Stray Thoughts... - Boiled Taters
On injuries, trades, retirements, podcasts, projections, the arrival of spring, and a whole hell of a lot more.
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Spring training is officially underway down in Florida, and along with the typical images of verdant fields and “best shape of his life” stories, the opening of camp has also brought a wave of news for the Blue Jays. And not a whole lot of it—as is typically the case at this time of year when, more than anything else, you want your team to get to Opening Day injury-free—is very good.
But, of course, you almost certainly know this already. Nevertheless, it’s an ideal spot for me to jump back into the land of the Blue Jays—there will be some bigger picture thoughts about the offseason and a host of odds and ends I’ll be addressing next week as I ramp things back up around here—and offer some thoughts more fully formed thoughts than some rambling on a podcast.
Though, if you’re into the latter, Nick and I did touch on a lot of this stuff on this week’s episode of our podcast, which you can hear by finding Blue Jays Happy Hour on your podcast app of choice, like Apple, Spotify, etc.
Or you can find us at patreon.com/BJHH, where for just $6 (CAD) a month you’ll get ad-free versions of the show, plus an exclusive bonus episode each week.
(For this week’s bonus episode, we took some time to rate and review the Jays’ recently released list of promotional items that will be given out at the ballpark throughout the 2026 season.)
And now: the news…
Anthony Santanderendon
Ho ho ho. Jokester that I am, the heading you see here is what I tweeted in response to the news, which broke earlier this week, that Anthony Santander’s second season with the Blue Jays will be as marred and defined by injury as his first one. It’s a bad situation but, honestly, an even worse joke. Clunky, for one thing. But, more to the point, it’s bad because in no way do I actually think there’s anything shared by the two players—Santander and now-former Angels slugger (?) Anthony Rendon, in case you needed it spelled out for you—other than a first name and brutal starts to long-term big-money contracts with new teams.
Frankly, their contracts aren’t even that comparable. The Angels in 2020 gave Rendon, fresh of a 6.8 WAR season and a World Series championship with the Nationals, a seven-year, $245 million deal that they’re still on the hook for even though he’s been functionally retired for... well... if you believe some of the noise... years.
While taking home an average of $35 million per year, Rendon never played more than 58 games in a season for the Angels, producing just 3.7 WAR in total along the way. He hasn’t played since late 2024, and spent most of the middle of that season on the injured list. Over this past winter he had his contract restructured in order to defer some money and give the Angels a little more present day cash, signalling that his career is essentially over. He still isn’t formally retired, but won’t play in 2026.
In the end he hit just 22 home runs over the life of the deal, meaning that Arte Moreno paid him over $11 million per dinger. As far as disastrous free agent deals go, it would be incredibly difficult to top this one.
Santander, meanwhile, feels more like a guy who signed a mega-contract than he is one in reality. A five-year, $92.5 million deal would have been plenty eye-popping a half a decade ago, and among the biggest in Blue Jays’ history. But two-thirds of the money the Jays will pay Santander ($61.75 million) is deferred. The present-day value of the deal when it was signed was just $68.8 million, giving him an AAV for competitive balance tax purposes of just $14 million. This season he’ll take home just $6.5 million. It’s barely on the same planet as Rendon’s deal, let alone in the same ballpark.
Though this is probably unnecessary, I feel I should also say here that there’s also absolutely no reason to believe there’s any similarity between Santander’s view of the baseball and Rendon’s. Back in the spring of 2024, Rendon made it as clear as any athlete ever could that he didn’t want to be there.
“This has never been a top priority,” he said of the spot. “This is a job. I do this to make a living.”
Nothing remotely of the sort has been ever said by or about Santander, and while I can understand the temptation to crack wise on this—guilty!—it’s actually a pretty unfair thing to put on a guy who clearly was doing everything he could to get back on the field last season.
And he did just that! After months and months in the background, Santander managed to make it back into big league games in very late September. Unfortunately, his comeback lasted only until the ALCS, when he suffered a back injury.
That it was a back issue that ended his season is, I think, a detail worth emphasizing, if only to make clear that it wasn’t a recurrence of the shoulder problem he’d dealt with all year. In fact, back in December at the Winter Meetings, Jays manager John Schneider reported that Santander’s shoulder was feeling good and that he was on course to have a regular spring training.
