Stray Thoughts... - Rule 5 Dud-line

On prospects unprotected, David Bell, Juan Soto, Berríos on Vladdy, Adames, Bregman, ROY stuff, HOF stuff, trade candidates, the Rays' stadium, MLB's streaming future, non-tender candidates, and more!

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You might not believe this, but what if I told you that the people who have decided a good substitute for having a personality is being pathologically angry about every little thing the Blue Jays’ front office ever does have found a way to be upset about the club’s decision on Tuesday not to protect any of their eligible prospects from selection in December’s Rule 5 draft? I know, it sounds wild, but there are genuinely people out there popping off because a 25-year-old with a 4.47 ERA in Double-A who sports a 93-mph fastball and has never pitched more than 100 innings in a season is going to be exposed for selection by any number of teams with any number of prospects with reasonably similar upsides who will almost certainly not be able find a way to keep him on their big league roster through the end of Spring Training, let alone for the entire year.

Now, this isn’t to say that there isn't potentially something to Lazaro Estrada, or that the Blue Jays couldn’t have got it wrong on him—potential starter!—or Philip Clarke—potential platoon catcher!—or Eddinson Paulino—just acquired for Danny Jansen!—or Adrian Pinto—AFL darling!—or any of the other guys who weren't added to the club’s 40-man ahead of the uninspiring likes of Brett De Geus, Easton Lucas, or Nick Raposo on Tuesday evening. But what I am saying is that the people who think they have a better handle than the team itself on the value or potential of any of these guys, or who are certain that they know that the best way to keep them in the organization is to hand them a precarious spot on the 40-man rather than sneaking them through a Rule 5 draft where their appeal will be very limited, are as unserious as they are completely unsurprising.

(Update: It’s been pointed out to me that I haven’t been as clear as I should here. Precarious is a word I should have highlighted more strongly. When you intend to make a bunch of acquisitions over the winter, filling your 40-man with players you want to keep is not a good idea. Some of those guys are inevitably going to have to be removed—and thus exposed to waivers—when new players sign. “You don’t want to fill the 40-man with guys you don’t want to put on waivers if you need a spot,” is how Josh Howsam puts it.)

Call that an appeal to authority if you want to, and definitely call it me getting mad about a very small number of annoying people I should simply ignore and certainly shouldn’t be framing all of this around, but I just find it deeply amusing that there are fans—albeit fans with genuine passion—who, rather than taking a second to think about why it might be easier to keep these prospects they want to hug so much by not forcing them onto the 40-man and starting to burn up their option years before it’s actually necessary, have this knee-jerk instinct for outrage at the front office.

Exhausting stuff!

The reality is that just about every team has prospects like these guys, 40-man spots are really valuable, churnable 40-man spots are valuable, veterans on minor league deals are going to have more to offer other clubs than kids with half a good season in A-ball or Double-A, and the Blue Jays have a pretty good track record of not losing anything of value in this process.

In fact, in the Shapiro-Atkins era they've had just three players taken in the Major League portion of the Rule 5: Dany Jiménez by the Giants in 2019 and the A's in 2020, who both returned him to the Jays. Travis Bergen by the Giants in 2018, who was returned in August, and Jordan Romano by the White Sox that same year—who then traded him to Texas, who returned him to the Jays before Spring Training was even through.

I get the sense that some people see, for example, Eddinson Paulino as the Jays’ number 17 prospect according to MLB Pipeline, which puts him just behind former top pick Brandon Bariera and ahead of Will Wagner, and think that not adding him means that the Jays like him less than a De Geus, when it’s more that they think other teams are going to look at his profile—lottery ticket utility type who lacks polish defensively and hit just 3 home runs in nearly 300 PA this season—and think there’s vanishingly little chance he could actually help them at the big league level this season.

The one that seems to have provoked the most—though still a minimal amount—of ire here is Estrada, who TSN’s Scott Mitchell singled out for inclusion on the 40-man on Tuesday.

I certainly understand the appeal of the Blue Jays having another starting pitcher named Estrada, and Scott does a lot of great work on the prospect side of things, so I trust his take that Lazaro might have the makings of a starter. But I’m not sure how to define what has historically counted as an “organization desperate for pitching” or an “analytically interesting arm” to say whether or not what he’s suggesting is true.

Not necessarily relatedly, but nor do I know what to make of a report from back in September that Estrada had signed a two-year, minor league deal with the club—a length of term typically reserved for players who are due to miss most or all of the following season due to injury, though Estrada has since pitched in the AFL, where he earned a spot in the Fall Stars Game after striking out 19 batters in 11 2/3 innings over four appearances.

Meh!

