Toronto Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro addresses an end-of-season news conference in Toronto on Oct. 2.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
After every season, Toronto Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro gives essentially the same speech.
He’s gutted about how it turned out:
“I get woken up each night, have trouble falling asleep, thinking about the fact that we’re letting down fans. … That parents and kids are not having more opportunity to celebrate the special aspects of what October baseball and playoff baseball can mean.”
The club didn’t meet the standard:
“A bitter disappointment. Incredibly disappointing.”
And you should get over it:
“The time now is to move forward.”
That was Wednesday, but it could be any October for the past nine years.
This is always done in crisp businessese with a few tight grins tossed in for reassurance. Nearly 10 seasons, and the only thing that changes is Shapiro’s outfit. Everything else – down to the people giving the speeches – stays the same.
This time, there was a very brief, temporary change in programming.
Twenty minutes in, the Toronto Star’s rhetorical arsonist, Rosie DiManno, told Shapiro how the team had been described to her by an unidentified Jays player.
“[He] told me that this place, this club, is a, quote, ‘[profane adjective-noun combo meant to denote a complete disaster]’,” DiManno said. “Excuse the language.”
There are a lot of ways a professional spokesperson can go when confronted by such an unpleasant judgment from one of his employees.
‘I don’t respond to anonymous comments’ is one way. Humour is probably the best way. The key is to show that when you claim to be open to criticism, you are able to hear it from someone other than yourself.
Shapiro, a man who runs a multibillion-dollar business overseeing many hundreds of employees, chose to respond this way: “That’s what I would expect from you, Rosie.”
“You’re such a charmer,” DiManno growled back.
For just a moment there, you saw Shapiro’s club as it is, rather than as the character it plays on television. Nice, but not actually that nice. Thin skinned and mean spirited.
This is a leadership group that never stops going on about culture and finding a winning way. And now here’s general manager Ross Atkins, speaking right after Shapiro on Wednesday, describing why the Jays just fired hitting coach Guillermo Martinez.
Martinez was responsible for the hitters this year, when the offence was terrible. He was also responsible for them in 2021, when it was fantastic.
“We’ve been committed to growing and learning and being open-minded and we thought we could do it with the people who were here. Again, that is on me. These individuals did nothing wrong, Guillermo Martinez has been very successful, a big part of some individual success, and he’s been with teams that have scored a ton of runs. But as [manager] John [Schneider] worked through it we felt that asking people to do things differently again was not going to be quite enough.”
Translating that into English – you took a “very successful” professional and asked him to change the successful way he does things. That was wrong, which you now admit was your fault, so he’s fired.
I ask you – would you work for these people? Would any amount of money be worth spending 60 hours a week inside the Franz Kafka Baseball Club over here? Because you know that eventually it will be their fault that they asked you to do something that didn’t work out and, obviously, you will have to go.
One can only imagine the level of paranoia this sort of reasoning – spoken aloud like it makes total sense – creates in a workplace. No wonder this team can’t tell whether it’s coming or going. Everybody’s doing their best to stay as small as possible. The search for minor cogs to blame for the failings of leadership is unceasing.
The low-key antagonism extends even to the biggest stars on the payroll. Someone tossed Shapiro a softball, asking him whether he thinks Vlad Guerrero Jr. is “a generational player.”
You run the club. The guy can walk in a year. If he goes, the club you run might as well take a four-year sabbatical. It costs you absolutely nothing to pump his tires. There’s only one right answer to that question.
Shapiro’s answer?
“Generational player? Like, what’s your definition?”
This must be the way people talk when there is nothing they could possibly say that will affect their current position. Because I mostly write about professional sports, I’ve never known anyone in that spot. Until now.
Clearly, Shapiro-Atkins has become a regime for life. They keep doing the same thing, with diminishing returns and no end in sight.
Nonetheless, the fans keep showing up. The televised audience keeps tuning in. The players keep tuning out. Ownership is largely concerned with accumulating new teams so that this system of highly profitable mediocrity can be franchised out.
Soon, you won’t be restricted to watching the Jays play April to September. You’ll be able to watch them playing hockey, basketball and soccer, too.
The only thing that has changed in the Jays approach is that the excuses sound even less urgent. Now they’re more like explanations. I screwed up, so that guy is sacked. Any other questions?
I’ll give the Jays this much – it is definitely a new and innovative way to run a sports club.
We know what happens next. The Jays will be in on everyone this winter. They will surprise no one with their additions. They will declare their total confidence in the team they have in spring training. They’ll lose again because the AL East is getting better and they’re the same.
Having lost once more, they’ll say they feel badly about it. Maybe this time they won’t be sleeping at all. Maybe they’ll just be up all night, staring out a window, agonizing about all those memories the kids won’t have.
Guerrero and Bo Bichette will leave. Then it will once again be time to move forward.
Get your tickets now.