The End is the Beginning is the End

On the trade deadline, the new Blue Jays, the GM, the finances, and the future...

Aug 02, 2024

This year’s trade deadline was, of course, about the deals, but for the Blue Jays it was about a whole lot more than that. There were a ton of moving parts and a ton of things to process, much with very real big-picture significance. That I didn’t end up writing furiously about it in real time was more due to circumstance than by choice. Some minor deals flooded in early, the big one happened on the eve of deadline day, then a flurry happened late, and I sort of ended up caught in between. So instead I decided to take a step back, get the details right, but also really absorb the bigger things as well. The result is the post below. I hope you enjoy it, and I apologize to those who prefer shorter, more frequent stuff…

It’s foolish to judge player-for-prospect trades simply by looking at where the prospects rank on publicly available lists. The various prospecting sites and gurus do great and invaluable work, but if you’ve ever been depraved enough to read that stuff with a religious fervor—and with the Blue Jays just having pressed the reset button, I think a lot of us are about to get there again—you’ll know how hard it is to come to a consensus on a player. You’ll know that all lists aren’t created equal. You’ll know that a numbered ranking isn’t as meaningful as the tier a player is in. You’ll know that there’s wide variance from team-to-team—i.e. the 20th guy in one system may be the 10th guy in another. You’ll know what helium is. You’ll know that every list is a snapshot in time, and that even one that’s recently updated is based on looks at players that can go back weeks or months—meaningfully long times in the world of development, especially at lower levels.

If a team lands, say, the Mariners’ 27th-ranked prospect in a deal it’s almost certainly not because they failed to get the 26th-ranked guy. It’s much more likely that they preferred the 27th-ranked one. Maybe even more than, like, the 12th-ranked guy.

That can be the case for a number of reasons. Outside elite-elite prospects who are rarely dealt, all these players have flaws, and sometimes a team may think they’ve identified a specific one they believe they’ve got a fix for. Or maybe the player just meshes well with the strengths of their player development apparatus. The Jays, for example, seem to have done a good job in recent years at coaxing extra velocity out of some of their drafted pitchers, so maybe they target arms they think they can repeat that trick with. They also clearly love contact bats with plate discipline, thinking that they can add power as guys develop. Though they also seem to put a real focus on improving players’ swing decisions, which might attract them to guys who have other tools but fall down lists because they’re lacking there.

I don’t know what, specifically, the Jays’ views of their own strengths may be, but my point is that feeling disappointed by a deal that only nets prospects in the back third of another team’s top 30 is a bit facile.

That said!

That said.

That said, it sure as hell changed the mood around the Jays’ and their “haul” when, on Monday night, news broke that Yusei Kikuchi had been dealt to Houston for a trio of prospects, two of which—Jake “Cake Boss” Bloss and Joey Loperfido—were among the Astros’ very best.

Now, I understand that this wasn’t just about their rankings. Watching Astros fans lose their minds about the deal was a pretty strong indicator that the Jays had done well here, as was the virtually universal acclaim for their end of the trade from the folks who get paid to know this stuff—folks like Ben Clemens of FanGraphs, whose piece on the deal is titled Yusei Kikuchi Returns an Astronomical Haul for the Blue Jays.

I also know that plenty of fans do understand what I’ve been trying to say here already. But still, I think a lot of that mood shift was exactly about having trust in the very rankings I was just suggesting not be taken as gospel. And, honestly, I completely get it. I’m on board. Bloss adds a third top-100ish prospect to the organization, and considering that the two already here are currently out of action—in one case due to a monumentally dumb PED suspension (Orelvis Martinez), and in the other because he’s just had Tommy John surgery (Ricky Tiedemann)—that’s obviously massive.

FanGraphs makes Bloss the Jays’ new top prospect, calling him a nearly MLB-ready number four starter thanks to his “fastball ride and coffer of distinct secondary pitches.” Three of those pitches—fastball, slider, curve—they grade as currently above average (55 on the 20-80 scale) or better, and one other, his changeup, projects to be there down the line. “Number four starter” is hardly the sexiest collection of words in world, but that makes him a very valuable piece of the Blue Jays’ future, with upside to be even more.

Add in Loperfido—Houston’s number two prospect for FG before graduating earlier this season, and a power-hitting outfielder with strikeout issues that had fans reminiscing about the last one of those acquired from the Astros: Teoscar Hernández (for our purposes Derek Fisher does not and has never existed)—and the Jays have added two players who have already played in the big leagues and can potentially help them in 2025.

