Early Thursday afternoon the New York Mets made a huge splash on the trade market, acquiring Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco from the dumpster fire of an organization in Cleveland in exchange for a pretty underwhelming package of Andrés Giménez (a very good defensive middle infield prospect who put up a 105 wRC+ in the majors in 2020), Ahmed Rosario (a big leaguer who looked less awful at short in 2020 than his previous two-and-a-half seasons, but who is mediocre at the plate), Josh Wolf (a 20-year-old righ-hander taken 53rd overall in the 2019 draft), and Isaiah Green (a 19-year-old outfielder taken 69th in the 2020 draft).
Clearly Cleveland was was looking for a big league shortstop in return for Lindor, which would have made it somewhat more difficult for the Jays to have met their price, but we need not sugarcoat this to protect the honour of Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins. The Jays unquestionably could have made a better offer and landed Lindor and Carrasco for themselves. Doing so would have made the club instantly better, and probably not have hurt them very much in the long run. It’s precisely the kind of deal the Blue Jays should be making, and it sucks a whole lot to see yet another team inspiring it’s fan base with big-ticket moves for players that Jays fans have been spending the last several months dreaming of.
These are the kinds of opportunities the Jays need to be taking. A team in their position shouldn’t be playing along with an industry gone mad for to-the-penny hard valuations and the belief that “just one year” of one of the best players in the game somehow isn’t worth it — they should be exploiting it to get better, and fans are rightly angry that they’ve yet to capitalize.
“Yet,” of course, is the key word in that sentence, and we’ll get to that in a second. But first, seriously! Look a the tweet below, which was posted just after the Padres made their big moves for Blake Snell, Yu Darvish and Ha-Seong Kim. The Jays are projected to be a pretty good team, but more importantly, they’re only a handful of projected WAR away from looking like one of the better teams in the sport.
The problem with looking at this chart from late December is that a whole bunch of those teams in the Jays’ tier are going to also find ways to get better. The Jays can absolutely still do that, but there simply aren’t a whole lot of Lindor’s out there to be had. There was one, though! And packaged with a really good arm in Carrasco who has two years and a vesting option remaining. But unsurprisingly the front office that openly fetishizes years of control couldn’t bring themselves to pull the trigger.
Of course, Lindor does only have one year of control remaining, and the deal did cost prospects and not just money. We can’t talk about this as though it was an absolutely perfect deal that the Jays have turned their noses up at. For a front office that’s probably still a little more in building mode than a lot of fans want to believe, and that, realistically, is still a year or two away from their championship window being fully open, paying a high price a single year of elite talent maybe doesn’t make the most sense. And for all we know Lindor may have made it clear that he wants to explore free agency next winter, or that he would want to explore free agency if he had landed in Toronto. Or maybe the price of an extension didn’t make a whole lot of sense for them.
There are reasons the Jays chose not to beat the Mets’ offer, to be sure. It’s just frustrating that they didn’t, and now Mets and Padres fans are out there having a blast while we have to hope there were good excuses and remind ourselves that the idea that Shapiro and Atkins promised to add elite players back in the fall is only true if you ignore all of the other things they said.
And yet George Springer is still out there. The Mets have certainly made themselves a more appealing destination by adding a pair of championship calibre players to their roster, though they’ve also added $34 million to their payroll, taking it up to a club record $177 million. Maybe the Mets back off Springer and the Jays can land him. Maybe the same goes for LeMahieu (though I still expect the Yankees to find a way to make that back). Maybe waiting out the market will benefit them by allowing them to flex even more financial muscle as players’ prices drop. They certainly aren’t going to do nothing, and it benefits no one to go around pissing out your mouth on that topic. But please don’t take that to mean you shouldn’t be frustrated today.
The Jays could have their fans already feeling like off-season winners if they had simply done what the Padres or Mets have done. And while there is still a hell of a lot of off-season left for them to give us something to be excited about, sitting around hoping that your team will do something and isn’t useless and isn’t too unbending on their internal valuations is not what anyone wants to be doing.
Be fun, Blue Jays. It isn’t even hard!
Top image: "File:2016-10-23 Francisco Lindor 3.jpg" by Arturo Pardavila III from Hoboken, NJ, USA is licensed under CC BY 2.0
How about we really pick that corpse clean and put together a package for Jose Ramirez? It would cost a shit-ton, but that's because he's awesome and controllable for several years at an affordable price. There's 3B solved. And he's several years younger than Springer.
My understanding is that the deal was contingent on drowning 37 puppies, and only the Mets were willing to do that.