Thursday rumours and thoughts: Dunedin it is, Tatis implications, Sanch Francisco, and more!
Baseball things are happening! None of them are happening in Toronto, obviously, but that would be true at this point in any other year as well. We’re up here biding our time between snowstorms, and the Blue Jays are down in Dunedin, starting to get the work in to ready themselves for the upcoming season. (Or, well, technically continuing the work they’d been doing all winter already, because being a pro ballplayer in 2021 is very much a 365 day a year job.)
Today we have some news on where the Jays will be playing at least a portion of their schedule, some news out of San Diego that probably doesn’t affect the Jays, at least a couple of old friend alerts, and more. So let’s get into it.
Home away from home
Shi Davidi and Ben Nicholson-Smith of Sportsnet reported on Wednesday night that the Blue Jays will begin the 2021 regular season playing home games at TD Ballpark in Dunedin. The Jays, in a press release, confirmed the news on Thursday morning.
That’s hardly a surprising development, but it does come with a slight twist, which is that the team is only committing so far to playing their first two homestands there.
The status of their third set of home games, which runs from May 14 to May 24, remains up in the air.
It feels incredibly unlikely that they'll be able to move to Toronto by then, but it's not impossible to imagine them moving to another site — Buffalo, perhaps — at some point during the season.
"Not impossible," I say. But likely? I'm not so sure.
I wrote about this stuff a week ago, the touched on it again in my most recent mail bag, so I don’t want to repeat myself too much, but basically the situation is this: the weather in Buffalo is less than ideal until about June, and the weather in Dunedin gets awfully wet at just about the same time. In a perfect closed-border world the Jays would just pick up and move from Dunedin to Buffalo at the end of May. This world, however, is definitely not perfect.
Players may not like having to potentially call three cities home over the course of a year. And, as I wrote in the mail bag, “it seemed a lot of the logistical hurdles they faced stemmed from COVID protocols requiring frequent cleaning of facilities and strict guidelines on spacing. Sharing a space with the Bisons would pose many of the same problems.” (The Dunedin Blue Jays could, I assume, simply play their games at the club’s development complex, five or six kilometres away. Failing that, they could probably share a park for games with the nearby Phillies.)
Yeah, it would be annoying to get rained on a bunch in the second half of the season, if it comes to that, but the Marlins dealt with it for 19 years, and so does every team in the Florida State League. I’m not sure that’s a big enough inconvenience to switch horses mid-stream.
Another issue is the cost of upgrades. The team may also not want to spend the money on facility upgrades in two places instead of just one — and that’s especially true given another new bit of interesting information provided in Shi and Ben’s report.
“The Blue Jays had initially planned to remain at TD Ballpark last year, investing $600,000 to bring the lights up to major-league standards and make other upgrades, but looked elsewhere amid a surge of coronavirus infections in the state.”
Florida is still a mess, of course. But where isn’t? And with players (and staff, and their families) potentially being able to get vaccinated in Florida — where the restrictions are loose, or will be soon — maybe that’s less of a concern in 2021 than it was a year ago.
My money is still on them staying in Dunedin until Toronto becomes an option again, but what do I know? Clearly the team is hedging its bets.
UPDATE: Good thing I’m not a betting man!
Getting dimensional
As for what impact this will have on the field, let’s just say that left-handed hitters are going to be happier in Dunedin than they would have been in Buffalo or Toronto.
In Rogers Centre's cookie cutter setup, the power alleys in both left and rigth field are 375 feet from the plate. At Sahlen Field in Buffalo, it's 371 to left-centre and 367 to right-centre, with both foul poles being three feet closer than at Rogers Centre, 328 feet out. TD Ballpark is farther to the poles (333 feet to left and 336 feet to right), and the left field power alley is a little deeper, at 380 feet. Right-centre, however, is a very inviting 363 feet.
A homer-prone right-handed pitcher — *COUGH* Tanner Roark *COUGH* — is maybe not going to have such a great experience playing here too much.
Wait, is this why the Jays went out and added a pair of lefty starters — Robbie Ray and Steven Matz — to a rotation that already included Hyun Jin Ryu???
(Image via FloridaGrapefruitLeague.com)
Links!
• The San Diego Padres have once again done something pretty spectacular, as the Athletic’s Dennis Lin and Ken Rosenthal reported on Wednesday night that the club has agreed to a 14-year, $340 million extension with superstar 22-year-old shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr. No, really.