You could similarly describe Jonatan Clase, acquired from the Mariners in the Yimi García deal, though he’s considered more raw—and, for that matter, only slots in at number 23 on FanGraphs’ board. Plus, apparently the club expects Will Wagner, the third player in the Astros deal, to also play in the majors this year.

With those guys added and the recent selection of top draft pick Trey Yesavage—who could start next year at Double-A (and whose signing was made official on Thursday, putting to rest for another year the weird fretting we see each draft season from fans who get nervous when looking at a calendar despite there never being any kind of indication that a top pick’s deal won’t get done)—it’s been a good couple of weeks for the 2025 Jays, despite the Tiedemann news. At least from a young depth/maybe things break right standpoint, which I think is pretty much exactly where they ought to be given the ugly circumstances that surround this club and have brought us here.

Positives and negatives

Now, I don’t want to act like everything is suddenly positive again, but I can’t deny that, far from being grim, I’ve found the Jays’ mini sell-off somewhat refreshing. I’ve found that to be the case in most of my little online echo chamber, too. Though, it must be noted, this may be because lately I’ve made an even-more-concerted-than-usual effort to mute from it the most exhaustingly negative fans—and media types!—in the universe. (I was about to get sidetracked and post a bunch of examples, but you know the ones I mean.)

Anyway, as I say, I’m not trying to put too positive a spin on it, but I like that we’ll get to see some guys like Addison Barger and Leo Jiménez get to audition for bigger roles next year. I like that some life has been breathed into the farm system and that we have some players with profiles other than bat-first non-shortstop infielder/corner outfielder in the upper minors to follow.

I hate saying it, but I also kinda like that the Nate Pearson experience is no longer my problem…

Of course, it’s a hell of a lot easier to be positive about this organization, no matter what else is going on in the background, when Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is sitting on a 155 wRC+ that ranks among the top 10 in baseball, and with 21 home runs—just five shy of his total for all of last year. Since May 1st, Vlad’s been the sixth best hitter in baseball, behind only Judge, Soto, Ohtani, Witt, and the A’s Brent Rooker. His 3.0 fWAR over that span is 15th among position players, just ahead of… uh… Matt Chapman. But still!

Back in late April, when another pedestrian month brought his wRC+ over the previous full calendar year down to just 109, and the negative discourse around him had reached a fever pitch, I wrote a regrettably-titled piece comparing his career arc favourably to Bryce Harper’s. (I also wrote a bunch of things about how Bo Bichette would be fine despite his own nearly year-long slump, but let’s forget about that for a second.) And would you look at that? Sitting just six slots behind Vlad on the full-season wRC+ leaderboard is the Phillies’ superstar himself.

I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.

And what I’m specifically sayin’ is this:

The Deals

OK, we’ve hit the highlights, but now it’s time to get our fingers dirty. Let’s look a little more closely at each of the Jays’ deadline moves…

• Yimi García to Seattle for OF Jonatan Clase and C Jacob Sharp

As I noted above, the headliner in this package, Jonatan Clase, only slots in as the Jays’ number 23 prospect for FanGraphs, so this was a bit of an underwhelming start to the sell-off. Perhaps that’s understandable. Recently activated from the injured list, Yimi’s elbow injury—or his medicals more generally—may have scared some teams off of him despite a healthy sellers’ market for rental relief pitching.

Then again, the issue here, if there even is one, may more simply have been that for some reason the industry wasn’t as sold on García in the first place as Jays fans were and are. The Athletic ranked him 44th on their trade board, clearly behind fellow rental relievers Tanner Scott (20) and Carlos Estévez (31). Those players seem to have fetched more, and having watched García shove all season I’d put him up with both of them, personally, even considering the injury—and not just because he seems like a swell guy. But the market is what it is.

Sometimes that works in your favour—as in the case of Kikuchi, who seems to have really been a guy the Astros targeted—and sometimes it doesn’t.

Still, it’s not like the Jays have done abysmally here. They certainly wouldn’t say so. Clase offers patience, and a bit of pop, in combination with a level of speed it feels like we don’t often see in the upper levels of the Jays' system. And I can’t even remember the last time they had a legit switch-hitter as a prospect.

Clase stole 79 bases and hit 20 home runs across High-A and Double-A last year, and while this year has been more of a struggle, and there's rawness and red flags in his profile, he’s also got “a premium tool (speed) and some late bloomer traits,” according to FanGraphs’ ranking of Mariners prospects from earlier this month. Plus, Baseball America slots him in as the Jays’ new number 12 prospect—so that’s a little bit better, even though it only puts him behind John Kasevich and the guy they acquired for IKF.

