Winter Bleatings '23: We're so back/It's so over
On a Winter Meetings that's all about one man, PLUS: Ross Atkins: Parts Unknown, Bo Bichette, Juan Soto, Cito Gaston, Springer, Schneider, Yamamoto, Jung Hoo Lee, Hungry Hungry Hippos, & more!
No news is good news.
That may seem like an unusual sentiment with which to be steaming toward Day Two of the Winter Meetings—MLB’s annual bonanza of trades, signings, and rumours big and small—but every hour that we don’t know where Shohei Ohtani is going to end up playing next season is an hour in which it’s still possible to dream he may choose Toronto.
Considering the cold, hard reality of the alternative, for at least a little while longer that’s a world I’m happy to live in. Which is fortunate, because even though all signs seem to be pointing toward Ohtani making his decision soon, it may not happen before the meetings end on Wednesday afternoon.
Reporting from Nashville's Opryland Resort on Sunday morning, USA Today's Bob Nightengale told us that the man of the hour—who, as Sportsnet's Ben Nicholson-Smith reported on Friday, was meeting with teams at his agency’s L.A. headquarters this weekend—is not coming to baseball’s biggest offseason extravaganza. And, unfortunately for the many fans eager to let the offseason begin in earnest, he adds that “despite the rampant rumors, unless someone suddenly writes a $1 billion check, Ohtani is not signing at the winter meetings.”
But we might not have to wait much longer than that. MLB Network’s Jon Morosi tweeted on Friday that “Ohtani is likely to decide on a team within the next week.” He then added that this was “according to one source engaged with the top end of the free-agent market.”
Oh, but then here on Monday we’re hearing, via a funky web translation of a poorly-sourced TBS News Dig article in Japanese, that Ohtani may yet pay visits to the finalist teams before making a decision—seemingly an inference from a Susan Slusser report for the San Francisco Chronicle, in which she noted that “there were rumblings he was in San Francisco on Saturday, and a number of the team's top decision-makers and recruiters, including Buster Posey and manager Bob Melvin, were at the ballpark.”
Jon Heyman is reporting that he spoke to a GM of a club that is “very, very interested in Ohtani,” who told him that he expects to have a meeting with him after things wrap up in Nashville.
Ahh, but MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand wrote Monday morning that an Ohtani announcement in Nashville is “quite possible, especially if he’s narrowed his choices down to two or three clubs.”
And don't forget that, back on Friday, I noted that ESPN's Alden Gonzalez said he believes MLB's preference would be for Ohtani to sign during the meetings. And that, at that point, his guess was that it would happen.
But that seems to be the whole thing. There is a ton of guesswork going on with this process. It may even be entirely guesswork. In a Sunday afternoon piece for Sportsnet, Benny Fresh reminds us of why.
“Teams have been asked not to leak anything as they pursue the reigning American League MVP, creating an environment where executives are extremely cautious about saying anything that could seem like gossip. Instead, information seems to be circulating on a need-to-know basis, even within the front offices of interested teams. The fewer people in the know, the better.”
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t believe a single thing we’ve heard so far. I mean, I’m personally choosing not to believe Jon Morosi’s sources that Atlanta is still engaged in all this, because I am simply not ready for the loudest Atkins haters out there to find a new gear of ass-dumb insufferability. But otherwise the fundamentals seem to be pretty sound. The Jays are clearly involved. There is far too much smoke, and not nearly enough tempering of expectations to believe otherwise.
The idea some folks have that some agent has decided to try to inflate the price and create the illusion of a bigger market by pumping up rumours about the Toronto Blue Jays, and the Toronto Blue Jays alone, is deeply hilarious. As I wrote in my last piece, they have a potentially compelling pitch to make, and all signs point to Ohtani having been willing to listen to it. Even if no one is saying as much.
Benny Fresh explains in a piece from here on Monday:
At some point last month, they expressed serious interest to CAA, the agency that represents Ohtani. Since then, there’s been enough reciprocal interest for talks to continue alongside pursuits from the Dodgers, Cubs, Angels and possibly others. A small group of finalists met with the two-way star in Los Angeles this weekend, and it stands to reason the Blue Jays were among that group, but their executives have declined to comment.
In other “stands to reason” news, a “scheduling conflict” apparently forced Ross Atkins to do today’s Winter Meetings availability with reporters via Zoom. Hard not to put two and two together.
It’s impossible to consider the Jays anything but a long shot in all this, of course. And nothing but a Passan tweet or a press release is going to change that. But until then? Like I say, no news is good news.
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Reality bites
Now, with that out of the way, it’s probably time to brace ourselves for a little of the aforementioned cold, hard stuff. And I don’t just mean things like Feinsand saying that if Juan Soto “going to be traded this week, it’s starting to feel like it’s the Yankees or bust,” or Slusser noting that on another high-end Jays target, starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto, “some other teams in the hunt for him think the Giants might have an edge.”
I’m not even talking about Jon Morosi throwing cold water on the dream that the Jays might actually be able to pull off adding both Ohtani and Soto. (Even Ross Atkins, in his Monday media session from parts unknown acknowledged that “t would be exceptionally difficult for us to land two players that are, don't hold me to this figure, but that are five wins and above, $25 million AAV and above. Two of those to add to our roster would be exceptionally difficult to pull off.”)