• That’s a ton of money, and seemingly a ton of risk on the Padres’ part. But, for one, it’s great to see great players get paid and teams that want to employ great players. For two, Tatis has accumulated two full years of service time already, and is only just 22 years old. That means he was due to reach free agency heading into his age-26 season, just as Manny Machado was when the Padres signed him prior to the 2019 season. Machado got 10 years and $300 million as a free agent. Tatis will get about that much for his same free agent years, which won't begin until 2025 — six years after Machado's deal started. If Tatis gets to the end of 2024 still looking like the generational talent he appears to be now, San Diego will be doing extremely well for themselves relative to what the cost of a player like that would be in free agency by then. Yes, there's risk that he won't be that guy, but if you can't bet on this guy, who can you bet on? Mike Trout? Sure, and he's been pretty heavily bet on in his own right. Juan Soto? I think I'd have to bet on him too. Anyone else? I’m not so sure.
• Does this deal have any bearing on what the Jays might do with Bo Bichette or Vlaidmir Guerrero Jr.? Not a lot, to be honest. Vladdy needs to get back on the track he was on two years ago before we really even think about this stuff. And while I think Bichette can be a great, dynamic player for the Jays, he’s not anywhere near this territory yet. Bichette is a year older than Tatis, doesn't take walks the way he does, doesn't hit for power the way he does, and since the start of 2019 has missed time for a broken hand, a concussion, a tight hamstring, and a knee sprain. I wouldn’t bet against him turning himself into a $300 million player by the time he reaches free agency (or sooner), but the Jays are surely not going to pay him now like that’s preordained. They could still probably find common ground on a long-term extension with Bichette — which would be great — but I can’t imagine it would be in the same layer of the earth’s atmosphere as Tatis’s deal.
• Remember those “Tatis Jr. or Guerrero Jr.?” questions a couple years ago? Yeah, me neither.
• Speaking of Vladdy, this seems like good advice:
• Hey, and speaking of Drew, he announced here on Thursday morning that he’s back podcasting again, with a new show he’ll be doing for the Athletic with Kaitlyn McGrath call Spin Rate. They’re both awesome, and pals, and I’m looking forward to having them both in my regular podcast rotation. (Drew also has a fresh post up at Vlad Religion, and those are always a must-read.)
• Spring training is basically upon us, and Jake Odorizzi and Taijuan Walker are still not in camp with anybody. According to Andy Martino of SNY.tv, the Mets have circled back to Walker, and seem to have some serious interest there. Walker is, of course, the pitcher who has most been linked to the Jays this winter — they liked him enough to trade for him last summer after all — and one has to believe that a conclusion to this saga is coming soon. But it sure seems at the moment like nobody is going to offer either of the pair a multi-year deal, and that everybody is simply waiting for someone to blink. Martino adds that the Mets would also have interest in Odorizzi on a one-year deal, but that he had been seeking three earlier in the winter. I think either of these guys would be great on a one-year deal — I might have even started leaning toward Odorizzi as my preference, simply because he actually showed close to frontline starter upside in 2019. And while I’m not exactly a fan of teams grinding players to dust in a market where, thanks to cheap owners in other cities, demand simply hasn’t been there, I do get why the teams are hesitant to commit for longer. Especially when they clearly don’t have to.
• Seriously, though. If the Padres can afford two $300 million infielders, every team in the game can afford at least one.
• Good stuff from Chris Henderson of Jays Journal, as he looks at some comments from Nate Pearson in a recent hit on MLB Network Radio. Pearson, interestingly, says that he’s “ready to fill whatever role I can at the big league level and just be ready to pitch when my name gets called.” A hint that he may not be deployed as a starter perhaps?
• The Blue Jays made it official on Wednesday that the club has released reliever Shun Yamaguchi. So, I guess that one didn’t work out. Yama time is over.
• Gregor Chisholm of the Toronto Star takes a look at where the Blue Jays’ roster is at, projecting what he thinks the group will look like, while noting all the various ways it could change between here and opening day.
• MLB.com’s Mike Petriello digs deep into the data in order to assess what the Jays are getting in Marcus Semien as a second baseman — a position it seems he’s barely played since 2014, though, as Petriello points out, that’s not exactly true. Really interesting stuff here.
• A late addition to this post:
Sanch Francisco
Former Blue Jays right-hander Aaron Sanchez was signed by the San Francisco Giants on Tuesday night, agreeing to a major league deal worth $4 million. According to Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle, who broke the news, Sanchez could earn as much as $6.5 million with incentives.