And apparently Ross Atkins is higher on his upside than anybody else the team acquired—which speaks to what I was saying about prospect rankings above.

Despite Atkins’ words, I think Clase would have been a concerning headliner for the entire haul had the Jays not added two better prospects in the Kikuchi deal. But they did! So colour me intrigued.

But also colour me realistic about the fact that his biggest appeal may be that he fits an organizational need as an optionable-big-league-ready-centre-fielder-who-isn’t-Nathan-Lukes.

Sharp, meanwhile, presumably owns his own mitt and catching gear.

• Nate Pearson to Chicago (NL) for INF Josh Rivera and OF Yohendrick Piñango

Sometimes it feels like a miracle that anyone manages to have a long, healthy, successful career as a big league pitcher. The attrition rates are massive and even the guys with “elite reliever floor” sometimes aren’t. Maybe Nate Pearson does eventually get there—the Cubs have a pretty good track record of fixing guys (a certain Julian Merryweather comes to mind)—and it seemed a bit odd to see the Jays giving up on a pitcher with elite velocity and some club control still remaining. But… well… if they haven’t figured out how to get him sorted by now? And if the fact that he’ll be arbitration-eligible this winter made them consider him a potential non-tender? Or they thought he’d get squeezed off the 40-man otherwise? Or they were concerned by his rumblings about wanting to take another crack at being a starter? And if they particularly liked what was being offered in exchange? I suppose I see it.

Coming the Blue Jays’ way are a pair of prospects, headlined by Piñango—one of several 80 grade names among the haul. He was one of the Cubs’ notable risers according to Baseball America’s midseason update, and “a data-darling corner outfield prospect whose contact rates and peak exit velocities are both plus” according to FanGraphs. FG had him as Chicago’s number 46 prospect in their mid-May update, but he now slots in at number 31 for the Jays—a jump probably more indicative of the Cubs’ strong system (ranked number two by MLB Pipeline prior to the season) than anything Piñange has done since, as his results have merely been average after making the jump to Double-A. (BA explains that “his underlying metrics are still strong. He’s been the victim of bad batted-ball luck and should turn things around from a batting average perspective.”)

Rivera was slightly ahead of Piñango on that mid-May Cubs list, but now finds himself five spots back at 36 for the Jays. Helium in reverse! But he’s not without intriguing qualities as well. He’s a glove-first guy who should be able to play shortstop and has a little bit of power, was only just drafted last year, and has a history of taking some time before breaking out—specifically, he posted a 1.064 OPS in his draft year at the University of Florida, earning a $725,000 bonus as a third-rounder, after producing marks of .780 and .713 in the two years previous (while also struggling to a .643 OPS in the Cape Cod League in the summer of 2021).

There’s certainly risk that the Jays end up looking foolish here. A reunion with Dr. Mike Sonne, a co-founder along with Pearson of baseball tech company ProPlayAI and now a Baseball Scientist in the Cubs' player development department, adds a wrinkle of intrigue. And with the way their bullpen has performed—and the fact that they’ll need to rebuild it pretty extensively before next season—it raises an eyebrow regardless. But the Jays have basically given up a short-term lottery ticket for a couple of long-term ones, and even as a club that does want to make a go of it in 2025, it’s hard to fault them for seeing appeal there—and in furthering what was very obviously an attempt to replenish the farm system.

• Danny Jansen to Boston for INF Cutter Coffey, IF Eddinson Paulino, and RHP Gilberto Batista

Danny Jansen was a well-liked, long-serving Blue Jays catcher who at times had looked like a potential foundational piece. One of those guys who may not put up big numbers or make flashy plays, but you could envision—when not cringing at yourself for so brutally falling for the gritty white guy trope—as the leader, the beloved teammate, the pitching whisperer, and the heart and soul of the Blue Jays.

The Jays themselves, according to Sportsnet’s Ben Nicholson-Smith, thought enough of him to try to work out a contract extension prior to the season, though “clearly talks never got past the finish line.” But the calls for him to get an extension got a lot quieter as this summer progressed. (Naturally that didn’t stop the name Gabriel Moreno from flashing across my Twitter timeline a whole bunch after this deal went down, though at least that was somehow less tiresome than the diaper-filling feigned outrage over Jansen apparently learning of the deal from a clubhouse TV.)

