BURSTDALLAS – Each baseball off-season moves at its own unique cadence, and as the industry trickled away from the Hilton Anatole following a rather remarkable Winter Meetings, now is a good time to debrief.
The staggering spending power of the New York Mets, who opened things up with their $765-million, 15-year agreement for Juan Soto and don’t appear to be done, certainly dominated the proceedings. And, cast against the determination of rival marquee clubs like the cross-town Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers and Boston Red Sox, among others, is perhaps more than ever a pivotal fault line.
Their desire to keep pace and surpass one another appears to be raising the bar in how elite talent is rewarded. The Dodgers jumping early to get Blake Snell for $182 million helped Max Fried end up with the biggest commitment ever for a left-hander at $218 million over eight years, which then prompted the Red Sox to surrender a king’s ransom of prospects to the Chicago White Sox for Garrett Crochet.
Meanwhile, Ace righty Corbin Burnes remains in play, ready to push the bonanza even further. And with seemingly no ceiling on the Mets’ spending, there’s an inflationary effect on the ambitions of other upper-third-payroll clubs, the Toronto Blue Jays among them, when trying to secure top talent on the market.
“There are always two aspects to free agency,” powerful agent Scott Boras, who’s already done more than a billion dollars worth of contracts this off-season, with plenty more to come, said on his way home Wednesday. “There are the models and internal assessments and valuations which sometimes lead you to an agreement. But beyond the models, there is the market competition and you’ll find that those that were very successful in free agency start with their models, but they understand that there’s a wide variance, the weight in their algorithm, that allows for a broad breadth of market competition. And it varies from free-agency-to-free-agency what that weight is, what that range is.”
A year ago, once Shohei Ohtani came off the board, that weight definitely shifted toward buyers rather than sellers. A much more bearish market. This year, though, the bulls are rampaging and for the Blue Jays – eager to add but stuck with a roster centred around an expiring core, limited flexibility through 2026 and a farm system lacking future cornerstone players – that’s really complicated their winter.
Typically, before the off-season starts, according to assistant general manager Mike Murov, the Blue Jays aggregate various public free agent signing projections and early deals tend to be higher before “that tapers off.”
This year, “it’s probably even been a little higher than you would expect,” he added, as “there have been some teams that are pretty aggressive. That’s not unexpected but I don’t know if that’s predictive. It’s been an aggressive market so far.”
Such an environment isn’t conducive to teams intent on staying disciplined to their own valuations, which the Blue Jays very much appear to be, particularly with as much guaranteed money on the books as they have this year and next.
That’s the lens you need to look through to understand their trade with the Cleveland Guardians for Andres Gimenez and the nearly $100 million he’s due in the next five years. Two rival executives said the three-time Gold Glove second baseman’s defence is so good it will be worth the financial commitment alone. If his bat reverses some of its decline over the past two years, then his addition offers the type of surplus impossible to find in this market.
The risk for the Blue Jays is that his bat really is what it was in 2024 and that their only player with guaranteed money through 2029 will be a $23.6-million, glove-only defender.
It’s a fairly big bet, one partly forced by the fact they don’t want to immediately deplete a farm system that was just replenished at last summer’s trade deadline, with some upper-level players ready to create options for the 2025 picture.
So, if the Blue Jays aren’t, at least right now, going to outspend the game’s top bidders, well, supply and demand isn’t working in their favour. Especially when shopping for the highly sought commodities of power and top-flight pitching.
“The demand characterization of free agency is the hardest part for teams – it’s an unknown,” said Boras. “You almost see a shock and awe when you tell them what the market is because they have no way of knowing until they hear it from us. But that’s the part where the adjustment comes and that’s a difficult step sometimes for owners, and those who do are rewarded for it.”
The alternative path — the one the Blue Jays appear to be on now that they’ve raised their floor by acquiring Gimenez and reliever Nick Sandlin from the Guardians while reuniting with Yimi Garcia for $15 million over two years pending a physical — is waiting out the market to see how other opportunities develop.
If Toronto is determined to keep its payroll under the first CBT threshold of $241 million, the team has roughly $13 million to work with, but the belief is that for the right player, they could go beyond that.
Teoscar Hernandez fits the bill and GM Ross Atkins publicly expressed interest in bringing him back, a feeling the outfielder is thought to reciprocate as long as Vladimir Guerrero Jr., eligible for free agency next year, is with the club longer-term. Bo Bichette, who can also hit the open market next fall, said in September that his “ultimate goal, really, is to play with Vladdy forever, to win a championship with him and to do that with this organization.”
Securing that trio would certainly change the franchise’s trajectory, but accomplishing that in the current market conditions won’t be easy. While the long-term ramifications of Soto’s deal aren’t immediately clear, it will no doubt move some goalposts. Boras, speaking in general terms, said record contracts are “kind of an umbrella and there’s shade to a point for the elite players, but not to his level.”
The veteran agent pointed to how megadeals for Greg Maddux, Kevin Brown and Alex Rodriguez in years past reset the top of the market, but it took time “before other players started reaching those levels.
“So one great generational talent does not impact a market exponentially,” he continued. “It’s something that graduates very slowly because we’re back to the theorem of good business. Owners are going to only do things for certain skill levels and ages. And those types of players only really come along once a decade, 20 years.”
Still, Guerrero and Bichette will draft off Soto’s deal and if top clubs are in a similar frenzy next year as they are in this one, with a handful of other on-the-make teams ready to jump in, the valuation algorithms will definitely need to factor in that broad breadth of competition.
As such, an industry that already moves fast in real-time, accelerated inside the suites of the Hilton Anatole, with fallout for the Blue Jays and the rest of the league, will have plenty to decipher over the winter and even more so in the seasons to come.