That’s a surprising amount of money for a guy who couldn’t stay healthy in 2017 or 2018, was awful for most of 2019, and then immediately broke down again. Sanchez didn’t pitch in 2020, and it wasn’t by choice. He had shoulder surgery in September 2019, was non-tendered by the Astros later that fall, and failed to catch on with anybody until now.
The reason he commanded such interest, it turns out, was rather simple.
The deal is a pretty interesting reflection of the way some of the league’s most analytically inclined teams think in 2021.
Even so, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher.
I’m glad Drew brought some properly ghoulish perspective to this one on Twitter, because it meant I didn’t have to. Frankly, I defended Derek Fisher and Shun Yamaguchi enough last week that I don’t really want to push my luck by also pointing out that Sanchez is kinda bad.
What I’d rather do is point out why it’s completely understandable that a lot of Jays fans still have so many feelings for Sanchez. He is more than just “a guy who couldn’t stay healthy in 2017 or 2018, was awful for most of 2019, and then immediately broke down again.” He is someone a huge amount of emotional energy was invested in over the years, who teased fans like few other prospects with long glimpses of his elite potential. And I think it goes beyond even that.
Maybe more than any other figure, I think Sanchez’s story is the story of Toronto Blue Jays baseball since the end of the J.P. Ricciardi era.
* * *
Alex Anthopoulos took over for Ricciardi in October 2009, and Sanchez was the second player taken in his first draft class the following summer. A high schooler from Barstow, California, he and Noah Syndergaard, who was taken four picks later, marked the beginning of a shift away from the Jays taking “safe” college players at the top of the draft toward AA’s higher risk, higher reward approach. (Of 15 first- and supplemental-round picks made by the Jays from 2001 through 2009, only three were high schoolers. Of 15 first- and supplemental-round picks made by the Jays from 2010 through 2013, 12 were high schoolers.)
The Jays dealt with some major growing pains in the John Farrell years of 2011 and 2012, but had found some serious bright lights by the end of it in the form of breakout sluggers José Bautista and Edwin Encarnación. Farther down the organizational ladder there was also the "Lansing Three" — the trio of highly touted prospects who pitched that year in Low-A, including Sanchez and Syndergaard.
However, by the end of 2012, with Bautista and Encarnación on team-friendly deals and established as middle-of-the-order forces, Anthopoulos decided to push the club's timeline up. Syndergaard went to the Mets in a deal for R.A. Dickey, leaving the hopes of the club's starting pitching future to rest on Sanchez’s shoulders — a load that got even heavier after Ricky Romero and Brandon Morrow flamed out and the Dickey and Josh Johnson deals immediately turned sour.
After appearing to take a bit of step back in the minors in the early part of 2014, Sanchez was nevertheless promoted to the majors after the All-Star break to help the club's bullpen. That was the year that had started with the Ervin Santana debacle, then went off the rails in late July when the front office was unable to make any major acquisitions at the trade deadline, despite the team being 10 games above .500 at the time. Sanchez, essentially, was their big July acquisition. And though the club swooned soon after, it was through no fault of his — he was spectacular, allowing just four earned runs on 14 hits and nine walks over 33 innings (1.09 ERA, 0.70 WHIP).
By then Marcus Stroman had also arrived, and locked down a rotation spot with a great rookie season in 2015. Sanchez was viewed as a potential late inning reliever for the Jays that year, but ended up in the rotation mix after Stroman tore his ACL in spring training and was (erroneously) ruled out for the entire season. (Sanchez pitched well enough to win a job in the rotation, which ultimately allowed an even younger pitching prospect to become the closer for the club.)
Sanchez didn’t look as good in his new role as he had as a reliever the previous year. He started 2015 poorly, got hurt in early June, and when he returned in late July it was once again as a reliever. Again he turned into an incredibly important weapon out of the bullpen — only this time he was doing it on the best Blue Jays team since the early 90s. Over 26 1/3 relief innings down the stretch opponents hit just .178 off of him as he pitched to a tidy 2.39 ERA.
John Gibbons trusted him so much in the 2015 playoffs that he gave him the ball nine times in 11 games. It was Sanchez who was on the mound in the seventh inning of Game 5 against the Rangers when Russell Martin's throw clanked off of Shin-Soo Choo's bat, allowing Rougned Odor to scamper home with the controversial go-ahead run. And he ended up getting credit for the win after José Bautista's bat flip home run turned the game on its head a half inning later.
