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There haven’t been many true icons in the history of Toronto Blue Jays baseball, and the list of those who didn’t have some kind of heartbreaking exit from the club—usually for dumb financial reasons—with years of their careers still ahead of them is awfully small. The list of those types of guys who gave all their best years to Toronto is even smaller. And the one of those who played their entire careers here is virtually nonexistent.
Roy Halladay left for Philadelphia at the peak of his powers. The team didn’t even try to bring back Carlos Delgado, so he left for the Marlins and then the Mets. Roberto Alomar jumped ship for an ascendant Orioles club once the Jays’ early 90s run was finished. Even lesser players who could—and in many cases should—have had more years to become more firmly entrenched as all-time Blue Jays fell into the same pattern. Shawn Green, John Olerud, Jesse Barfield, Edwin Encarnación, Josh Donaldson, Marcus Stroman, Jimmy Key, Vernon Wells, George Bell, Pat Hentgen, Devon White, Aléx Ríos, Aaron Hill, Teoscar Hernández.
Ernie Whitt was almost a day-one guy, but didn't quite have the career to merit being in this conversation. Joe Carter is an incredibly important figure for the franchise, but was a veteran of over 1,000 big league games before he arrived, and was a well below-average hitter for the final three of his seven seasons here (though most didn’t see it that way until much later). Tony Fernández’s heartbreaking departure worked out incredibly well for the franchise, and he kept on returning to the club, which perhaps deserves an asterisk when it comes to this subject. But, for me, there are only two players who stand out as the type of one-franchise guys I'm talking about here—and I'm going to have to cheat to make them meet that description.
José Bautista bounced around before and after his Jays tenure, but he didn’t become the real José Bautista until after he got here—and he was no longer that guy when he left. Functionally, we got his full HOF-calibre peak and then some, he just happened to not produce anything until he was 29.
And if it were not for 22 1/3 pesky innings with the White Sox in 1993, we could say rather unequivocally that the great Dave Stieb was precisely this guy—a Hall of Fame calibre franchise icon who from start to finish was a Toronto Blue Jay. And, frankly, I think we can say it unequivocally anyway. Literally the only one.
Dave Stieb! Dave Stieb whose fun little comeback season was fully 27 years ago. Dave Stieb whose last great season was in 1990. Dave Stieb who will be 82 years old when Vladimir Guerrero Jr.'s new contract with the Blue Jays ends after the 2039 season.
It is an exceedingly rare thing for players like this to come along, and even rarer still that they want to stay—and that the Blue Jays actually have it in them to make it happen. It is, in fact, unprecedented, and therefore makes this probably the most monumental off-field day for the franchise since Fernández and McGriff for Alomar and Carter. (The Tulo and David Price deals happened two days apart don't forget.)
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is a Blue Jay for life. For good, ill, and $500 million.
Where even to begin...
Though I haven’t exactly provided much of it to this point—sorry about that, but sometimes life, death, moving, and states of emergency get in the way of things (though I should be back to normal going forward!)—the 2025 season is somehow my 19th covering this team. Thinking back to those early years, it’s genuinely astonishing to be sitting here today typing away about what we’re talking about. The Blue Jays have just handed out the second richest contract in MLB history. They’re running a top-five payroll in the sport. They’re above the second luxury tax threshold. They’re spending $100 million more this season than they were just four years ago, back in 2021, when they had just broken their previous franchise record with a $150 million deal for George Springer.
Like… what on earth??!?
We’ve come an incredibly long way from Godfrey-nomics, J.P. Moneyball, “payroll parameters,” hat-passing for Ervin Santana, Paul Beeston’s self-imposed contract limitations, and all the other cheapjack garbage of the Bad Old Days. And I don’t think it’s especially difficult to deduce why we’ve seen such a change, either.
Part of it, I suspect, is that current President and CEO Mark Shapiro has forged a much better, closer relationship to ownership—and Edward Rogers, in particular—than any of his predecessors. But before we get too gooey about Ed’s benevolence, I think it’s important to always remember that it’s actually MLB that compelled the Blue Jays to act like the big market club they always ought to have been.
Thanks to the fact they didn't yet own their stadium, and some funky accounting related to local broadcast rights, back in the mid-aughts the Jays were one of the teams in baseball most reliant on the league's revenue sharing program—which at the time was based around local revenues, attendance, TV contracts, etc.. According to a 2004 piece in the Globe and Mail, the Jays received the fifth-highest revenue sharing payout in 2003 and were due to get even more the following year. They were also receiving equalization payments because of the weak Canadian dollar, and because of all this, Jeff Blair wrote at the time, the club had “quietly come under increasing scrutiny from other owners.”
Fast forward to November of 2011, when the league and the players’ association signed a new collective bargaining agreement covering the 2012 to 2016 seasons. One of the new provisions in this CBA was that, per Cot's, “by the end of the agreement in 2026, clubs in the 15 largest markets (would) no longer be eligible to receive revenue sharing money, regardless of local revenues, TV contracts, or attendance figures.”
In the following CBA, the “market rank disqualification” formula was changed to rely “on a market score measuring each market to the average MLB market based on population, income and cable television households.”
In other words, the Jays could never again rely on revenue sharing payouts the way they had in the past and needed to change their business model. That change took several years to come about because the team reached a natural reset point with their roster around 2018-19. But as they've come out of that brief rebuild, into their recent playoff years, and now as they faced the prospect of once again sinking into irrelevance, clearly their behaviour has changed.