That, obviously, hasn’t happened. This week in Dunedin, per Keegan Matheson of BlueJays.com, Schneider gave us some clarity:
“He was resting and rehabbing in November and December, then he kind of had a setback when he started ramping up with his hitting earlier in January,” said Schneider. “He came over to the complex, got checked out and did everything we could to avoid this. At this point, after what we dealt with last year and in talking with Tony, this is the best possible way to get him back to 100 percent. This is unfortunate timing, obviously.”
“Unfortunate” really is the operative word here, I think. I’ve seen chatter out there about how the surgery route should obviously have been taken sooner, that the Jays bungled this, that Santander was already damaged goods when he signed somehow, that losing a second year of the club’s ninth-highest paid player by AAV is some kind of historic disaster, etc., etc. But mostly that’s just miserable people finding a way to be miserable.
That said, the situation ain’t good! And I don’t doubt that having the type of surgery he’s now scheduled for was on the table at some point last season. That Santander was able to get back into the lineup, and that his shoulder held together until his back issue flared up says to me that the rest-and-rehab path he took wasn’t any kind of indefensible call. But the re-emergence of the shoulder problem says pretty definitively that they should have gone the surgical route in the first place. Nevertheless, I think it’s at least somewhat admirable for him to have wanted so badly to give something to his team in the first year of his contract. I think it’s also worth pointing out here that he’s hardly the first player to have chosen to avoid surgery for an injury only to ultimately have to go under the knife to get it fixed anyway.
In fact, we’ll be talking about another case like that in a later section of this post.
When, two starts into the 2023 season, it was decided that Shane Bieber required Tommy John surgery, the Guardians conceded as much in a team statement:
“Given the recurrence of symptoms following an extended period of rest and rehabilitation during the 2023 season and subsequent off-season, surgical reconstruction of the ulnar collateral ligament has been recommended,” they announced.
It sucks, but these things happen.
Now, before we finally move on to the rammifications of the injury for the 2026 Jays, let’s get one more thing straight. The collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players’ association governs all kinds of stuff to do with medical procedures, including players’ right to a second medical opinion, and the fact that teams must authorize treatments for players but can’t dictate them. It should still be relatively fresh in our minds from the Alek Manoah situation in 2024 that differences of opinion on the best medical path for a player to take can and do crop up. So, if anyone is out here complaining that the Jays did something wrong in bringing about this situation, be aware that they don’t have a clue what they’re talking about. I mean, unless they’re talking about signing Santander in the first place, in which case… yeah, OK, maybe not their best work.
But for all we know, and this would absolutely be my assumption, Santander followed the best medical advice available to him last year, and is following the best medical advice now as well. It is what it is.
Woof.
Alright, so, how concerned are we about the impact this will have on the Jays this year? For me, the answer isn’t quite as big and scary as it seems. Especially now (SPOILER ALERT) that they’ve traded Joey Loperfido back to Houston in exchange for Jésus Sánchez.
I think a lot of fans throughout the offseason—with all the chatter about potentially landing Kyle Tucker, bringing back Bo Bichette, or maybe even getting both—saw the need for an additional big bat as a necessity. Looking at it through that lens, the loss of Santander for at least most of the season would seem heavily significant. They were already one big bat short, now they’re down two.
Tucker was such a desirable fit in part because Nathan Lukes simply isn’t a terribly sexy option in left field, even with Davis Schneider factoring into a platoon of sorts. Lukes picked up some important hits in the postseason, but his 90 wRC+ in October almost exactly matched his 89 mark in the second half. Tucker would have fit there brilliantly instead, and then Santander would have been freed up to be used more judiciously. And when they missed on Tucker, Santander’s importance to keeping the offence seemed to grow, right?
Well, in reality, Santander was probably always going to be something of an awkward fit. The Jays signed him ahead of 2025 largely to offset the declining production they’d been receiving from George Springer, then Springer’s incredible comback season—along with Addison Barger’s emergence, and the fact that Springer’s litany of injuries forced him into the DH slot—almost instantly made Santander somewhat redundant.
Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not trying to spin this as a positive. Losing a guy who could theoretically bring some much-needed power to this lineup is significant. What I’m saying is that it wasn’t necessarily going to be as easy to get Santander the kind of playing time you’d expect for an impact hitter. His defence is just too much of a liability to see him as an everyday guy out there, I think. He was a DH on a team that suddenly didn’t need one—and still doesn’t. It was a weird situation and this eases that, while obviously creating issues of a different kind.
But how big are these new issues? Santander was also, as I’m sure you’ll all remember, pretty awful when he actually did manage to play last season. To the point where the median of the projections available on his FanGraphs page for this year has his wRC+ a shade below 105, with the highest (ZiPS) projecting it to just 111.
Projections aren’t everything, and those ones certainly aren’t bad—I would have bet the over!—but, at least the way I see it, Santander is just not as irreplaceable a player as it might feel he is if you’re looking at him as the big-money slugger that he’s often discussed as.
And I think the Jays sort of just proved that…
Jésus Saves
I quite like the addition of Jésus Sánchez to this Blue Jays lineup, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I love the trade. Or, to put it more accurately, I don’t love that the Jays were in a position where they felt like this was a good trade for them to make.
Undoubtedly the team would have been better off with a healthy Santander and Joey Loperfido still in the organization. Yet… as far as contingency plans go, this one is pretty nifty.
Yes, Loperfido is an intriguing player still. But he’s getting older, the runway’s getting shorter, and, if we’re being brutally honest, there wasn’t much to love about his 2025. He had a very average (103 wRC+) year in Buffalo, then completely lost the ability to take a walk while in Toronto.
Granted, if you’re running a .431 BABIP you might as well keep putting the ball in play. But that’s just it: his 148 wRC+ in the big leagues looks impressive, but that BABIP is simply not repeatable. And instead of, after a down year in 2024, bouncing back in the power department to look more like the guy who knocked 25 out of the park at Double-A in 2023, Loperfido homered just 11 times in 477 PA.
There could still be something there, and like a lot of Jays fans I’ll be rooting for him to find it, but… well… it hardly feels catastrophic to be getting out of the Joey Loperfido business at this point. I’ll put it that way.
And though it’s a bit glib to say that Loperfido has a chance to develop into what Sánchez already is, because they’re very different hitters, as a value proposition that’s probably about right. If Joey one day becomes the kind of guy who can hold down the strong side of a corner outfield platoon with solid hitting against right-handers and a little bit of pop, I think that’s a pretty strong outcome for him. And that’s what Sánchez is today.
But that’s not all Sánchez is. Against right-handed pitching, I think he’s at least as intriguing as Santander, let alone Loperfido.
Over the last three seasons versus RHP, Sánchez has a 113 wRC+ and 41 home runs in 1,196 plate appearances. Over the same span Santander has seen right-handers 1,137 times, producing a 116 wRC+ and hitting 61 homers. Obviously you’d have to prefer Santander on the basis of that track record, but when you factor in how few Taters Tony produced in 2025 the difference gets a little less clear.
And the Statcast metrics on Sánchez really are tasty.
Steamer projects Santander to produce a 108 wRC+ against right-handers in 2026. For Sánchez that number is 118. (For Loperfido it’s 89). And there’s a pretty significant gulf defensively, too. ZiPS projects Santander’s defensive component of WAR to be -13.1 runs, whereas Sánchez is only at -3.0.
Starting to see why the Jays made the move that they did?
Now, I’m not going to say that the Jays are better off with Sánchez, because he’s never been able to hit lefties, so they’re still missing Santander’s power against LHP. And before we get ahead of ourselves because of one projection, we’re still talking about a guy in Santander who hit 44 home runs just two years ago, and who has three full seasons in which he’s produced a higher wRC+ than Sánchez did in his best season within his best split.
Sánchez is a Statcast darling who hasn’t produced the results to match. In that sense he’s a bit of a theorteical proposition. But, I suppose, after the year Santander just had, he would have been one, too. And so, in a weird way, for me, Sánchez is a maybe even a better fit for the club’s crowded outfield because he has a smaller and more easily defined role.
And that theoretical stuff means he brings upside here, too.
I’m pretty intrigued to see if this is someone the Jays’ hitting coaches can help get to another level.
It’s just a very nice, floor-raising move. One that may end up having to more to do with Lukes than Santander, honestly. Especially if Lukes doesn’t rediscover his first half form.