Since late 2021, Jansen had been putting up eye-popping numbers out of the catcher's spot whenever he was healthy—which hasn’t been often enough. When finally able to get a bit of a run here in 2024, his production sunk abysmally after a red hot start (wRC+s of 178 and 145 in April and May followed by 21 and 63 in June and July). It's probably simplistic to suggest that maybe his constant cycling from the IL and back created a mirage, helping to keep him fresher than most catchers when actually on the field and allowing him to avoid the production-sapping grind of putting on the gear every day for extended periods. But I wonder.

The Red Sox evidently do not. Because rather than simply sending back the kind of “meh” prospect you might expect for a rental guy in a two-month slump, Jansen netted two youngsters who slot in just behind Clase at numbers 24 and 25 on FanGraphs’ updated list, plus a 19-year-old wild card in the Complex League.

Paulino is the slightly higher-ranked of the pair and certainly fits a type we see a lot of with the Blue Jays (or, more accurately, the Buffalo Bisons)—the bat-first non-shortstop infielder/corner outfielder I referred to earlier, with limited power but a decent hit tool and a utility guy projection.

Coffey is also a bat-first non-shortstop infielder/corner outfielder with utility projection, but offers some more interesting characteristics—or at least novel ones among Jays prospects. The hit tool is a big question mark, but he's homered 14 times in 61 games at High-A so far this season. He also only just turned 20 in May, making him 2.2 years below average for the level. He's still so far away from the majors that none of that means a whole lot, and he’s pretty clearly a boom-or-bust guy based on how the development of his hit tool goes, but other than a 21-year-old with a 42.6% strikeout rate in A-ball (Cristian Feliz), the only other Jays farmhands below the age of 24 with double-digit home runs are Orelvis Martinez and Arjun Nimmala. So that’s something.

• Justin Turner and $2 million to Seattle for OF R.J. Schreck

I joked above that catcher Jacob Sharp, acquired from Seattle in the Yimi García deal, presumably at least has catching gear. Well, in Baseball America's rankings of the 89 prospects traded at this year's deadline, Schreck ranks just two spots ahead of him. So... yeah.

Also apparently there's a famous children's character with a similar name?? I’ll have to look into that.

As for Turner, you can't fault the player but it became very apparent very quickly—if not before he even signed—that he wasn’t the right fit for a lineup that lacked true home run power, and that he wasn’t going to be helpful in the field at all. The version of him that the Blue Jays got was quite good for half the time he was here, and much of what’s on the negative side of that ledger came during his flu-riddled May slump, but in the end it’s a 109 wRC+ stint that follows a 114 wRC+ season, which followed a 124 one, and… yeah, that’ll happen with 39-year-old DH types.

You can’t fault the person, either, as Turner had nothing but kind words about his time in Toronto, telling Sportsnet’s Hazel Mae: “The genuine niceness of the people didn’t go (unnoticed). And it’s a first class organization. The facilities, everything they did to Rogers Centre, as well as PDC. First class at every level.”

(I’d take the opportunity here to dunk on the fans who’d find such statements unbelievable but it turns out I already did.)

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this deal is the financial component. According to the Associated Press, the Jays will send the Mariners $2 million to cover part of the $4.3 million remaining on Turner’s deal. Getting out from under $2.3 million of that commitment is nice in the abstract, I suppose. It should at the very least please the accountants at Rogers. But whether fans should care or not—and, frankly, whether this deal, or maybe even the deadline itself, ultimately gets a pass or a fail from me—comes down to whether that savings has helped the club get underneath the Competitive Balance Tax threshold.

Rather than get into the weeds of all that here, we’ll discuss all of those implications in a section below.

• Yusei Kikuchi to Houston for RHP Jake Bloss, OF Joey Loperfido, and INF Will Wagner

I love the haul the Blue Jays got in this trade, but I also love Yusei Kikuchi. I love the redemption story. I love his stuff in a way that may only be approached by Dana Brown. I love that the man lives here year ‘round—in Scarborough of all places! I love that he clearly didn’t want to leave us. I love that his son doesn’t want to leave. I love the idea of trying to bring him back as a free agent over the winter. I love that his teammates all seem to want him back. And also, because I’m a ghoul of the soulless variety, I kinda love that—because of the immense backlash to this deal among Astros fans—he’s going to pitch down the stretch under so much pressure that I’m not sure he’ll exactly be able to thrive.