I’m talking about the real cruel stuff. Or, more precisely, the real, cruel stuff.
Ken Rosenthal and Kaitlyn McGrath of the Athletic wrote here on Monday about the urgency that seems to be behind the Jays' aggressive search for high-end talent this winter. In it they paint a particularly stark picture of the crossroads the club seems to have arrived at.
It doesn't exactly tell us anything Jays fans haven't thought about before—the team disappointed again in 2023, their lineup has major holes, the clock on the Vlad and Bo era is ticking, and they badly need a big winter to calm fans and sell a bunch of fancy new premium tickets—but it lays out the situation rather succinctly.
I tend to agree with Jonah here about the off-the-top suggestion that the Jays have been conservative...
...especially when you add in that the club really did seem to have the financial backing to go hard after Gerrit Cole and Corey Seager when they were free agents—something Arden Zwelling touched on in the most recent episode of Sportsnet's At the Letters podcast—though obviously neither of those worked out.
“The Jays are in a precarious spot,” Ken and Kaitlyn write.
In his latest for Sportsnet, which touches on many of the same issues, Shi Davidi goes a step or two further by focusing on both the near- and far-term stakes facing the Blue Jays this winter, and just how quickly things get complicated if they fall short on Ohtani.
“If Ohtani ends up with the Los Angeles Dodgers or somewhere else,” he writes, “acquiring another talent who legitimately extends their window beyond 2025, after which Guerrero and Bichette become eligible for free agency, will be exceptionally difficult.”
Soto, he points out, is an incredible player, but doesn’t fit the bill. By having to give up young, MLB-ready talent to acquire a rental, he solves a near-term problem while only adding to the long-term one.
Personally, I don’t think that matters enough to let it get in the way. Atkins and Mark Shapiro’s predecessor—and in the piece Shi uses a similarly fraught 2014-15 offseason as a parallel for the current predicament—would likely have been strongly inclined to bet big on the now and worry about the rest later. But at the risk of falling into that same trap of believing Atkins and Shapiro are far more conservative than they’ve repeatedly demonstrated, I’m really not sure they’re built for quite that much of a high wire act.
Of course, as we’ve talked about for years, extending Vlad, Bo, or both would go a long way toward keeping that window open. But, interestingly, Shi writes here as though free agency is almost a foregone conclusion at this point, explaining that, '“given the amount of peak ahead of them, re-signing them will come at considerable cost and require the fending off of other suitors.”
I doubt that flirting with Ohtani—or, in previous years, Seager or Xander Bogaerts—and flashing enough cash to pay Soto’s north-of-$30-million salary will be lowering any asking prices, but maybe throwing enough money at him to get a Bo extension done is the rabbit Atkins will ultimately end up having to try to pull from his hat this winter.
That would feel like a let down compared to what seems possible right now. It should, in fact, have simply been par for the course of a team with the kind of financial muscle the Jays are now flexing to make sure their best players get locked up long-term. But it would give them a stronger foundation going forward, move at least a few of those fancy tickets they need to move, and keep them out of the nightmare hard pivot scenario that could await next winter.
Plan Juan-B
To be clear about Shi’s piece above, he’s certainly not ruling them out on Soto. But he does say that a deal isn’t likely “at the current San Diego Padres ask.”
That, fortunately, seems to be the case for everyone. The Padres are understandably asking for the moon, but considering the $33 million arbitration projection for Soto’s final year before free agency makes it seem incredibly unlikely that they’ll that. Especially if, as Jon Heyman writes in a piece for the New York Post, other teams believe that San Diego has “no choice” but to move the superstar in order to save money. If they choose to keep him, one rival executive told Heyman, “They’ll have to take out anther loan.” (Evan Drellich, Dennis Lin, and Ken Rosenthal of the Athletic reported early last month that the Padres took out a $50 million loan back in September “to address short-term cash flow issues and meet their obligations, including player payroll.”)
According to Heyman, San Diego has been asking for four known players, all pitchers, and “two prospects” in exchange for Soto and centre fielder Trent Grisham. The pitchers are Michael King, Drew Thorpe, Jhony Brito, and Randy Vásquez.
King has a couple years of club control left and has had some real success in the big leagues—particularly as a starter down the stretch this season—as Jays fans can attest. Thorpe is a special arm drafted in the second round in 2022, who put up crooked numbers in his first pro year this year across High-A and Double-A, including 11.8 K/9 and 2.52 ERA across both levels. Vázquez and Brito are both 25-year-old back-end starter types.
New York is apparently reluctant to part with both King and Thorpe, and with $33 million, plus a projected (but not guaranteed) $4.9 million for Grisham—who can’t hit!—also involved here, one can understand why.
None of this is much different than what we’d heard over the weekend, frankly.
And it’s probably not going to change in the very near future, either. Partly because you have to believe the Padres’ ask will come down and partly, of course, because of Ohtani.