Either way, Sánchez’s presence will also make it easier to slide Addison Barger to third base in place of Kazuma Okamoto against tougher right-handers, or if the former Yomiuri Giants slugger struggles a little as he gets up to speed against MLB-calibre pitching.
The fact that the Jays flexed their financial muscle to get the deal done—it’s being described on the Astros side as a cost-cutting move—and pushed even deeper into luxury tax territory is a good sign, too.
Just, all around, a nice little batch of lemonade made out of these life lemons. If, you know, that makes sense.
Quickly…
• Again, I feel I need to be clear that none of this Santander business is good. Him having such a horrific season last year that his projections have already cratered to the point where it feels like a shrug is a more appropriate reaction to his being out for six months and replaced by Jésus Sánchez than wailing in anguish isn’t remotely ideal. It’s certainly not what the Jays signed up for. But, as I said, I don’t think they signed up for him being an everyday outfielder either. And I’m sure they’re happy that George Springer’s renaissance made this such a problem. I know I am.
• What another lost season for Santander also means is that, when Springer’s contract expires at the end of the season, the Jays will have a big question mark instead of the ready-made DH that Santander might have once looked like. Does this open the door for Springer to extend his stay here? I’ll wait and see how the upcoming season plays out before I really start pining for it, but I really hope so. Extend George!!!
• Yes, yes, the Jays still could very much use another big bat—and I’m sure that’s something that they’ll look to address at the trade deadline, if not sooner—but I think a lot of fans maybe don’t quite appreciate how good this team already was on paper.
Back on February 4th, FanGraphs’ Depth Charts projected the Jays to 48.1 WAR, second in MLB. Since then they’ve adjusted Santander from 567 PA down to 84, Bieber from 138 IP to 118, given small bumps up for Ponce and Yesavage, maybe a couple other small adjustments, and added Sánchez.
Their new projection? 48.2 WAR, second in MLB.
• Now, those Depth Charts projections are odd ones, particularly on the defensive side of the ball. For example, the defensive component of Daulton Varsho’s WAR is just +4.5 runs, which is less than he produced last season in 71 games. Some of the defensive stuff looked even weirder before ZiPS projections were blended in—Steamer has this at -1.2 for Varsho, which is truly absurd—but there’s still a chance that the Jays are being shortchanged here. Of course, that’s just as likely for other teams as well, so I don’t think there’s much sense trying to adjust anything here for ourselves.
• One set of projections worth highlighting here I think, seeing as we’re talking projections anyway, are Okamoto’s. Looking at the six main systems found on FanGraphs’ player pages, Okamoto’s wRC+ projections range from 110 to 121, with a median of 113.5. His WAR projections range from 2.3 to 2.9.
And for Bo Bichette? A 113 to 122 range (117 median), and his WAR ranges from 3.0 to 4.3.
• Uh… let’s not go crazy here, though. I’m not going to be the guy trying to put lipstick on a pig by suggesting there’s not a difference between Okamoto and Sánchez versus Bichette and Santander, because that would be stupid. The gulf is maybe not quite as big as people think, but obviously, the error bars on a guy like Okamoto have to be bigger than guys with actual MLB experience. And—*gulp*—projections haven’t exactly fared well on some of the bigger name Japanese and Korean imports in their debut seasons over the last few years. To wit:
-Jung Hoo Lee (2024): 109 wRC+ (ZiPS), 114 (Steamer), 83 (actual)
-Masataka Yoshida (2023): 137 (ZiPS), 139 (Steamer), 111 (actual)
-Seiya Suzuki (2022): 121 (ZiPS), 144 (Steamer), 118 (actual)
-Ha-Seong Kim (2021): -- (ZiPS), 105 (Steamer), 71 (actual)
-Yoshi Tsutsugo (2020): 111 (ZiPS), 123 (Steamer), 99 (actual)
-Shogo Akiyama (2020): 96 (ZiPS), 101 (Steamer), 81 (actual)
-Shohei Ohtani (2018): 99 (ZiPS), 116 (Steamer), 149 (actual)
• OK, moving on to a minor mea culpa. Sort of. Early on in the offseason I was of the mind, and pretty vocal about it, that the reason Shane Bieber decided not to opt out of his contract and instead stick around with the Jays likely had as much to do with market forces as it did with anything too scary that might be going on inside his surgically repaired arm. That’s still basically where I’d land on that, but I will acknowledge that obviously there are some concerns about his arm health. Ross Atkins made that clear enough at the Winter Meetings back in December, and it was confirmed this week when Jays manager John Schneider confirmed that Bieber will have his ramp-up delayed because of forearm fatigue.