Don’t get me wrong, the part of me that’s not garbage only wants to see this man succeed, but I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t also a part of me that kinda hopes he doesn’t price himself out of the Jays’ plans next winter—the way I think he’s capable—with some kind of an ace-like two-month run that endears him to the baseball world at large the way he’s endeared himself to us. I know that rental player reunions rarely happen, but I think this one’s more possible than most, and that getting Bloss, Loperfido, Wagner, and then Kikuchi back three-and-a-half months from now, would be a dream. He just maybe has to struggle a bit for us to get there, which is the part I can’t say I love.

Anyway, Bloss we’ve already talked about above. Loperfido, too—and Jays fans have already seen him by this point. (Strikeout issues: real. My struggles to get this post done in both a timely manner and in the way I felt it needed to be done: also real.) So let’s look a little closer at Wagner, shall we? The son of former All-Star closer Billy Wagner has been an above average hitter just about everywhere he’s played, especially over the last two seasons.

This year he's slashing .307/.424/.429 at Triple-A Sugar Land, and while we always have to be cautious with numbers coming out of the Pacific Coast League, a) it's not as though he's playing home games at elevation or somewhere the ball really carries and can inflate power numbers, which is readily apparent in the fact that he only has five home runs, and b) the league average OPS in the PCL this season is .806, so at .853 he's clearly well above. Defensively he appears to be in the Spencer Horwitz sort of mold, in the sense that first base would be ideal if he could hit enough, but he can make it work at second, though otherwise doesn't really have a spot. He's never played the outfield as a pro, though I wouldn't be surprised to see the Blue Jays have him give that a go, if only to add some versatility.

But the bat's the thing—and the plate discipline, which has helped him post a ridiculous 54 walks (16.7%) to 33 strikeouts (10.2%) this season.

We're still just talking about a guy FanGraphs puts at number 30 on the Jays' updated list, and that Baseball America has as the 48th best player traded this week (Bloss and Loperfido rank fourth and 11th respectively). Still, it’s yet another lottery ticket—and one that FG likes “as an above-replacement player and a high-priority upper-level depth option.”

And now Ross has got so many of those he can’t lose!

• Trevor Richards to Minnesota for OF Jay Harry

Trevor Richards has so much Twins energy that I’m honestly surprised he wasn’t drafted by them out of high school but failed to sign or something. I’d say more about him and his Blue Jays career but… well… it was up-and-down.

The good times were good, though.

Good-night, sweet prince. I’ll never forget how much it bothered me that I forgot to erase that white splotch on your neck when I made this image…

Jay Harry, despite having at least a B- name, doesn’t feel like much of a return here. In fact, in those Baseball America rankings of all the prospects traded at the deadline that I mentioned earlier, he ranked last.

The Jays saved about $710,000 in the deal.

• Isiah Kiner-Falefa and $2.2 million to Pittsburgh for OF Charles McAdoo

I still don’t think the IKF signing was a good one. He wasn’t the right addition to a lineup that clearly lacked power, and he always had the look of a player who would become redundant given the presence of Bo Bichette at shortstop and the Jays’ plethora of young 2B/3B/OF options.

Granted, the choice, one day earlier in late December, to bring back Kevin Kiermaier now looks like the worse of the two. And the whispers that Kiner-Falefa’s deal was the most player-friendly one signed last winter tended to fade while his play got stronger and stronger as the season progressed. But let’s not pretend they did great here.

In total the Jays paid out $5 million in salary to IKF before shipping him out, plus they’re sending $2.2 million to the Pirates in the deal ($1 million this year and $1.2 million next). Getting back two wins-above-replacement in a lost season and a decent, if perhaps polarizing, prospect is not exactly a slam-dunk use of $7.2 million.

But credit to Kiner-Falefa, and to the Jays’ front office, for making a lot of people—myself included—have to eat their words. Even if it didn’t work out in whatever harebrained way they’d hoped, IKF was really good—particularly after ditching his leg kick for a toe tap about three weeks into May, after which he slashed .344/.383/.516 (158 wRC+) over 142 plate appearances before landing on the injured list.

But he was also always going to end up getting in the way, this just happened maybe a little bit sooner than anybody expected. The Jays need spots and reps for guys like Horwitz, Barger, Schneider, Jiménez, De Los Santos, Berroa, Loperfido, Wagner, and whoever else. They needed money off the books to get under the CBT threshold. They needed to turn the page.

Moving on to McAdoo, I mentioned that he might be polarizing, and I say that because while he was rated as the 24th best prospect traded by Baseball America—the fourth-best addition for the Jays behind Bloss, Loperfido, and Clase—and will slot in as the number 14 prospect on the Jays' list at MLB Pipeline, FanGraphs didn't even have him among the Pirates' top 40 on their June 19th update, listing him among a six-deep group of “tweener outfielders.”