“Word is the Padres have offers from about five teams for Soto,” Heyman reports. “Complicating matters is that two of those teams are thought to be finalists for Ohtani.” Among them, he says, the Jays and Giants.
Is Alek Manoah involved in these talks? Who cares! None of this is serious, because like just about everything else with this market, right now it’s all about one man.
Quickly…
• On Sunday night, as a sort of kick-off to the Winter Meetings, MLB announced that former Pirates, Tigers, and Marlins manager Jim Leyland has been elected to the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee. It’s a great and deserving honour for Leyland, who is one of the great characters in the game. But I can’t help but believe that Blue Jays legend Cito Gaston was just as worthy, and that its a shame he was overlooked.
A genuine trailblazer, Cito’s two titles and two pennants stack up with Leyland’s one and three respectively. All he’s really missing is a bunch of additional mediocre seasons. In other words, he’s essentially being penalized a second time for his lack of longevity—a consequence of other teams’ “curious” reluctance to hire the two-time World Series winner after his Blue Jays glory days.
He deserves to be in.
• I suppose that anything is possible in the topsy-turvy world of MLB transactions this time of year, but even so, this was a bit of an odd suggestion from Jeff Blair on Sunday…
Springer at three years and $67.5 million might start looking pretty good once the Jeimer Candelarios of the world start pulling in similar dollars, but what on earth are we doing here? I think the risk that the Jays pay him too much for too little production in 2024 is a whole lot more palatable than the risk that they give him away for nothing—which they’d virtually have to do—and he ends up showing that 2023 was just a blip. Especially when the Jays are desperate enough for bats that they may be one of the teams in on Candelario at those prices!
• Apparently it wasn't just GM Ross Atkins who was mysteriously absent at the Winter Meeting here on Monday. According to SI's Stephanie Apstein—a real person—Jays manager John Schneider “had been scheduled to address the media on Monday afternoon, [but] had his session moved to Tuesday. A person familiar with that process said the change had been made Friday. A team spokesperson did not return a request for comment as to whether Atkins’s classified location and Schneider’s schedule change were related. Atkins did not return a request for comment as to whether he was at that moment with Ohtani. [Ohtani’s agent, Nez] Balelo did not return a request for comment as to whether he was at that moment with Atkins.”
Remind me to never let an MLB executive aid and/or abet me if I ever need to escape justice.
• The market may be in an Ohtani-related stall at the moment, but trade talks and all kinds of things are still going on in the background, of course. And in his latest for TSN.ca, Scott Mitchell brings up a name we haven’t heard much this hot stove season: Davis Schneider.
It’s a name that, Scott says, has only “casually come up” during his time in Nashville, but why wouldn’t it? The Jays have a number of similar players, most of whom are better defenders. Schneider’s value may never be higher, as it’s hard to parse what his season really meant. It doesn’t seem impossible that there’s an organization out there that prizes him more highly than the Jays do—we all remember their reluctance to really believe in his early hot streak once it started to fade, I’m sure—and that’s exactly the kind of scenario that can lead to trades.
• Jim Bowden tweets that the market for Yamamoto may now be pushing $300 million, for whatever that’s worth. If so, that’s well above the $200 million-ish it was first believed he’d land. The Jays continue to be connected to him, and one way to get creative with their offseason if things go south on the Soto and Ohtani fronts would be to spend on a guy like that an then flip some pitching to backfill the lineup, but this one is feeling pretty unlikely at the moment. Isn’t it?
• A pair of interesting KBO players were officially posted here on Monday, per Jeeho Yu of Yonhap News: reliever Woo Suk Go, who doesn't really fit the Jays' needs though I'd absolutely take him for the name alone, and the much more interesting Jung Hoo Lee.
The fifth-highest rated position player on FanGraphs' free agent board, Lee's 2023 season ended after 86 games due to an ankle injury, and his .860 OPS represented a dip from his previous three years, but he was the KBO's MVP in 2022, hitting 23 homers while slashing j.349/.421/.575 in his age-23 season.
He'll just be 25 next year, and ticks some notable boxes for the Jays: he's spent the vast majority of his career in centre field, he hits from the left side, his KBO numbers compare favourably to former teammate Ha-Seong Kim, who the Jays saw a lot of and were very close to signing three winters ago (he reportedly preferred Toronto, but the Jays' unwillingness to put a clause in his contract that he couldn't be sent to the minors ultimately landed him in San Diego instead). Lee is also a Scott Boras client.
• Here’s how desperate we are for content right now: I’m wondering about the connection between a nothing comment from Ron Washington and a Buster Olney tweet that makes zero sense.
Could the Angels have something in the bag?? But why on earth would no other organization offer Ohtani more autonomy??
• We’re not the only ones desperate here, either. Giants ace Logan Webb told Susan Slusser recently that he’d tried to follow Ohtani on Instagram in order to pitch him on San Francisco, but “he didn’t follow me back so I didn’t get very far there.” Well now, apparently, Webb has a new follower. And right after his request was printed in the paper, and Ohtani met with the Giants? Will wonders never cease??
• Lastly… anybody got a copy of Hungry Hungry Hippos kicking around?
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