's good.
Something that George said in the presser — I don't know if you guys heard it — but when he talked about just how much he could feel our players' belief, and he could hear from us how much we wanted this to be a great place to play. And when I say that, the city is the easy part of selling this to be a great place to play. It's all the other little things that we can do to work hard and obsess about making this the best. I'm talking about, that means the best food in the clubhouse, that means that Shannon Curley who assists our families is the absolute best at what she does. That means, more importantly than anything, the guy that lockers next to you is a guy — and you guys know this from playing — is a guy that you like to come in and see every day. Because when it's 162 games, you'd better like that guy.
So, I think we want to create a compelling place to play, we want to make this the best place in the major leagues to play, period. Period. And I'm not saying that geographically, I'm saying that in every aspect.
It’s impossible for fans to know how well the Jays are actually doing in this area, but the fact that they’re getting buy-in from a top free agent like George Springer says a lot. (So, too, does the fact that we are not now talking about Trevor Bauer signing with the Jays.)
The second thing Shapiro talked about that fit in seamlessly with his suggestions that the Jays are continuing to move toward acting like a club befitting their “behemoth” of a market, as he described it at the Springer press conference on Wednesday, was the commitment that ownership has made to the club.
For this we’ll go back to something he said to Blair and Brunt about selling ownership on continuing to spend big this winter when much of the league has used the pandemic as an excuse not to spend.
If I have to sell, it's probably not a good thing. It's more, you know, make a recommendation and ensure that I communicate the alternatives, right?
One alternative is we've worked incredibly hard, we've endured a lot of challenges both from the natural disconnect that happens when you go through some sort of (re)building process, and we are on course. We've seen tangible and objective progress in our plan, and our players believe in themselves and believe in each other, and kind of took that plan maybe even faster than any of expected. So we start to enter into junctures of opportunity, and your choice is to pull back — in which case, Stephen, if we're doing that we potentially lose time, not just time in the building process, we potentially lose time in our championship window — or, if, in that distressed environment, we can be one of the few teams that is being more aggressive (and we're obviously not the only team) then we might have an opportunity to do more than we would in a normal environment. And to even build a stronger foundation and perhaps speed the timeframe even more.
So, it's been unequivocal support from the ownership level — certainly Edward Rogers, actively engaged and consistent in his belief — and the commitment from the executives at the corporate level has been consistent. Very consistent. The losses, while they're huge in the scale of baseball, in the scale of their business are not as big. And, again, a lot of it is planning and being transparent, allowing them to understand and navigate that in their messaging with the board and with their shareholders.
Fans often tend to bristle at the way Shapiro speaks the language of business, and of the boardroom, but a real sense of synergy between the Blue Jays and their owners is something that has been missing since basically the Labatt days.
Jays fans love Shapiro’s predecessor, Paul Beeston, and for good reason, but he always seemed an odd fit as the conduit between the club and the massive telecommunications company that owned it. It wasn’t just the disinclination to wear socks or use email, either. I can’t exactly imagine Shapiro working to undercut a revenue stream for Sportsnet just because he was unable to watch the Jays on MLB.tv on an iPad at his cottage in Muskoka. And the fact that Rogers went behind Beeston’s back to fish for Ken Williams and Dan Duquette as replacements for him doesn’t exactly speak well to that relationship.
Shapiro isn’t here to evoke memories of the good ol’ days. While the Jays were spinning their wheels teasing us about installing real grass at the Rogers Centre, the Atlanta Braves were tearing down an even newer ballpark and moving to a site where they also would be able to control major real estate developments — the kind of thing MLSE was doing literally a couple blocks away with Maple Leaf Square, and that Shapiro’s Jays seemed to finally be moving toward before COVID-19 got in the way. And it certainly looks like having a real vision like that — which, along with the vision for what the Blue Jays can be on and off the field, will transform the team into a much, much more lucrative asset — can give a baseball executive quite a bit of sway in the boardroom.
It’s a good time to be a Jays fan.
On playing in Toronto in 2021
Obviously the Jays would like to play at home in 2021. They appeared to push very hard to do so last year, perhaps to the point of being a little bit blindsided when they were told no, and this year seem determined to be aggressively prepared for whatever is thrown at them.