“Most of this group is comprised of power-over-hit types who we don't think will make enough contact to sustain big league-level offense,” they write.

And here we return to where we began: Not all lists are created equal. Helium is real. Consensus isn’t.

Pipeline appears to be the outlier here. The don't seem to be as high on his power—“he could grow into average power eventually”—but give him good marks for his “quality at-bats” and “patient approach,” though they do note that he “surprised evaluators with his overall feel for hitting.” They also suggest he's “shown he can handle velocity.”

BA, on the other hand, calls it above average power, and lean into recency, noting that he's been “one of the more impressive surprises” for the Pirates this year, and that he's continued to hit even after a move up to Double-A. (They rank him 10th on their updated Jays list.)

Meanwhile, Kiri Oler of FanGraphs, in a piece on Pittsburgh's deadline dealing, relays a note from FG's lead prospect analyst, Eric Longenhagen:

He reiterated McAdoo’s plus power, but voiced concerns that, “His swing’s length will make him more vulnerable to velocity versus upper-level and MLB arms.” And though he has posted solid contact and hard-hit rates this season, most of those numbers were generated at High-A. The real test for McAdoo will come at the upper levels of the minors.

If differences opinion like this are happening publicly, it’s safe to assume that they’re happening within organizations, and maybe that’s part of the reason why the Jays were able to pry such an impressive riser away from the Pirates—a real win for them if they tend toward the more positive view.

• Kevin Kiermaier and $1.66 million to Los Angeles (NL) for RHP Ryan Yarbrough

Kevin Kiermaier was an outstanding signing for the Blue Jays in 2023. An absolute all-timer with the glove in centre field, Kiermaier came as advertised, and kicked in his best offensive season since 2017 as well. No complaints there. But with Daulton Varsho looking beyond capable in centre and stumbling enough at the plate to make it seem very clear that it should be his home, and a market for his services that Kiermaier himself admitted was nonexistent, tying up $10.5 million dollars to bring him back and double down on a defence-first scheme that had frustrated fans to no end seemed like a very bad idea at the time, and ended up being worse than that.

The defence was still great but the walks disappeared, the modest power disappeared, the strikeout rate is the highest of his career, and his 53 wRC+ is the ninth-worst of 289 batters with at least 200 plate appearances this season. He was put through waivers unclaimed, announced his retirement at the end of the season, and now has been sent packing.

For him it's a good thing. He'll get to finally play on grass, he's got a real shot at a World Series with the Dodgers, and he's on a team that can genuinely use him. L.A.'s mighty offence can handle a lack of production from centre field—they've done so already this season—and now they have one of the best fielders to ever do it. I'm not sure that means he'll start a ton, but even as a defensive replacement that's a sweet gig. And good on the Blue Jays for making it happen.

To do so it took sending $1.66 million the Dodgers' way and taking on the $1.28 million left on Yarbrough's deal. That's $2.94 million, compared to the $3.44 million left on Kiermaier's deal, meaning the Jays saved about a half a million bucks and picked up an old nemesis to use as a punching bag as they look to cover innings over the final third of the year.

Apart from blowing $10 million, it was a fairly neat trick, honestly. Provided, of course, the small savings do actually help them get under the CBT threshold. Yarbrough's 3.74 ERA on the season wasn't enough to save him from a DFA off of a deep Dodgers roster, which seems to have been largely down to some ugly underlying numbers (5.17 FIP, 1.2 HR/9) and a rough, 6.00 ERA July. He'll join the Jays rotation as they play out the string.

The Finances

OK, so the luxury tax thing. After the deadline, GM Ross Atkins indicated that they were “right on the razor’s edge” of the CBT threshold, while also insisting that getting underneath was only a secondary goal.

Posturing that way probably makes sense in terms of optics—to the uninitiated, too much focus on getting below the threshold could appear as cost-cutting for the sake of it—but to me it’s not difficult to see it as a good thing for the club to get under.

That’s not just because they would be able to pocket some relatively small (in MLB terms) savings on overages and maybe keep some dollars off of next year’s books, or because it prevents them from incurring even bigger penalties on overages if they pass the threshold again in 2025. The bigger thing is that tax-paying clubs face significantly stricter penalties for signing free agents who have rejected their qualifying offers—typically the best ones on the market—than anybody else.