Anyway, here are today’s stray thoughts…

Jays ring Bell

Back over the weekend the Jays announced that they've hired former Reds manager David Bell as Vice President, Baseball Operations and Assistant General Manager, explaining in a press release that he “will oversee the Player Development and Physical and Mental Performance departments”—a role similar to the one once held by Ben Cherington, particularly with respect to development.

That side of the industry is, indeed, in Bell's background, as he spent a year as the Giants’ Vice President of Player Development before leaving in 2018 to manage in Cincinnati.

Bell, perhaps not-so-incidentally, was reportedly a finalist to take over for John Gibbons as the Jays’ manager the same October he was hired by the Reds, choosing instead to go back to his hometown—and an organization with whom his brother, his father, and his grandfather had all played. Bell’s hiring was announced on October 21st, while the Jays announced Charlie Montoyo four days later. Could Charlie have been their second choice, and Bell a guy they’ve been pining for ever since? It doesn't seem entirely far fetched, seeing as they snapped him up so relatively quickly after becoming available. Bell was fired by the Reds back in September and replaced by Terry Francona.

The relationship in Cincinnati didn’t exactly end well, with Reds GM Nick Krall telling reporters such as Gordon Wittenmyer of the Cincinnati Enquirer back in September that he'd been concerned about the effort level of certain players on this year’s young and underachieving Reds club. Krall also said that, though some players improved others took steps backwards, that the club was “a little undisciplined” at times, and that players needed to be “continuously getting better”—which, supposedly, they weren’t.

That won't be great stuff to hear for Blue Jays fans as they look at their team’s new player development hire, but it's worth noting that Krall also cited “philosophical differences” as part of the reason for Bell's departure, and acknowledged that in 2023 they'd done “a better job of integrating a lot of younger players to the big-league ballclub.”

It's probably also worth noting that missing the playoffs in five of six years—and only making it the one time because of the expanded field and Trevor Bauer's dubious spin rate spike in 2020—would make it tough for any manager to keep his job.

As for Bell’s tenure with the Giants, it’s hard to know what to make of the results of his work, since he was only there for a year, but we can see some of the reasons the Jays might have liked him quite clearly. He was brought in to oversee a transitional period for the Giants on the development side, which had been an area they'd struggled with for the few years prior. In a piece about her conversation with Bell in September, 2018, the Athletic's Melissa Lockhard noted that the team had “added several new positions to the player development department (that season), including a fourth coach at each level and a second Arizona Rookie League team” in order to, as Bell put it, “maximize all areas of fundamentals and really just make it like the major leagues with the level of instruction and the level of accountability in all areas of the game.” Bell, we're told, was implementing big changes to the Giants’ offseason prospect development program as well. And in a San Francisco Chronicle piece from earlier that year we see talk about the importance of data and analytics, and not just “swing planes and spin rates, but also biometrics and sleep patterns, nutrition and psychology. If a minor-leaguer is struggling, the staff will not just look at video, but ask the player is all right at home and what he is eating.”

That feels like stuff the Jays have long seemed to already be on board with, as most teams are here six years later, but obviously they've struggled somewhat with pitching health—for what it’s worth, in Lockhard’s piece, the pair discuss the post-Tommy John restrictions placed on then-prospect Logan Webb, who has since gone on to be one of the best and most durable starting pitchers in the league—and there seems to have been some misalignment between, say, player development and amateur scouting that one has to believe it's hoped Bell can help mitigate.

When hired by the Reds he called his work on the development side “an incredible experience that makes me excited in this job to bridge that gap and make sure that everything being worked on in the front office is part of what we do on the field and all the way through player development and scouting. There's a real edge to be had there.”

Again, this may not be about the Jays creating an edge so much as catching up in areas where they've gone a little bit sideways, but I don’t think it’s hard to see how they could be helped by a guy who has played the game and managed at the top level, understands and respects the modern age of information, worked in player development, and before that was in the Cardinals dugout as assistant hitting coach and bench coach while they were still considered among the best development organizations in the game. There’s credibility there, at the very least.

Bell even sounds like a member of the Blue Jays’ front office! He told Lockhard in that 2018 piece, “We do have a hitting philosophy and one of the main points of that philosophy is being able to control plate discipline. It’s also to do damage. We want to be aggressive, but we also want to have great discipline. That’s the idea behind hitting and it kind of always has been.”

Ahh, but before anyone freaks out and starts convincing themselves this is another Don Mattingly-esque hire, it’s worth noting that Bell doesn’t believe that discipline necessarily comes first and players will grow into power later, as Mattingly has suggested.

I think with Chris, there was a high number of strikeouts, but he was still able to do damage. You look at his OPS and the amount of home runs he hit, there’s obvious ability to do that not only in Triple-A, but I believe that will translate to the major league level. As he improves his plate discipline and maybe even cuts down on the strikeouts, those power numbers are going to go up even more. He has a chance to be, as we all know, dangerous and a successful major leaguer. He’s working towards it. What he knows he needs to do fits right into what we are doing throughout our organization.