After showing up in spring training 2016 with "man ass" (or whatever it was they were saying — I'm not Googling it) following an intense off-season workout regimen, Sanchez forced his way into the rotation conversation again. He beat out the likes of Gavin Floyd for a job, then seemed to blossom into a frontline starter before our very eyes. He'd make the All-Star team that year on his way to leading the American League in ERA.
In that summer of 2016, as the Jays were on their way to another playoff appearance, Sanchez inadvertently became the story around the team. The club had hoped to carefully manage his innings that season, to help spare his young arm abuse it wasn't ready for, but he had other plans. He pitched too well and was too important to the Jays’ playoff push to be shut down so easily, and after weeks of debate on Twitter, sports talk radio, and in the “blogosphere,” the club relented devised a plan to suppress his innings while allowing him to still pitch into October.
A rare bright spot in a mostly bleak playoff run, Sanchez outduelled Corey Kluber in Game 4 of the Jays' ALCS against Cleveland that year — the only game of the series they would win.
With Bautista and Encarnación headed for free agency after 2016, and uncertainty surrounding the future of Josh Donaldson, Stroman and Sanchez became more and more the young faces of the franchise. By then, however, things were already starting to fall apart. For one thing, in early 2017, fans (and reporters) started to notice that the "Strochez" bromance had hit the rocks, with the pair having unfollowed each other on social media.
Things continually got worse for the Jays that season on the field, too. Kendrys Morales failed to adequately replace Encarnación. Bautista returned, but only as a shell of his former self. Donaldson managed to get into just 113 games. Marco Estrada and Francisco Liriano fell apart. Sanchez was emblematic of the whole mess, as he dealt with blisters and a fingernail issue all year that allowed him to make just eight starts.
In 2018, the Jays did not bounce back, nor did Sanchez. Donaldson played his final 36 games for the club after spending most of the year hurt. J.A. Happ had a brutal last hurrah, posting a 6.03 ERA over his last six starts before being shipped to New York for an underwhelming package of Brandon Drury and Billy McKinney. And instead of resuming life as an ace, Sanchez struggled through the first three months of the season, lost a battle with a suitcase that ended up sending him to the injured list for two months, then struggled again to close out the year.
The 2019 season was when the rebuilding Jays bottomed out. Their 95 losses were the most for a Blue Jays team since 1980, and it was a year that saw the debut of key members of the club's new core, like Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette, and Cavan Biggio. The roster was being turned over, and both Stroman and Sanchez were dealt away as the club tried to make a clean break from the previous era.
Stroman's deal was despised because it made little sense to fans that the club wouldn't have tried to extend such a good young pitcher who clearly wanted to stay, and because the Jays were ahead of the public side of the industry on the prospects they received from the Mets, which meant that many believed the return was light. The Sanchez deal was despised for similar reasons, but also because the popular Joe Biagini went along with him, and because — as always — it felt like he might have finally been on the verge of putting it all together.
He wasn’t, but the fact that he helped pitch a combined no-hitter in his Astros debut didn’t exactly feel that way.
His last pitch for the Blue Jays resulted in a two-run double off the bat of Travis d'Arnaud — another player the Jays had traded away for R.A. Dickey. He made just four starts for the Astros after that. It’s not the way anybody wanted things to work out, but it made a bit of cosmic sense.
When Sanchez was up, the Blue Jays were up. Now the Jays were down as Sanchez was down. It was a pattern that had played out for nearly a decade, and seems to still be playing out. Today the Jays have turned a corner. The vision Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins have for the franchise, which included trading Stroman and Sanchez, seems to have been greatly validated. And now here comes Aaron, back to the majors, back to throwing in the upper 90s.
It won’t be the same to see him pitching for the Giants, and how could it? In some way or another Sanchez has touched just about every major Blue Jays storyline since 2010. The first time he was ranked among the top 30 Blue Jays prospects by Baseball America, Kyle Drabek and Brett Lawrie topped the list. In his last game for the club Vladimir Guerrero Jr. went 3-for-4.
A lot of people spent a lot of time pulling for him along the way, and he spent more time than we — or I — sometimes give credit delivering. The reality of what throwing baseballs upwards of 98 miles per hour does to the human body makes the story of any pitcher’s career a tough one to find a happy ending in. But for a guy who will forever be remembered as a really important member of the best Blue Jays teams in a generation, I’m happy to believe. My ghoulish nature be damned!
Top image via @DunedinBlueJays
Enjoyed the Sanchez bit Stoeten.
The Sanchez piece at the bottom is an excellent separate full column all in itself.