CBT-payors lose their second- and fifth-highest draft picks for signing a QO-rejecting FA, plus the bonus pool allotment for those slots, plus an additional $1 million from their international bonus pool. Meanwhile, revenue-sharing recipients forfeit only their third-highest pick, and any other team—which is the category the Jays will land in if they get under—will lose just its second-highest pick, and only $500,000 from their international bonus pool. (There are additional penalties for signing a second of these free agents, but you get the idea.)

The extra pick, the slot money, the bonus pool money—those are all meaningful things. Especially because the draft and the international market aren’t areas where a team can simply convince their owners to spend more. Those pools are finite. So we're talking about significant chunks of the capital that is available to some of any club's most integral departments. For example, the Jays’ total bonus pool for this year's draft was just $8.99 million. Their second- ($1.49 million slot value) and fifth- highest ($515,000) picks account for more than 20% of that. Even just adding $500K back into the pool allows them to do quite a bit more.

Regardless of the level of penalty, we know that teams think very hard before signing those QO-rejecting FAs. We know it can crater the market for guys when they’re saddled with a QO, and that’s because front offices hate sacrificing too much extra in order to sign top tier free agents to contracts they’re usually uneasy about in the first place. They also price those kinds of penalties into what they’re willing to offer to players.

So getting under the threshold, taking away a small-but-significant impediment to signing one of those guys? As a fan, that’s what you want. Especially because it could also be a signal that they’ll be hunting top tier players again this coming winter, and potentially willing to be a tax-paying team again immediately.

That would be good.

What would be less good is if they tried to get under the threshold and didn’t actually succeed. That would mean they were effectively just cost-cutting for the sake of it. Because if you’re not going to get under the threshold, why not eat more salary in some of these deals in order to get better prospects in return?

So did they actually do it? Well… as with all of this stuff, it’s complicated.

At the moment, RosterResource says that they are over the threshold ($237 million) by about $2.6 million, coming in with an estimated CBT hit of $239,612,499. But even though that figure is quite dollar-specific, the word “estimated” is very deliberate.

Part of that $239 million total is a very round figure of $17 million for estimated player benefits, which “include health insurance, transportation, meal money and other non-salary payments for all 40-man roster players.” As far as I know there's no breakdown of what goes into this anywhere online, or how it may vary from roster to roster—or if the league simply ballparks it for each club the way that these kinds of sites also do.

Another part of the total is $14,866,100 representing “estimated salaries for players not yet eligible for arbitration and other players with non-guaranteed contracts.”

RosterResource explains that one like this:

The "estimated salaries for players not yet eligible for arbitration" figure (which is included in luxury tax and "actual" payroll) presumes that, when factoring IL time, each team will need to pay for at least 34 player-seasons over the course of the regular season. This number is calculated by subtracting the number of guaranteed and arbitration-year contracts from 34 (the number of player-seasons) and then multiplying the number that remains (typically around 10-15) by the league minimum salary.

There’s definitely some wiggle room there, in other words. Which I think leaves open the possibility that they may have managed to—or will manage to—squeak under.

For a couple of reasons, I think that possibility is a strong one. First is that it simply doesn’t make sense that they’d go this route if they weren’t very sure they’d be able to get it done. Second, Jon Becker, who does this stuff for FanGraphs/RosterResource, is up front that there are grey areas here, and notes a discrepancy with one of his fellow contract trackers, Ethan Hullihen, who has them under.

Hullihen has the Jays at $235.2 million, and shows his numbers. He then notes that there are still some clauses in various contracts that could push the total higher, but almost certainly won't do so by enough to put them back over.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see who’s got it right when it's all made official after the season. It certainly would be ideal if the club was able to sign a QO-rejecting FA over the winter without taking too much away from their 2025 draft and international capital. But... well... it would mostly just be nice if they signed one of those guys at all.

Playing out the string…

I don’t want overstate the importance of the CBT situation that I’ve outlined here, because obviously we’re still talking about a team with a lot of work to do for 2025, and one that might not have a ton of appeal to those top-of-the-market free agents at this stage anyway. Where that appeal can be massively improved, and where that work needs to start, is with getting Vladimir Guerrero Jr. signed to a contract extension. The difference between locking him in as the centre of the Blue Jays’ universe for the next decade and stepping out into the abyss after 2025 and hoping that some other franchise player materializes before the oxygen runs out is genuinely astronomical.

Give him whatever he wants, make sure there’s a huge signing bonus and a low salary in year one, get the deal done in time to count that bonus toward your 2024 budget (for Rogers’ purposes; long-term contracts are averaged out when it comes to how they count against the CBT), and get straight to throwing some money around to kick-off the next phase. Maybe start by bringing back his pal Teoscar. Maybe announce them both on the same day and let them boot Ross Atkins out the door at the presser.

