02/07/2024 – Owen Hill
Last time I sat down to write, I was absolutely giddy at the prospect that Shohei Ohtani was going to be a Blue Jay. Since then, Ohtani has inked a 700 million dollar contract and the Blue Jays have added 3 players: Kevin Kiermaier, Isiah Kiner-Falefa, and as of last week, Justin Turner. Yariel Rodríguez has also reportedly agreed to sign with the Jays on a 4 year deal, however due to some visa issues, it’s yet to be made official.
In a vacuum, all of these moves are fine; good, even. But I have an extremely hard time seeing how any of these players are going to make the 2024 Blue Jays better than the 2023 Blue Jays.
For me, it’s impossible to hold the disappointment of missing out on Ohtani against Ross Atkins and the offseason he’s put together to this point. There is an alternate reality right now, not so different from our own, where that God damned plane actually carried Shohei Ohtani and we’d all be wearing #17 jerseys. But it didn’t work out that way. We got close, missed out, and that’s okay.
It’s important for me to preface the rest of this article with that, because so much of the way we’re going to look back at this offseason is going to have to do with the crushing bummer that was Shohei Ohtani’s decision to sign with the LA Dodgers. While a bunch of my disappointment of this offseason stems from that, my overwhelming frustration with the Blue Jays runs much deeper than the moves (or lack-there-of) this winter.
It’s inarguable that the Blue Jays have been an exciting and at times elite team since this ‘window’ opened when George Springer signed with the Blue Jays in the 2021 offseason.
Yet, there’s lack of success when it actually matters.
External additions have supplemented the core well. The moves made by the front office from George Springer and Kevin Gausman to Marcus Semien, Brandon Belt, and Kevin Kiermaier have panned out. Yet in four years of service time from Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette, the team has zero playoff wins. The Blue Jays legitimately regressed from 2022 to 2023, and after the offseason that they’ve put together, you’d be hard pressed to convince me that they’re not going into 2024 as a worse team than they were in 2023. When the two guys that you’ve built your team around are going into their second last year before free agency, you really don’t want to be getting worse.
The baseball world had the 2020’s pegged as the decade of the Blue Jays. Mark Shapiro was talking about a ‘behemoth’, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. was talking about movies, and there was an expectation of a sustainable, World Series contender with a window that would be open for as long as any sports fan can think into the future.
Yet nothing has been sustainable about the way this team has operated since the beginning of the so-called window. The farm system that was among the best in baseball AFTER graduating Vlad and Bo has failed to produce any other elite players, and even struggled to produce positive ones, especially on the pitching side. The system has now fallen to #24 on baseball America’s rankings, 9 spots lower than their 2023 ranking without graduating anybody of significance (sorry Davis Schneider) or making any major subtractions via trade (sorry Sem Robberse and Adam Kloffenstein). That tells me that there is a serious lack of development of high impact players, which is NOT going to lead to a sustainable contender.
(I’m not even going to mention how scary it is that the Jays are projected to be the 4th best team in the AL East and they have the worst farm system in the division).
So, while the front office has managed to hit on just about every major addition to the major league roster, the lack of internal options to supplement the big league team has forced the Jays into buying established players via free agency and trades. This is why they’re pressed up against the luxury tax and have boxed themselves into this corner of trying to replicate the production of departing players via one and two year deals, rather than making a splash on a Juan Soto type via trade, or a Cody Ballinger type via free agency.
The ENTIRE starting rotation last year, minus Alek Manoah, (we all know how that went) was built from players added via trade or free agency. The rotation was probably the best in the big leagues, but it’s not sustainable.
To be successful, Major League Baseball teams NEED to find a way to have players contribute to winning without being payed their value. The way to do that is with young players on rookie contracts, and just about the only way to get those players is to develop them yourself. It’s the model that the Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros have been following for the better part of a decade, and nobody is asking any questions about their success.
I also have a frustration with the lack of long term extensions to the players that are going to mean the most to this team in the future. There’s no reason the Kansas City Royals should be dishing out nearly 300 million dollars to Bobby Witt Jr. before the Jays even offer that kind of money to Bo and Vlad. Danny Jansen is coming up on free agency after the 2024 season, and should be a prime extension candidate, yet all things have been quiet there as well.
This leads to a lot of uncertainty, and while you could argue it leads to financial flexibility, the Jays are pretty obviously saving cash in the event that Both Vlad and Bo are going to be on 30 million dollar contracts after 2026. More than anything, it’s just disappointing to see other teams lock-up their players while the Jays seem uninterested in doing so.
Bringing it back a little bit to the current version of the Blue Jays, there is pretty obviously a huge bet on internal improvements and some regression to the mean for some hitters who underperformed last season. *cough VLAD cough*. The 2023 team was not good enough, and IKF, Justin Turner and Yariel Rodríguez are not going to make it better. Ross Atkins is likely betting his job that the improvements come from within.
Can I see it happening?
Yeah, sure.
But that would require a starting rotation that was healthy and likely over performed to replicate that type of success.
Is the 2024 season canceled because of this offseason?
No.
But did this video get me as excited as ‘truck day’ normally does?
Via @BlueJays on X
Also no…
… Okay, maybe it did.