Thing is, the Chris he’s speaking about there is Chris Shaw, and… uh… maybe don’t look him up to see how that actually went. I think the broader point is a decent one, though. Maybe even encouraging.

The Juan and Only…

Juan Soto’s free agency is still the talk of MLB, and I’m sure will continue to be until that saga concludes. This, of course, means that we’re going to keep being subjected to tantalizing rumours about the Blue Jays’ involvement in the process, whether we like it or not. The Jays have had a meeting with Soto and his camp. They have an incredibly wealthy owner. They need offensive firepower. They seem to have a stronger desire to act like a big market club than at any point since the 90s.

It’s a good thing, even if nobody actually thinks it’s going to lead anywhere, at least as far as Soto is concerned. It also has to be discussed. Except… maybe when it doesn’t.

We’ve reached a bit of a grim phase here with the Soto stuff, I think. At first a potential Jays pursuit of Soto was newsworthy because it was unclear if the rumblings about it were genuinely serious. Then it was because of the chatter about it at the GM Meetings. Somewhere in there it was worth discussing because supposedly serious insiders were making predictions to that effect. Last week the Jays were sitting across the table from him.

Now the content mills need to keep spinning, but we’re lacking for grist. So what do we get?

Horse race nonsense. Or worse.

Take, for one example, Jon Heyman, who practically channeled Scott Boras on Tuesday in an eponymous video for New York Post Sports:

Well, the number seems to be going up with all the predictions, but you know, I'm not going to give you any new numbers. I've certainly thought it's going to be over $600 (million). Is it going to be over $700 (million)? I think that's the question, and not deferred. He's going to be the highest paid guy.

And you can say, ‘Why? Ohtani is the greatest player maybe ever, and can also pitch.’ It's the age factor, is number one. Soto just turned 26 years old, so he's about four years younger than Ohtani was as a free agent.

That's a major factor. Another factor is, I do believe he's willing to play anywhere. Whereas Ohtani probably just wanted to go to Southern California, as we look back on it. Right? I think he would have gone to the Angels happily, and he certainly is happy with the Dodgers.

And, (Soto) also has Scott Boras as an agent. So, you know, I think that's the reason we're looking at the record contract in terms of actual value.

You know, don't hold me to this: if I were going to predict today—and I change every other day—I wouldn't say every day, but I would say I change every other day—I think it's going to be about the money, so the teams that are going to be able to win the bidding war are probably the teams with the biggest advantage. And I'm going to say right here that the Mets, followed by the Blue Jays—I'm going to say Mets one, Blue Jays two—would be my guess today.

And you know, I get that Yankee fans are going to be upset. He was in New York for a year, he is a free agent now. He did love Aaron Judge, he did love the clubhouse, he loved many things about the Yankees, but maybe he will go back. But right now I'm putting them no better than number three at this moment. We shall see.

I’m somewhat surprised he wasn’t also talking up the Dodgers, seeing as apparently that’s now a thing too. But perhaps that’s best saved for the next horse race update.

Or maybe the Yankees will get that spot…

Either way, someone will definitely make some eye-roll-worthy “bad news for the Jays” content out of the idea that Soto is apparently thinking about player development.

Another example of the dearth of anything to actually say about all this right now came from the Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal, who in a Monday piece ran through all the reasons we’re already well aware of that put the Blue Jays in a tough situation, which he suggests might not appeal to a top free agent like Soto. But not before prefacing all of that by saying that “Soto, 26, almost certainly will go for the best offer.”

OK, so then what are we even doing here?

Mostly, it’s about driving the news cycle, keeping the conversation alive, keeping one’s work in the spotlight. In certain cases, getting radio hits. That is, when it comes right down to it, the job. And plenty of actual content mills are happy to play along for their own reasons—which I’m doing a version of here myself, I suppose.

But I think there’s also an aspect of this, too…

I mean, it is what it is, and we don’t have much choice but to mostly follow along. But the idea that so much of this chatter is simply made up seems a pretty worthwhile lesson to keep in mind this time of year. And, I think, an especially easy one to digest these days, when we’re all trying out best to not get sucked in by any of this stuff—at least not until, as Josh correctly points out, Passan reports it.

That all said, uh… EDWARD ROGERS LET’S GOOOOOO…

Quickly…

• José Berríos gets it, telling Jarniel Canales of El Vocero de Puerto Rico that (according to Google Translate): “It would be brutal (in the good sense)” to sign Juan Soto, “but first we have to sign Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who I understand is the pillar of the team.”

“When we sign ‘Vlady’, we can sign whoever they want. But I think the priority should be Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and, then, if we add Juan Soto, it would be a perfect world,” he added.

