The Toronto Blue Jays just had the right week at the wrong time. They’ve won two series in a row against decent-ish competition – Seattle and San Francisco. So I guess they’re a contender again.
That’s how it works in this town. Win four of six and start clearing out space in the rafters.
If they’re a contender, they can’t blow it up before the July 30 trade deadline. Which means they’re sticking with the current crop of underperformers. No renos required.
It must be so great to own the Toronto Blue Jays. Even when they lose, you win.
Once the year’s over, management will hang its head, blame the computers and promise to put better computers in charge next year.
If people are really angry, they’ll announce plans to build an Earls restaurant on top of the Rogers Centre or something. No team is more successful at distracting the fan base with architectural schematics.
The secret to owning a baseball franchise in Canada is to keep the focus tight. Should the Jays stick with what they’ve got or blow it up? Should they fire everyone or stick with the process? This institutionalized solipsism keeps everyone off balance and pliant.
It’s important that everyone ignore a key point – that the Jays aren’t the only team in the American League East.
While Toronto’s spent five years futzing around with a golden generation that looks more like tin, other teams have been making different, better decisions.
Fangraphs does a running calculation of the top farm systems in baseball, based on dollar valuation. The Jays’ AL East competition currently sits first (Baltimore), fourth (Tampa Bay), fifth (Boston) and sixth (New York) on that list.
Toronto is 25th. Per Fangraphs’ metrics, the Jays’ farm system is worth a third of Baltimore’s. What does this mean exactly? I don’t know because I don’t have a PhD in fluid dynamics. But it doesn’t sound promising.
Baltimore is the best team in the American League, with the best young player in the American League (Gunnar Henderson), the second-best offence in baseball and the best farm system.
The Yankees have the best offence in baseball, a very good farm system and more money than Croesus. The Red Sox are tucked in just behind those two, with a decent offence, good pitching, a very good farm system and more money to spare than the Yankees.
With that in mind, the Jays are pooched. Not a little pooched, and not just right now. But pooched epically, and for the foreseeable future.
What they do doesn’t matter nearly as much as where they live – in baseball’s toughest neighbourhood, where the neighbours are all learning karate. Soon, Toronto won’t be able to leave the house without taking a beating.
The best thing that can happen to the Jays now is that they keep the faith with Vlad Guerrero and Bo Bichette and both of them decide to abandon the sinking ship after 2025. That would give the pair some encouragement to try next year.
At their best, Bichette and Guerrero have not been enough to escape the division’s gravity. And the rest of the division is getting heavier.
Tearing it down puts you into years of pain. Toronto has already blown it once. It could try again and be more like Baltimore this time.
The Orioles were where the Jays are right now in 2016 – somewhere between okay and good, but not nearly good enough. Then Baltimore blew its tanks and headed for the bottom.
The Orioles rebuild was remarkably efficient. They hit the skids for only five seasons. A few of them were truly gruesome – in three of those years, they lost 108 games or more. But the result of all those high draft picks and loose money is a boyish roster filled with current and future all-stars.
When did the Jays start their own, less ambitious rebuild? The same year. A bit of a difference, yeah?
If you’re not the Yankees, you must accept a basic trade-off in baseball – five lean years for five fat years. Having not got past a little chubby, the Jays are re-entering their lean years.
So the question isn’t what they should do right now. It’s where they want to be in five years.
Based on recent history, we can guess what the Jays will do about their holistic and intractable problems – nothing.
They won’t trade anyone important. They won’t change anything in management. They’ll blame another lost season on a few minor cogs, or the economy, or solar winds. Maybe the manager gets fired, as though it’s his fault they put a phone in the dugout and people keep calling on it.
They’ll run it back next year with the same result. The people who can leave will. Guerrero has already publicly walked back his promise never to join the Yankees. He might as well hire a skywriter to troll the Bronx on holiday weekends with a message: “Help me, Brian Cashman. You’re my only hope.”
The one sliver of light is that if everyone else in the AL East is either peaking or near peaking now, the Jays can plan to peak next when some of them begin to dip. But that would require long-term thinking.
Instead, a ‘what should we do in July/in November/in January’ mindset pervades the Jays’ discussion. That suits management right down to the ground. Short-term thinking makes it difficult to imagine a world any different than the one the team lives in now.
Up at the top, that world must look pretty sweet to ownership. A sad sack Jays team is still drawing better than every other team in the division except the Yankees. Imagine if they got good by accident?
It looks even better for Rogers Inc. when you think of all the money coming off the books. By 2026, the Jays will be the Orioles at their worst, minus the blowback and the wasted salaries. Pump the PR tires on a couple of prospects and the cycle begins anew.
So what should this team do at the trade deadline? There are two ways of looking at it, both of which get you to the same answer.
From a baseball perspective, they are adrift in shark-infested waters, so no point in changing anything right now.
From a business perspective, they are on a steady course to nowhere, so no point in changing anything ever.