Here’s what he said to Sportsnet on this topic:
What I would say is that we've gotten pretty adept as an organization at scenario planning, and understanding and accepting uncertainty. And doing the best we can to plan for every alternative that's out there. So we set dates in our mind of kind of having to make decisions. We flesh out every potential alternative. We know what the priority is, we know where we'd like to be, but we also will take the same tone that we took up last summer, which is that we'll be deferential to public health. We'll do the right thing for the city and for the province and for the country, and when the time's right we're going to bring a team back here that we are both proud of and excited about, and that will be excited to be here. Until that time, Stephen, we'll do the best thing we can do for our players and for our team.
And here’s even a bit more on logistics from the Sportsnet interview:
I'm going be very careful because nothing's been decided, but I think in any place there are two major levels of challenges to deal with. The first one is protocols. There are not stadiums, particularly non-major league stadiums, that are built to withstand the health protocols that MLB and the union are putting in place. Just think about the spacing, think about the amount of room you need in a locker room, in a training room, in a bathroom, in a weight room. So the number of challenges that exist, adapting facilities to uphold the MLB/union protocol for health during the pandemic is one major challenge. And the second is ensuring facilities, from playing surface to lighting to clubhouses to dugouts, and all those things. So in any place we look at, those are the kinds of things that we're walking through and examining, and saying, 'OK, what changes would we have to make? How could we make them? When could we get that facility up and running? When will we need to know to make that decision?'
The most interesting stuff he said on the subject, however, came from Shapiro’s chat with TSN.
First, when he was asked about whether he or the club has been lobbying the government, as they did last year, on the subject of having the Jays play in Toronto:
I have not felt that it was worthwhile or productive use of their time to re-engage so shortly after the conversations for the Raptors had been had. They were had, that result is clear, nothing has changed for the better since those were had, so there will be a time to re-engage, but as of right now, I don't know what the purpose of that would be, when the Raptors had done that so recently.
Could a time to re-engage possibly be after the Jays all get vaccinated?
I doubt it. Someone who is vaccinated may still be an asymptomatic spreader of COVID-19, so even though they’re protected from being sick, precautions will still need to be taken for individuals who haven’t received it yet. But the Jays being in Florida over the next couple of months may have a chance to get themselves vaccinated regardless, which could potentially help speed up the process of bringing the team home once the picture starts to improve in Ontario. (Which it will, provided our ghoul of a premier eventually stops putting his donors’ business concerns ahead of public health.)
Shapiro has at least thought about this sort of stuff.
There's a lot more access to the vaccine in Florida, and it's a lot broader as far as who qualifies. But we couldn't jump the line and wouldn't jump the line for our players. It's still (limited to) 65 (years old and up) — and Florida's among the loosest. It's (available if you’re) high risk — if you qualify as high risk — but it is not the general population. So while the vaccine is generally broader — and that could change while we're there for training, and if it does I think we'll encourage as many guys as possible to get vaccinated, if not even try to get that done in our camp.
Thinking about having baseball players jump the line is pretty gross, and Shapiro is right to point that out. But it may not be long until Florida is allowing anyone from the ages of 18-64 to get the vaccine, so this could be something worth monitoring — if for no other reason that the Jays’ return to Toronto is going to be cause for serious celebration, and a milestone in our fight against this pandemic and the clowns who haven’t taken it seriously enough.
Other comments of note
From TSN, on the slow off-season:
Every off-season has its own cadence. The circumstances to this one are so far different than anyone's ever been through. It's the slowest off-season of the 30 that I've been through. I've never been through any one like this. I think that's because agents, everyone, was trying to wait as long as possible to get a firm understanding of what the landscape looked like, what kind of revenues, if any, teams would project, and how that would affect their decision making. And so, no agent wanted to make a firm decision without clearly understanding who the alternatives were and where they could play financially. That was a hard slow process. And then the Mets were a wild card as well throughout the whole process, with the new owner who obviously has deep pockets. People were waiting to see what they did.
Seems about right, though it’s kind of funny how he almost casts agents as the ones slowing down the process, as though teams weren’t also trying to wait out the market until guys had to drop their asking prices.