Throw some prospects around, too. Because, of course, the purpose of restocking the cupboards the way the Jays have done this week isn’t just to add a bunch of future major leaguers, it’s to add future trade chips. We’ve seen time and time again this last half-decade that the most value that most prospects will ever provide is on the trade market. With the league’s mushy middle having grown so much in the Manfred era, significant offseason trades have become very hard to make. Just about everybody can start the season with that third Wild Card spot in sight. But they’re especially hard to make if you feel like losing anyone of significance will blow a massive hole in your pipeline because there aren’t several other guys behind them.

The Jays are still thin on the pitching side, and they lack elite position player prospects, but there are more guys with genuine major league futures and vast years of control in the upper levels of the minors and on the 26-man roster today than there were a month ago, and there is a lot of value in that—even if it’s not particularly sexy value.

Now is the time, obviously, to see what you’ve got.

Addison Barger, Spencer Horwitz, Leo Jiménez, and Davis Schneider were already here. Joey Loperfido has already joined them. Jake Bloss, Will Wagner, and Jonatan Clase likely won’t be far behind. Let's see them. Let's see Steward Berroa and Luis De Los Santos, too. Anybody who might have a future here has two months to get a lot of looks, a lot of tests against the best players in the world, a lot of time to work on becoming viable big leaguers—or potentially something more.

Not all of them will pop—maybe not any of them. Likely not any of them, if we’re being honest. Some will fail. Some of them will only reach their floors. All of them will have ups-and-downs. Nothing will ever be as good or as bad as it seems. But one of them just might turn into something real—a genuine every day big leaguer, or perhaps more. Heaven help us, maybe even two.

That's the game we're playing here. And while it's maybe not going to be as fun as it seemed in the immediate afterglow of the deadline, with all its shiny new toys, it's an important one—not just for the long-term success of these specific players that are under team control here for a very long time, but for knowing what the team has got and where they stand heading into the Most Crucial Offseason of Our Lifetimes. It's not a huge thing, but it's not nothing—and in a sport where truth is so slow to reveal itself, those kind of incremental wins do matter.

Now, I joked above about Ross Atkins getting the boot, but we obviously have to talk about him a little more seriously. I'll say up front that, while I've wavered on this over the last several months, I wouldn't be outraged if he continued on as the GM. I wouldn't even necessarily be surprised, honestly. The abysmal levels of consumer confidence may make that move untenable for Mark Shapiro, and I'm certainly not saying I'd shed any tears if he was let go. But I'm not sure this is the right moment for a new direction. Do you smash the stability you've built just as it finally feels like you might be able to actually put a value on Vlad's next ten years and get a contract done with your most important player?

Maybe Atkins isn't as integral to that as I'm suggesting, and maybe I'm too soft on him because I sort of love his ability to make even smart people be very, very stupid about this team, but I think stability's a real consideration—and one we know Shapiro values, otherwise Atkins might not even have lasted this long. I also think it would be fair if they went that way. As I wrote in one of the tweets I included above, I think we're here because of “a few honest missteps that undermined the team's recent on-field success,” not some fundamental inability to do the job. That doesn't mean I think he should be given this all-important role—of which there are only 30 in the world—in perpetuity, but the convergence of this well-executed mini reset and Vlad's value seeming to crystallize makes it feel to me like this project is still unfinished. And, maybe, that if a new person is going to come in it should be with the decks cleared for a fresh start.

I guess if it were me I'd give Atkins these next two months to dig in with Vlad's camp and find a framework for an extension that works for everybody and can be signed as soon as the season finishes. If it can't be done, then it's time for someone else. That person can then decide how they want to proceed, and if this new GM thinks the best course of action is to punt on 2025 and get as much as possible for Vlad and Bo and whoever else isn't part of the future this winter, it will at least be a whole lot more palatable for everybody to have them do that.

Whether that would be palatable to the accountants, and the folks in the boardroom who just spent $400 million on renovating the Rogers Centre, is another question. You probably want to give your high-end customers the kind of on-field product that will impel them to spend right away, rather than kicking the can down the road and trying to bring them back in a few years, when your amenities are no longer brand new or best-in-class, right?

So there’s a hell of a needle to thread here over the next few months, and it’s going to be much more compelling to follow and to think about than the outcomes of the fifty-odd games the team has left. The deadline definitely feels like a win, but that was the easy part.

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