BURSTDALLAS — Going after Juan Soto in free agency is the front-office equivalent of a hitter taking his best and biggest swing at a first-pitch fastball. Nothing wrong with such an approach, but if a batter whiffs on that offering, there needs to be a good plan for the rest of the at-bat.
To follow the metaphor, then, the Toronto Blue Jays are down 0-1 in the count after their pursuit of Soto came up short, and now, they have to dig back in and get ready for the next pitch.
“We’re not shifting our plan,” general manager Ross Atkins said Monday during the first day of the Winter Meetings. “We’ve had a plan from the start of the off-season and Juan Soto could have been a part of it. And now we’ll continue to look to improve our team. We’ve been working tirelessly on every front to do so. From the start of the off-season, we talked about adding to our pitching, adding to our offence and rebuilding our bullpen. That remains our goal.”
Unlike a year ago, when the free-agent class was dreadfully thin beyond Shohei Ohtani, the Blue Jays can turn to better fallback options and it’s up to them to execute a more inspiring series of moves this time.
Longer-term, though, the one area where the Soto’s $765-million, 15-year agreement with the New York Mets dramatically shifts the goalposts for the Blue Jays is the future of Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
As a four-time All-Star eligible for free agency a year from now ahead of his age 27 season, he’s now looking at a market transformed for players of his calibre.
Three rival executives and four rival agents polled Monday felt that the nine-figure total on a long-term extension for Guerrero now likely starts with a five as a result of the Soto deal. Even if there’s some irrational exuberance in the wake of a historic contract driving those assessments, baseball’s new ceiling is sure to pull up the floor.
By how much is a question the industry is wrestling with.
But along with Guerrero, two other potential free agents next fall — Blue Jays teammate Bo Bichette, who’ll be heading into his age 28 season, and Houston Astros outfielder Kyle Tucker, who’ll be selling his age 29 season and beyond — are also among the Class of 2025 expecting to draft upwards thanks to Soto.
So while Atkins sought to play down Soto’s inflationary impact on the wider market, there’s no ignoring the industry’s new benchmark.
“I don’t know,” said Atkins. “We have to stay disciplined to how we view things. We are committed to always being fair and being consistent. Nothing has changed in terms of our pursuit of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. And we are very hopeful to extend him.”
Extensions take money, not hope and with the Blue Jays no longer constrained financially the way they were in the past, they need to properly frame the value here.
What’s Guerrero worth, then?
Soto is, without doubt, the better player, but in an attempt to create a very basic yet objective reference point of how much, let’s compare the value both have produced so far. To compensate for Soto having an extra year of service, let’s project that Guerrero repeats his 2024 production in 2025.
Using Baseball Reference’s calculation for WAR, Guerrero has produced 28.5 wins while Soto is at 36.4, an additional 22 per cent. Using FanGraphs’ WAR metric, Guerrero is at 22.5 against Soto’s 36.3, a difference of 38 per cent.
So, if Guerrero has produced somewhere between 62 and 78 per cent of Soto’s win value, that corresponds to somewhere between $474.3- million-$596.7 of his record-setting contract.
Don’t like WAR? Using wRC+, Soto’s career mark is 158 while Guerrero’s 137, or 13 per cent lower. If Guerrero is 87 per cent the offensive player that Soto is, you could argue he’s worth $665 million.
Now, valuations are far more intricate, detailed and nuanced than those calculations and that’s not how contracts are negotiated. But with $765 million the new ceiling, how can the Blue Jays tell Guerrero he’s worth, say, $300 million or $400 million less, especially when the team is buying all his peak years?
Important to acknowledge is that a perfect storm of factors helped Soto, who had the Mets bidding against the crosstown and incumbent Yankees, with the Blue Jays, Red Sox and Dodgers also forcing their way into the mix, each driving the price upwards.
Perhaps future bidding for Guerrero will be similarly fierce, especially if he repeats or builds on his boffo 2024. Or maybe not. But if the early deals in this off-season market are any indication, teams seem increasingly willing to pay a premium for elite talent, making the price of a win on the open market more expensive.
“I would like to see the whole off-season transpire, it’s early and I think year-over-year is when it’s better to assess that,” Atkins said of the early trendlines. “To react to a month I would not say would be the best way … to even react.”
In assessing where the number on a Guerrero extension might be headed, fair enough, although when it comes to signing players now, the Blue Jays and other teams don’t have the same luxury of waiting things out.
“We’re agile enough to understand if there are short-term implications, because you can magnify and drill down in certain markets and understand supply and demand,” said Atkins. “We don’t wait to adjust.”
Neither do players.
Guerrero can now look at the way Aaron Judge turned down a $213.5-million, seven-year extension offer from the Yankees ahead of his walk year and then signed a $360-million, nine-year deal with them as a free agent, earning himself an extra 68 per cent.
And he can look at how Soto turned down a $440-million extension from the Nationals midway through the 2022 season only to make another $54 million in arbitration before landing a contract worth 74 per cent more than the one he rejected.
Given all of the above, buying Guerrero out of the opportunity to hit the open market is now clearly more expensive. And for a franchise trying to navigate through the real possibility its competitive window is on the verge of collapsing, with control of its core running out and the farm system not deep enough to replenish the roster, leverage is very clearly not in the Blue Jays’ hands.
For those reasons, the Mets’ monster deal not only killed the Blue Jays’ hopes of landing a franchise-altering superstar in Soto, it also made it far harder for them to keep the superstar they already have in Guerrero, too.
