Blue Jays Rolling Blunder Revue

Front office wrap offers few clues to team’s immediate future

On Wednesday, just three days after the Blue Jays regular season ignominiously ended, swept in three at home by the Marlins, a team with 100 losses and a team that has since fired its manager, Skip Schumaker and his entire coaching staff, Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro and GM Ross Atkins strolled into the Rogers Centre field-level interview room to tag-team local media – in a pair of Q&A sessions 30 minutes apart -- producing somewhat less-than clearing-up-the-issues answers.

Nobody at the top had their job seemingly in Jeopardy, despite every answer seeming to be presented in the form of a question, reminiscent of the popular quiz show made famous by Alex Trebek. Shapiro is back. Atkins is back. Manager John Schneider is back. You needed to reach down to the level of the coaching staff to see any changes being made for 2025. Why is the main question not about the odd pairing of Top-10 payroll, Bottom-6 standings.  

“This past season was a bitter disappointment,” Shapiro said in his opening statement. “Incredibly disappointing and as a leader of the organization, the accountability and responsibility for that clearly rests with me and lies with me. Our fans clearly deserve better, but the time is now to move forward.”  

If you are one of those that had wanted Atkins fired, instead, you got the release of coaches Guillermo Martinez, Jeff Ware and Gil Kim moving along.

If you wanted Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to have his contract extended, you got the president’s carefully considered opinion that Vlad is not a generational player and, besides, as Atkins pointed out, they’ve got him contractually for another year.

If you were among the group of fans/critics suggesting that maybe there were too many Jays hitting coaches that may have been sending mixed messages, information and numbers that analysis then having to be processed prior to a pitch arriving from 60’6” in less than a second, the Jays have solved that perceived need for a fall-guy, firing six-year veteran coach Martinez, who had, for the sake of fairness, been in his position since 2019, including a spectacularly offensive 2021 season.

The Jays have initiated what they labelled an internal and external search for a new hitting coach. That process will include current assistant hitting coach Matt Hague, who seemed to have an obvious rapport, specifically with the group of youngsters from AAA-Buffalo that populated the Jays dugout in September.

One man who it won’t be? We were informed that much-maligned offensive coordinator, Don Mattingly, a former AL batting champion and Yankee all-star, who had fallen into disfavour with Jays fans due to a seeming dismissal of home runs as being the most important tool, has been reassigned back to where he was when he joined the team amid much hype in 2023.

Mattingly has been shuffled back to bench coach, even though Demarlo Hale had been brought in for ’24 as Schneider’s associate manager and bench coach. Confused?

One way to interpret the awkwardness of Schneider, at least for the moment, having two bench coaches, plus his trusted pitching coach Pete Walker, is that the Jays may be expecting that Mattingly could receive a call for an interview with another organization, yet to be named.

Look ahead to ’25 Payroll: The Jays on Opening Day 2024 had a payroll of $225,362,600 according to FanGraphs. At the moment, the Jays have seven players with a guarantee of $115M. There are 10 other players that are arbitration eligible, including Vlad Guerrero Jr. The only free agent is Ryan Yarbrough, while the rest are under team control, pre-arb. They are in good financial shape.

“I don’t see it dramatically different next year,” Shapiro said. “I don’t see it either growing or decreasing in a big way.”

Vladimir Guerrero multi-year contract: This seems like the logical place for the organization to start the off-season, securing their cornerstone and face of the franchise through 8-10 more years, as a visible sign of the team’s good intentions for 2025, when it comes to convincing free agents to journey north of the border. Vlad will be earning about $26-28 million in his final arbitration year. Just start from there with the understanding that a Top 9 payroll team needs a Top 9 paid player. However, oddly, this does not yet seem to be a priority for Shapiro, who may simply be negotiating through the media by playing hard to get.

“Looking forward to him being a big part of us turning around the offence next year and being a better team, making a championship calibre team.” Shapiro said. “No shortage of gratitude and appreciation for that.”

Shapiro was asked if Guerrero Jr. might be considered a generational player.

“I don’t know, a generational player,” Shapiro downplayed. “What’s your definition? That he’s one of the better offensive players in the game today, I’m not sure. Vlad certainly has the opportunity to be a generational player. It’s tough. He’s a great talent and emerging into a great player and certainly has a chance to be that type of player, as far as contractually and what happens here, you know, I listen.”

Disappointing farm system: The Jays farm system has been rated as low as 25^th over the past couple of rankings, while just one Jays pick in the last five amateur drafts has even made it to the major leagues, with any organization. The advantage of a strong farm system is it provides trade inventory and major-league depth. Jays trades at the ‘24 deadline were more about acquiring young talent than money.

“We need to continue to be better as an organization, in terms of identifying and acquiring talent,” Shapiro said. “We did a pretty good job, in light of that context. We also took advantage of the misfortune of this year to add 13 players (in deadline trades) to dramatically improve our system. So both the steps that guys like (Alan) Roden and (Josh) Kasevich took, along with the players we added and a good draft this year, the system is in a lot better place than it was a year ago.”                     

Improving the bullpen: The Jays bullpen at spring training looked like it could be even better than the excellent results in 2023, but as people around the game for any length of time know, the most volatile subset of a major-league roster is the bullpen. There was Jordan Romano, Erik Swanson, Yimi Garcia, Chad Green, Genesis Cabrera, Tim Mayza and Trevor Richard. What happened?

“Coming off such a successful year and returning that group seemed like a very solid play,” Atkins said. “None of us expected the level of injuries that we had. You have to account for those, but in addition to the performance setbacks, we also had injuries to (minor-league) players that would have been depth for us. So we have to have more depth. We have to do a better job of avoiding injuries.

“We probably have to be more aggressive on the external adds. Last year, Chad Green coming into the fold (for the full season) was the most significant add. We’ll probably be looking a little bit more aggressively than that.”    

Is this the final five-man rotation: The failure of the Blue Jays over the final two months, at least, allowed them to get a better read on Bowden Francis and Yariel Rodriguez. Combined with Jose Berrios, Kevin Gausman and Chris Bassitt, that is a solid five-man rotation. These guys in the final two months admitted that they benefitted from an extra day of rest. Knowing that, would the GM be possibly looking for an impact starter, or just some added depth?

“I would say we’ll be in both of those markets,” Atkins said. “We are afforded the opportunity not to be in that impact market, but we will stay in it.”

How to rebuild in five months and compete again so quickly: If the payroll is allowed by ownership to equal 2023 and if Vlad and Bo are in serious negotiations for lucrative long-term deals, does that have any effect on the ability for the needed external adds, especially to the offence? Can the Jays get it all done and once again be playing meaningful games into October?

“Yes we can,” Atkins emphasized. “We are definitely committed to this core. We’ve had incredible (financial) support (from Rogers) here. Saying it is a possibility doesn’t make it just happen because it’s a possibility. It’s difficult to sign one player to an extension. Signing two is very difficult. Building around them still requires that our farm system continues to contribute.”

It’s a long shopping list for Atkins and his front office group and entering the 10th season at the helm, the GM admits that he needs to be better. Now can he be.