BURSTStay in a prominent public role long enough, and you’ll accumulate too many losses for anyone to believe you can win.
Such is the case with the Toronto Blue Jays’ brain trust of CEO Mark Shapiro and general manager Ross Atkins, who are about to enter their 10th season at the helm of the team.
Despite their season-end self-assessments that singled out their modest successes, they entered this offseason in something close to a no-win situation with the fans of the franchise.
To appraise the front office on their own valuations, they have managed to field a team that has made the playoffs in three of the five seasons in this decade so far, and there’s a good argument that the nomadic 2021 squad that missed the playoffs on the last day of the season despite calling three different cities home was the best team fielded during their tenure.
On the other hand, the Blue Jays have not won a playoff game since 2016, with a team that was largely assembled by the previous regime.
Baseball is, as R.A. Dickey might say, a capricious game. Bad luck, poor health and confounding performance all begin to add up, and in the retrospective assessment, those failures seem that much more concentrated.
This may be most evident with the front office’s roster building. Despite playing near the top of the free agent market in recent off-seasons and landing some prime veteran talent, there’s nothing that resonates so deeply as the unsuccessful pursuit of Shohei Ohtani last year. That the team on the field followed this off-field defeat with a season of backsliding and regression only served to erode what slim deposits of fan optimism remained.
If Shapiro and Atkins entered the off-season in something close to a no-win situation, the ostentatious contract awarded to Juan Soto by the New York Mets only served to deepen their troubles. Not only did the Blue Jays come up short with a prominent free agent – again – but the terms of Soto’s deal are so inflationary that this group of executives fixated on their own rational valuations of players’ value must feel disoriented and adrift.
Layer onto this discombobulation the fact that many or most Blue Jays fans entered the signing season with the following bumper sticker as their mantra: “If not Soto, re-sign Vlad.”
Soto’s deal blew far past even the most outlandish expectations, leaving Ohtani’s record-breaking deal from just last year in the dust by hundreds of millions of dollars in actual value. In this context, the Jays are left with two options when it comes to securing the long-term services of Vladimir Guerrero Jr.: Bid themselves upwards in a historically hot market,
or let him reach free agency and hope that the salary proposals come back down to earth next year.
Outside of an extension for Guerrero, it’s hard to imagine what collection of off-season moves it would take to reinvigorate the faith of an understandably weary group of fans. Corbin Burnes is an exceptional pitcher, but even his signing would leave open the questions: “What else? What next?”
The muted response to the recent acquisition of Platinum Glove infielder Andrés Giménez offers some sense of the gulf between the expectations of fans and the ambitions of the front office. Giménez is a young, gifted defender with exceptional baserunning skills, and accumulates wins on paper in underappreciated ways that aren’t evident in the numbers that show up under his image on TV.
Giménez is a nice player, but his acquisition is something of a head-scratcher at the current moment, when the team’s competitive window may be about to slam shut once again. One couldn’t be blamed for wondering if the front office is less interested in winning championships than they are in hanging banners in the Rogers Centre outfield for being The Most Clever Boys in Baseball, or The Most Prudent Stewards of Payroll.
Winning in baseball is no simple thing. It takes a confluence of great scouting, drafting, and player development. Add in the right coaching and support, acquiring the right free agents, and having all this fit perfectly and succeed collectively, and maybe it all comes together gloriously in the crisp fall air.
Over a decade, the executive team led by Shapiro and Atkins have had ample opportunity to lineup up as many of those factors as possible. It has yet to work, and it seems to be headed in the wrong direction.
In a game defined by failure, this Blue Jays front office has little room remaining for error in the coming weeks.