Correct! (h/t @benturn22)

• Speaking of Ben (and because of course…)

• EXTEND THE NEWS CYCLE! Speaking of insiders making predictions, we've got two (of 18) predicting to ESPN that Juan Soto will be a member of the Blue Jays. (Two also pick the Jays as the landing spot for Blake Snell.)

• And speaking of reporters seeking out radio hits, Jon Morosi.

*AHEM*

In an MLB Network segment this week, Morosi listed the Jays among several teams looking at free agent shortstop Willy Adames. He’s not a great OBP guy, but I’ll take the homers and doubles—and the ability to play shortstop, which would make him a nifty little bit of insurance should Bo Bichette depart after 2025. Not a perfect player or fit, but beggars can’t be choosers.

• Back to the Rosenthal piece mentioned earlier, where he suggests that he suspects Scott Boras will be looking to land Alex Bregman a contract in the same stratosphere as Manny Machado’s. That is: 11-years and $350 million. I say this with all sincerity: best of luck with that.

• The only AL Rookie of the Year take worth having:

• A couple of interesting things related to the NL version of the award. First, Travis Sawchik of theScore (never heard of it) looks into the implications Paul Skenes’ win has for the Pirates; notably that he'll now reach free agency a year earlier than expected. Second, FanGraphs’ Dan Szymborski was one of the seven voters to take San Diego’s Jackson Merrill over Skenes, and he argues the case—I think quite successfully.

• Elsewhere at FanGraphs, Michael Baumann tells us all about the new dimensions coming to Camden Yards in the delightfully titled Wall Over but the Shoutin'.

• It sounds as though Nick Ashbourne and I will be back for another episode of Blue Jays Happy Hour later on this week, and in it perhaps we’ll talk about his latest for Sportsnet, in which he takes us through some under-the-radar trade targets the Jays ought to be contemplating.

• LMAOOOOOOO. Sorry, Shi. The idea that the Jays will reach an inflection point in 2025 that we’ve all been talking about for literally years has already been claimed.

• Richard Griffin makes the case for the Jays moving to a six-man rotation in 2026. Another of my fairly safe big picture predictions from back in September is coming true!

• The Tampa Bay Rays’ stadium deal is in some serious peril, thanks largely to the fallout from hurricanes Milton and Helene, which according to a great overview of the situation from the Tampa Bay Times’ John Romano, ended up seeing the Pinellas County Commission “postpone a vote to issue bonds to pay for the county’s portion of the new stadium, a detail that was thought to be a formality,” beyond early November's election. The election “ended up changing the makeup and disposition of the commission,” and hoo boy, are things contentious now. Couldn't happened to a more garbage organization, I say!

• “MLB plans to create national packages for major streaming companies to bid on come 2028, the year that the league’s national television deals with ESPN, Fox and Turner are set to expire,” reports Evan Drellich of the Athletic in a piece on the complicated but potentially massive moves being made by the league as it deals with a changing media landscape and the bankruptcy of Diamond Sports Group.

Ultimately, we’re told, “Manfred wants the league office to take over teams’ local media rights — the traditional, linear TV rights, as well as the in-market, direct-to-consumer streaming rights, both of which currently belong to the individual clubs.”

That feels like something that some local rights-holders—say, Rogers Communications, for example—might have a very hard time with. And, of course, with Rogers being across the border, there are potentially even more complications. And, even if Manfred gets owners on board, “he will also need approval from the players’ union. The Players Association does not control how MLB uses its TV rights, but it does have a say in revenue sharing between teams.”

Drellich also rather ominously notes that the current CBA between the league and the players’ union expires in December 2026. Dun dun dun…

• The BBWAA released this year's version of the Hall of Fame ballot this week, and you'd be hard pressed to find one with more Jays-related representation. Included on it are: Mark Buerhrle (2013-2015), Curtis Granderson (2018, apparently!), Ian Kinsler (I often confuse him with Michael Young, who was traded for Esteban Loaiza), Russell Martin (2015-2018), Manny Ramírez (once spotted at Pearson while a free agent), Troy Tulowitzki (2015-2017), Omar Vizquel (prefer not to remember), David Wright (offered by the Mets for José Cruz Jr. but J.P. Ricciardi didn't want some guy in the Sally League so let Cruz walk for nothing that winter instead), and Ben Zobrist (trade lined up for him at the 2015 deadline but Anthopoulos too reluctant to give up Rowdy Tellez).

• Lastly, the Rule 5 one wasn’t the only deadline we’re dealing with this week, as on Friday at 8 PM ET teams will have to decide whether to tender contracts to their arbitration-eligible players. Thomas Hall of Blue Jays Nation runs through the Jays’ four non-tender candidates—including the tricky case of Jordan Romano—and comes up with basically the same predictions I would. So rather than write about them all myself, I encourage you to all go read his piece.

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