Also from TSN, on how the team approaches negotiations:
If the question is how do you make sure you still make a good decision and you don't react and bid against yourself, you've got to be prepared. You go into the off-season with a plan, and you prep out the free agents. George was always at the top of the list for us. We were open with him about that. And then you frame values, right? Your values are kind of framed by a variety of variables. One is your own situation/circumstance — so, how young the players are around, can you build a championship team around those players and make sure that you can sustain that and grow that. So, what does it look like over the length of contract. Two are, kind of, who your competitors are. I think any successful negotiation, the two things that are most important to have it turn out well are, one, that you know what your walk-away is and that you stick to that, and two, you know what the alternatives are. And the alternatives for yourself, one, and for the player, two. You need to know what they are for both. And if you're well aware what the alternatives are, and you're firm with what your walk-away is, and that's framed with a really, really good process, where you set the values and you're comfortable with them, then you can negotiate successfully. This one just took a lot of patience, and a lot of time, and Ross handled it extremely well. It was unprecedented what he was going through.
It’s easy to say all this now that it looks like the Jays really did handle the market quite well this year, but I can’t help but wonder how firm they were with their walk-away on Hyun Jin Ryu last year. It has always seemed possible they were a little more flexible there, considering how much they ended up giving him and how badly they needed to really make a splash.
Still, this should be an interesting one to keep in our pockets for the next time people start raging about the Jays’ process when it comes to making transactions.
Continuing with TSN, here’s Shapiro on the evolution of clubhouse food:
It's so funny when you think back. When I first got in the game the clubhouse spread was like a 7-11. Chili dogs before the game and, like, Snickers and Three Musketeers laid out. A lot of great players ate that way. But somewhere along the line you start thinking about all of the different things you can control to be a championship athlete, and what they eat, as far as how they fuel, how that impacts their energy levels throughout a very long day.
The baseball schedule is extremely challenging, because it's every single day, and it's odd because obviously they're playing in the night, and they have a full workout where they start that around 4:30, and they break for an hour, and then they get heated up again and play. So, food is an important part. It's a little bit like, how do you make healthy food good? And how do you make food that's attractive for a Korean player, a Dominican player, a Venezuelan player, a Mexican player, a Japanese player, and an American southern player, a Canadian player. You're trying to satisfy everyone and still have it taste good, but still be healthy. That's part of how we think about performance, and we hire our own chefs — more than one — and they come in and their challenged to make really good food that both you and I would like to eat, but also make it so that it's good food for our players.
Those poor Municipal Stadium shitters!
This last one from the TSN clip is on Bo Bichette:
I think one of the things that it's easy to lose track of is that two years ago, when he made his major league debut, he was really good at short. And he was trending (that way) in the minor leagues. He exceeded our expectations, just due to his hard work — what he did to strengthen his arm, what he did to strengthen his defence. Last year was rough defensive year for him, but in reality he was hurt, rushed back from injury, and then didn't play that many games. So it's a pretty small sample size.
S,o what I would say is, listen, every one of us — you guys are evaluated pretty regularly, you get ratings, you get feedback, you've got to perform, right? We all have to perform at our job. Bo is going to be a great major league player for a long time. The reason I feel so strongly about that is that there are very few guys that are as driven to be great as he is. That's what makes him so special. He just doesn't want to be good, this guy wants to be the best, he wants to be great. So I don't hold anything — I don't put any limits on what he can do. As far as, like, is he going to be a shortstop long term? We're going to give him that opportunity. He's earned that right, to get that opportunity. It's up to him. I don't know whether you guys have heard me say this, but I believe it strongly: the best decisions front office executives make are the ones that players make for us. If we have to make 'em, we have a good chance to make a bad one. So, Bo's going to get a chance to make that decision for us.
I mean, it really sounded like they were pretty close to acquiring Francisco Lindor early this winter, and they’re already salivating over next winter’s shortstop-heavy free agent class. But sure!
Now a couple stray ones from the Sportsnet clip, starting with one on Marcus Semien — who the club has now officially signed, but who had only been reportedly signed at the time of the interview.