Obviously I can’t say that all this compelled Edward Rogers to specifically approve a $500 million payday for Vlad. But I don’t think it’s purely a coincidence that we’re here.
Now, don't get me wrong, I also think getting the most out of their investment in stadium renovations probably has a lot to do with this as well. I'm sure that continuing to provide Sportsnet with content people actually will want to watch is part of it. Building Rogers’ ever-growing sports empire could be a factor. But it’s simply not as advantageous for a team like the Jays to strip everything down to the studs as it would be elsewhere—or as it would have been for them in the past.
And that’s the choice they were faced with here, really. There was no sane path forward for this franchise without Vlad that wasn’t going to end in a rebuild, and preferably sooner than later. No way to make sense of paying Kirk, and Santander, and Giménez, let alone Springer and Gausman and Berríos and Hoffman, without their offensive lodestar. No way to convince truly elite free agents that the team was committed to winning in the same way that other big market teams have already shown. And as every fan could have told you at any point over the last calendar year, that’s a path that was beyond unpalatable. Bleak. Particularly if Vlad had eventually signed with a rival. Maybe not franchise-destroying, but things around here could have got ugly. Ugly-ugly. Or, worse, maybe no one would have even cared enough to be upset about the state of things anymore. Maybe we’d have been set for a return of the apathy that pervaded so many of thosde Godfrey/Ricciardi years I was referring to above.
Vlad and his camp knew this because everybody knew this. They stuck to their guns, and they won—as did the fans. And, yet, even in losing the negotiation to win for the franchise—as my pal an podcast cohost Nick Ashbourne put it—the Jays’ deserve credit for going to what I’m certain is far beyond their comfort zone to get this done, regardless of how hard they must be kicking themselves for not finding a way to do it sooner and cheaper.
And, hoo boy, he is not coming cheaply.
The thing about that, though, is… so what?
Back in August, I wrote in a mail bag response that, based on the Rafael Devers contract plus inflation, a realistic number for Vlad would have been something like $350 million over 11 years. I added that “if it has to be $370 million, or $380 million? $390 million? I suck it up and do that.” Obviously he's exceeded that total pretty significantly, but actually not so much in terms of average annual value. That 11/390 figure produces an AAV of $35.5 million per year. His actual contract comes in at $35.7 million a season.
Obviously having to pay him that amount for three additional years when he’s going to be well past his peak isn’t good or nearly the same, and $500 million for a first baseman is utterly absurd in a vacuum. But billionaire money is fake, so I think what really matters is the impact on payroll year to year. In that sense the difference between Vlad and Devers is just $4.4 million—a million bucks less than what Myles Straw is pointlessly being paid by the Jays this year. Barely the cost of a decent middle reliever—and far less than what those will cost by the time the fake-ass year 2039 rolls around.
They'll be able to see the eventual dead money coming from light years away and can plan accordingly—hooray for cost certainty! And even if you think he’s being overpaid by $10-, or even $15 million, you're still way ahead of what anybody even thought was possible just three-and-a-half years ago.
“I’m not sure, with how we're currently constructed, we’ve got the revenues to support a team that goes over the CBT,” said Mark Shapiro back in October 2021, when asked if the Jays could eventually become a club that might push toward the first luxury tax threshold. Currently they’re projected to be about $33 million above that mark in 2025.
If you had said to me five years ago that Vlad would be on a $500 million contract but that if you took away his salary the Jays would still be able to spend to within a couple million bucks of the luxury tax threshold, I’d have been absolutely over the moon. I’d have also been positive that I was talking to an absolute maniac.
“That's not to say that ownership doesn't make the strategic decision at some point to go over,” Shapiro continued in that 2021 presser—potentially an indication of what we’ve seen in the last couple of years, as the club has been allowed to spend heavily to fill in gaps left by their struggling development pipeline in order to stave off the abyss. But the thing about that is: there is no longer an abyss.
THERE IS NO LONGER AN ABYSS!
There will be no rebuilding for the foreseeable futured. Expectations and payroll may ebb and flow somewhat over these next 15 seasons, but you don’t hand half a billion dollars to a 26-year-old and not do everything in your power to build around his peak.
That, for me, is as massive as anything in this—save, of course, for the size of Vladdy’s paycheques for the next 15 seasons. (The deal, I probably should have noted by now, doesn’t kick in until next season, and there are no opt-outs and no deferred money.)
The cloud over this franchise has lifted. The slow-motion train wreck has been averted. And more than even the joy, the awe, the surprise, this deal has brought about an immense feeling of relief.
That feeling—that incredible fucking feeling!—is going to be vital to remember, I think.
There will undoubtedly be days—maybe weeks, maybe months—where many of us think that Vlad isn’t the guy they should have given this contract to, or that it was painfully obvious they never should have done it, or whatever it is that cranks think when they lose sight of how difficult the game of baseball truly is, or what kind of talent Vlad remains even at his worst. This will be wrong. This deal was very, very, very important to get done. And they actually fucking did it!
Remember that.
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Without wanting to distract from the overwhelmingly positive message in here - and it is a great one - can we talk about how you snuck Aaron Hill into that list of players?
Once we collect our breaths and get beyond the "is any first baseman worth half a BILLION dollars" (Dr. Evil voice) discussion, when does the extend/trade Bo conversation start?
Asking for a friend.