Before pontificating I probably should have given a little more weight to the way the Jays shuffled their rotation in late September in order to give Bieber an extra day of rest, and how he was only lined up to pitch once in the World Series. And also to the fact that Bieber simply didn’t pitch well—in his final four regular season starts he had a 6.26 K/9, a 2.35 HR/9, and a 5.79 FIP, despite putting up a 3.13 ERA over that span, and he then was uneven in the playoffs despite mostly pitching on extra rest—at the end of the year.
• Fortunately, Bieber has downplayed all of this just about as much as humanly possible. Per BlueJays.com:
“The reality of the matter is that I came off of TJ right into a pennant race,” Bieber said. “I wouldn’t have it any other way. I pitched in the World Series and gave it everything I had, like everyone else did in here. Ultimately, I took my option and I wanted to be back here, my family wanted to be back here. In regard to [John Schneider's] comments yesterday and where I’m at, I was just advised to take a little time off and take it slow. These things take time.”
“In reality and in hindsight looking back, those were the most intense innings I’ve ever thrown, right?” Bieber said. “It all makes sense and I’m happy to have a plan going forward. I feel good right now.”
• What I won’t be apologizing for? Wondering why on earth anyone who isn’t his coach or teammate would actually care that José Berríos wasn’t with the Jays during their playoff run. Like, you can. Be mad if you want to expend your energy like that. I understand why the statement was made and the question had to be asked, I guess. Just know that I do not remotely get it. He has a family, he wasn’t playing, he was mad, it’s a job, he went home. Whatever.
• One guy who didn’t go home in October was Chris Bassitt. Instead, he ass-kickingly transformed himself into a high-leverage reliever despite having made 188 starts—tied for the seventh-most in baseball—since 2019. This week Bassitt signed with the Orioles and, as much as I hate the trash birds, I have to admit it’s going to be awfully difficult to cheer against them when he’s on the for them. Well, unless they’re playing the Jyas. A great contract, a great Blue Jay. I’d flip him with Berríos in a heartbeat. Hell, maybe even Bieber.
• Speaking of that Games Started Since 2019 leaderboard, also in the top 10 are Kevin Gausman (10th), Yusei Kikuchi (9th), Dylan Cease (t-6th), and Berríos (1st). Is it possible that the Jays have a type more than anybody has ever had a type in the history of having types? I think maybe yes.
• Lastly, though I feel it’s almost disrespectful to save this one for a mere bullet point, I have to join in the chorus celebrating the career of Buck Martinez, who announced his retirement from the broadcast booth earlier this week. My only saving grace here, I think, is that there’s nothing I can say here that hasn’t been said better elsewhere—including, I hope, when Nick and I dedicated a long segment to Buck on the podcast mentioned way back at the start of this post.
Buck is as synonymous with the Toronto Blue Jays organization as anybody in the world, and what a hell of a guy to hold that title for us. Universally beloved, even among those of us who’ve delighted in pointing out his foibles over the years, Buck was an unbelievably dedicated guy who Nick, on that very episode, referred to as the “sherriff” who presided over batting practice, day-in, day-out, for years, for decades, for a lifetime. A human encyclopedia of the sport. A guy who began his MLB career playing for a manager who’d been a teammate of Lou Gehrig’s and closed it out calling at-bats featuring the likes of Trey Yesavage and Shohei Ohtani.
It’s hard to wrap your head around just how much of this sport he’s touched, and how many people have invited him into their homes by way of the broadcast booth. And that he did all that with such humility and grace througout? Genuinely an unbelievable guy and an unbelievable career. Put him on the Level of Excellence.
Godspeed, Buck!
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Words?! Baseball is back!!
Also, does it have to be back on here, meaning Substack? Seem to be more publishing options out there than ever before. And the way I understand for-profit media to work, Substack is gonna be leaning more not less into writers that spew hate filled bile.
Anywho, that’s my yearly plea to not give Substack a cut of my annual subscription fee 🙏