Marcus Semien is a free agent. A really, really good fit for our team. Whenever you sign any player — it's not — I heard you when I was waiting to come on, it's not formalities, there are things that have to happen in order for contracts to be approved. You guys have not been around me as long, but a deal is never a deal until it's done, you know? I think that whether it's a medical process or whether it's contractual language, things get reported sometimes before they're complete. If they get reported there's usually good reason for that to happen, but the reason why we don't announce something is because they're not done, they're not complete.
That’s all completely understandable stuff, but what I think is interesting here, especially in light of the Michael Brantley situation two weeks ago, is that he said “if they get reported there’s usually good reason for that to happen.”
Was the Brantley situation one of those rare times where there wasn’t good reason for those reports to have happened? Or were the reports on the right track and something — either a medical issue, or a last minute offer from Houston — made it so they ended up being incorrect?
Clearly he doesn’t say, but what’s also clear is that nobody has exactly come out and said that there was absolutely nothing to those reports either.
Lastly, here’s Shapiro on newly acquired lefty Steven Matz:
Ross had targeted him very early in the off-season as a potential starting alternative for us, with reason to believe that there was bounce back ability. I guess what I'd say overall, it was a very tough free agent starting pitcher — the starting pitching market was a very tough market.
I loved Ross's approach, which is, 'Look, man, the starting pitching market is what the starting pitching market is, we just need to get better. So, whether it's run created or run prevented, it's still going to help us win games.’ We're going to have to find ways, whenever that happens, to address the starting pitching, and this is one with some upside.
Certainly some risk based on what he did last year, but we had our own reasons for believing that the potential to bounce back is there. It's a guy that has competed and done well on a very tough stage in New York, so we felt like he could withstand the AL East and our stage as well. So, excited about the potential upside of him, but recognize some of the risks as well.
Clearly there aren’t any illusions on the Jays’ part that Matz is not exactly the answer that their rotation was looking for. He adds depth and as a lefty whose velocity ticked up last year might be an option to drop back into the ‘pen if he ends up not winning a rotation spot out of spring training.
What really stands out to me here, though, is the talk about how it was important simply that the Jays got better, not that they got better in one particular area. That’s a change from what they were saying back in the fall, when they made it clear run prevention and strike-throwing were areas of need for the club (though, to be fair, they did improve on those fronts somewhat, with the gloves of Springer and Semien and the strike-throwing ability of Matz).
This Twitter convo, I think, gets to that whole concept really well.
This 2014 piece from Jesse Wolfersberger of the Hardball Times, called “The Exponential Nature of Offense,” is clearly not the one that Ty is remembering (unless he remembers it being passed around at the time of the 2015 trade deadline), but it’s about exactly the same thing he and Blake are discussing.
“The exponential nature of offense means a good hitter in a good lineup is worth more than that same hitter in a bad lineup,” Wolfersberger writes. “On a good offense, that hitter is more likely to come to the plate with more runners on, more likely to get driven in once he’s on base. And, the lineup turns over more often, meaning he gets more plate appearances. Not only is he more valuable to a good lineup, but he’s even more valuable to a better one – the effect builds on itself.”
He goes even farther than what Shapiro is saying, in fact.
“Advanced statistics strip away context, which is critical to evaluating players, but it does not mean these stats should always be viewed in a vacuum,” Wolfersberger adds. “Just as a win is more valuable to a team in the middle of the win probability curve, a hitter is more valuable to a team that already has a good offense.
“Today, when a team has a good offense, it usually targets pitching, and when it has good pitching, it usually targets hitting. This is inefficient. Even if the linear trends were completely accurate, teams should be indifferent between a run saved and a run scored. This analysis suggests that a team with good hitting should not only be indifferent, but should actively target more offense.”
I’ve skipped over a whole lot of what Russell Carleton would refer to as the “gory mathematical details” here, but the piece is interesting! Give it a read. It doesn’t exactly sound like the Jays necessarily went out targeting offensive players to take advantage of this stuff, but it’s where they’ve ended up regardless.
Pretty hard not to be excited to watch this team hit, isn’t it?
Top image: Screengrab via CTV/YouTube