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Plus some quick thoughts on arbitration and more!

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The Jays and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. won’t be going to a potentially contentious arbitration hearing with the Blue Jays this winter. That’s what we’re generally told was the good news to come out of Thursday’s deadline for teams to come to agreements with eligible players before having to officially exchange salary numbers to be used by the arbitrator, though I can’t say I can recall a single example of a player whose fee-fees were so hurt specifically by this process that he refused to sign a fair market extension with his club against his own financial interest—let alone a number of such cases as to correspond to the amount of oxygen this concept is given by busywork-seeking writers and commentators every year at this time.

I also can’t say that, if they had failed to come to an agreement here, it would have had any more or less bearing on whether the two sides will ultimately be able to get a longer extension done than the fact that they did. They could have still managed to get a deal done despite a trip to an arbitrator looming, just as they could still very much fail to do it from here. And I’m not sure why so many people seem to be in a rush to think otherwise.

What I can say is that it’s nice to see that the two sides have found common ground within the fairly rigid structure of the arb process. That didn’t happen a year ago, and if this means nothing else, we’ll at least be spared a repeat of the kinds of misguided howling that characterized that saga—like the acting as though the team was obliviously walking into some kind of obvious relationship-destroying disaster, or the pretending that a $1.9 million gap between the sides was too little to fight over.

The latter is not true even by the standards of a top 10 MLB payroll, and is especially not true once you grasp that a player’s salary in the preceding year is the biggest factor of all when it comes to his next trip through the process. If the Jays had won last year’s hearing they would not be paying Vlad $28.5 million for 2025. Vlad’s salary is going up by $8.6 million, which represents 43% of last year’s 19.9 million salary. If his pay had gone up by the same rate from the $18.0 million the Jays had wanted to pay him, that’s just a $7.8 million raise, and a $25.8 million salary overall. Those are just quick and dirty numbers and I can’t imagine the process actually works precisely like that, but I think it’s a fair enough way to ballpark it, and it suggests that last year’s “fight” was over something more in the $4 or $5 million range—potentially more if Vlad had taken a harder line and won a hearing with them again this winter, and certainly far too high a price to pay just to have avoided a process that seems to have had literally zero impact on his willingness to sign an extension with the team if his demands are met.

Frankly, the fact that this is Vlad’s final trip through the arb process probably made it easier for the two sides to come to an agreement, as there are no future salaries to be affected. So let’s maybe not get too excited here.

I should also point out that, even though it looks on the surface as though Ross Atkins has done a tidy piece of work by getting Vlad signed for less than his MLBTR-projected rate of $29.6 million, last year’s projection for him was $20.4 million, and even his camp ultimately didn’t come in that high.

Yet there is good news to come out of this agreement, I think. And that’s the fact—pointed out on Twitter by Josh Howsam—that by locking in Vlad’s salary for 2025, the Jays can now sign him to an extension that doesn’t kick in until next season and avoid further blowing up their luxury tax number for this year.

He explains:

For this to be a factor the Jays still have to get it done, of course—something the most exhaustingly annoying reply guys will be incredibly quick to tell you they can’t, won’t, and never will—but even a marginal win like that could help make the difference. Because they do still need every dollar they can muster to help the roster elsewhere.

Zooming out, it seems they served that project well with all their arb-eligible guys, coming in just $300,000 above MLBTR’s projections in total, according to Thomas Hall of Blue Jays Nation. They now sit at $228 million as their projected CBT number, which puts them $13 million below the first threshold and $22 million below the $250 million they were projected to last April, according to Cot’s. That $250 million figure left them $7 million shy of last year’s second threshold, and if they’re able to land in a similar place this year—below the second threshold with a little bit of wiggle room for mid-season additions—they could have even more than that. And, of course, they obviously should be allowed to go even higher than that.

Anyway, between all that and a rumour mill that keeps on churning—Jeff Hoffman? Anthony Santander? Roki Sasaki???—and an offseason that feels very incomplete, there is still plenty to talk about at this late-ish stage. So let’s do exactly that!

Leave me your best thoughts and questions about any and all things Jays in the comments on this post!

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