The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

The Blue Jays' massive series with the Texas Rangers is, uh, not going well.

Back in February, Blue Jays team president and CEO Mark Shapiro had a wide-ranging 45 minute session with reporters at the club’s player development complex in Dunedin, Florida. The question during that session that the Athletic’s Kaitlyn McGrath felt made Shapiro’s eyes light up was one about the league’s then-upcoming rule changes. Shapiro is a member of the league’s 11-person competition committee, which oversaw and approved banning the infield shift, making it easier to steal bases, and dramatically shortening games through the use of the pitch clock. Aesthetic changes designed to keep fans more engaged and better entertained. “I’ve spent a couple of years of my life working on them,” he said.

“I’m not apocalyptic. I don’t feel like the game can’t survive four minutes and 17 seconds between balls in play,” he continued. “But I do feel the game cannot grow. I do feel the expectation to both engage younger fans and to engage new fans, which is a priority for us, especially for the Blue Jays in such a diverse international market, to attract new fans and a much more crowded sports and entertainment — and entertainment in general — landscape that it is very challenging to get someone to come in.”

In other words, in the view of the team itself, the Blue Jays are not really a baseball club, they’re an entertainment product.

We’ve seen that vision in practice this year via the outfield renovations that took place over the winter at Rogers Centre, and in the unveiling of changes to the infield portion of the park to come this winter. Old, ugly, underused sections of seating have been refreshed and in many areas replaced with fan-friendly spaces in which attendees are encouraged to show up to the ballpark early to drink even more $14 beers than they normally would in “the coolest bar in Toronto.” By next spring the building will be replete with new, exclusive lounges and premium seating options for the city’s ultra-rich, with prices all over the stadium jacked-up accordingly.

But what happens when your entertainment product doesn’t entertain?

The baseball and the business sides of the Toronto Blue Jays mostly operate within their own spheres, but they’re inseparable to the fan who plunks down massive amounts of money to take in this entertainment. Especially when this fan looks up halfway through the team’s third straight on-field embarrassment in the biggest series of the season and realizes that the thing they’re allowing their wallets to be gouged for is giving them absolutely nothing back.

That’s not to say that none of the home-team booing that took place on Wednesday night in Toronto had roots in old fashioned, baby-brained narcissism. There will always be booing dullards who can’t see athletes as human and need to throw little tantrums at them when the dopamine-rushes-by-proxy are too few and too far between. And it’s their right as fans to do so, just as it’s my right to think they’re all embarrassing losers.

But something is boiling at Rogers Centre here as we wind down this miserably disappointing season, and I don’t think it’s entirely that.

Here’s how a friend of mine put it on Wednesday night:

That Shapiro can be as open as he has been over the years about dipping into fans’ pockets, and the team’s need for more and more premium seating in a building owned by a $30 billion telecom company that is so far beyond “too big to fail” that the CRTC—the supposed regulatory body for Canada’s radio, TV, and telecommunications industries—won’t even formally investigate the network outage last summer that interrupted 911 services for millions, says a whole lot about the depth of the grift, I think. The sense this summer of “what the hell am I doing this for?” among other friends who go to dozens of games in person and spend much more down there than I do these days has been profound, and watching a team that seems to have shrunk from every big moment for five straight months as its “generational hitter” puts up numbers like 2018 Kendrys Morales with less power has only exacerbated it.

Don’t get me wrong, plenty of fans who don’t go in person are angry too. Many of them would have booed just as vociferously as Wednesday night’s crowd, maybe even more so, had they been there. But this isn’t entirely a “team bad, me mad!” thing, I don’t think. That’s obviously part of it. But when the entertainment product isn’t entertaining, people start looking around, and right now a lot of Jays fans aren’t liking what they see.

Which, if we’re only talking about the baseball side of things, is inevitable. But also, I think, a shame. The team hasn’t been good enough. They’ve massively failed to live up to expectations, yes. But this front office has got buy-in and real world dollars out of ownership to levels previous regimes could only have dreamed of. And there’s not much more you can do from a roster-building standpoint than put together an elite defence and pitching staff, and an offence that’s pretty decent—and not nearly as awful as this one has felt most nights.

It hasn’t worked, and it doesn’t feel like it ever will, but no one was wrong for expecting that it would. The failures of this season are far more about Vladimir Guerrero Jr., George Springer, Matt Chapman, and Alejandro Kirk than they are about Ross Atkins.

And yet consumer confidence matters. This is, after all, the entertainment business. So I think it’s fair to wonder—fairer, perhaps, than at any time in the current era—whether what’s gone down this week, from team performance, to attendance, to the fans getting so notably restless, will actually spur change. Especially because club brass seems to lack an important tool in their damage control toolkit at the moment.

Last season, when the Orioles were chasing them down in late August and Buck Martinez was scolding players for lack of effort to hundreds of thousands of viewers on a nightly basis, Shapiro and Atkins took turns facing the media, essentially imploring fans to understand that their players cared. Things weren’t as bad as they seemed, they assured us. And they were ultimately right. But, more importantly for them, they changed the discussion in that moment. They put themselves at the centre of the conversation for a day or two, which mellowed the drumbeat of outrage long enough for the team to string some wins together and lighten the mood.

Maybe they’ll try something like that again this time around, but not only would it reek of desperation, it would also invite questions about the Alek Manoah saga that I suspect they don’t want to answer. (Manager John Schneider did discuss Manoah on MLB Network Radio this week, and again with Rob Longley of the Toronto Sun, only vaguely saying that the young starter is “not ready to compete,” and that “you don’t want to put guys in position that they are not comfortable with”—lines that I’d say could work just as easily with either version of the story of his absence we’ve been told).

So, could things with fans get more poisonous yet? I wouldn’t rule it out.

Of course, as was the case last year—and every year!—no matter where their PR strategy takes them, the only thing that can actually change the narrative here is a bunch of wins. And, honestly, at this point maybe even that won’t do it.

The Seattle Mariners have to play the Rangers and Astros several times before the season ends, which means that the Jays still have a very good chance of playing in the postseason. But even if fans don’t know specifically that the club’s record against teams at or above .500 is 41-49, no one who has watched the Blue Jays all season could be remotely surprised that against stronger opposition they haven’t been good enough. So, does a playoff spot even matter?

Well, yes. But I can’t blame anybody for not being enthused by the prospect of having to watch more of this team. Or even for loudly voicing their more general displeasure.

Personally, I don’t think the record against teams over .500 means a ton. Or, at least, it doesn’t mean that they can’t beat good teams, just that they haven’t. The talent to do so is certainly in there somewhere. But we’re getting to the point where such distinctions become meaningless, and the kind of hopefulness required to believe that things could finally click and these Jays could start playing the way we always expected them to has long been beaten out of much of this demoralized fan base.

Tickets for tonight’s game start for as low as $23, plus $4.75 order processing fee. Catch the excitement!

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