When Mark Shapiro joined the Blue Jays in the fall of 2015, he arrived at the height of Major League Baseball’s rebirth in this city.
The Jays had just snapped a post-season drought that lasted more than two decades. Fans had returned in droves and, for the first time since the early 1990s, Rogers Centre was the hottest ticket in town.
Shapiro showed up late to the party and while the fan base was still celebrating Jose Bautista’s bat flip heard around the world, the former Cleveland Guardians executive was there to deliver some sobering news.
Sure, the playoff run was great and all, but it wasn’t going to last. The business model was flawed. The roster wasn’t sustainable. Costs were spiralling out of control and the future had been mortgaged for short-term gains.
It was this differing point of view that reportedly led Shapiro to scold former general manager Alex Anthopoulos for going all in at the trade deadline to acquire David Price, Troy Tulowitzki, Ben Revere and several others. It’s also what caused Anthopoulos to look elsewhere for work.
Shapiro agreed to run it back with a similar group in 2016 but the investments in that core stopped. Minimal additions were made the following season and, after one more trip to the American League Championship Series, the teardown began.
The point of all that was to build a sustainable winner, not a team that would contend for a year or two. As one core aged out, another would be set to take over as part of an endless flow of talent from the minor leagues.
Well, here we are nine years later and the Jays find themselves in the same situation they were in back then, only without the post-season success. Payroll has reached record highs and there isn’t much more room to grow. The minor-league system is almost completely bare.
Even if the Jays were living up to expectations, this group would have an expiry date. Danny Jansen and Yusei Kikuchi are eligible for free agency at the end of the season. They’ll be joined next year by Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette, Jordan Romano and Chris Bassitt.
The clock has been ticking for awhile and the low-cost prospects that were supposed to offset rising costs elsewhere on the roster haven’t materialized. The Jays, 17-20 and last in the AL East, have the eighth-highest payroll, per Cot’s Baseball Contracts and the sixth-worst farm system, per ESPN.
In other words, the Jays have become the organization they claimed they didn’t want to be. This is 2015 all over again, just with an improved revenue stream for Rogers Communications and none of the on-field accolades.
Trade talk
The Jays have too much riding on this season to start trading guys away prematurely. The roster will be given every opportunity to turn things around but if this team is still hovering around .500 in July, the front office will have no choice but to start selling assets.
What’s interesting is that, after this market spent the last several years obsessing over the lack of contract extensions for Bichette and Guerrero, the two franchise cornerstones likely won’t be the most sought-after commodities. Season-long struggles from the two players have hurt their values.
If the Jays are forced to sell, the bulk of the attention would centre on pitching. Kevin Gausman, Bassitt, Kikuchi and bullpen arms like Jordan Romano, Chad Green and Yimi Garcia will be the names other teams bring up.
The lineup shuffle
Who’s hitting where in the lineup doesn’t really matter if the supposed top three hitters on the team aren’t producing. So I understand manager John Schneider‘s plea for patience and his desire to keep the lineup relatively similar to the one used throughout much of 2023.
But waiting on George Springer might be a fruitless exercise. Since the start of 2023, the aging corner outfielder is batting just .248 with a barely league-average .702 on-base-plus-slugging percentage across 183 games.
Those numbers don’t cut it for a leadoff man. Instead of waiting for Springer to find the fountain of youth at age 34, it might be time to audition someone else for the role. My pick would be Davis Schneider, whose .383 on-base percentage offsets some of the swing-and-miss in his game.
Struggling DH
With the slow starts of Springer, Bichette and Guerrero hogging most of the attention, there has been another struggling Jay who has flown under the radar.
Justin Turner started the year on fire by hitting .345 with a .998 OPS across his first 18 games. Over his last 16, the 39-year-old DH is batting just .193 with three extra-base hits and a .562 OPS.
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