Changes loom in Blue Jays bullpen as deadline nears

Swanson claims he's ready for more leverage

For this Blue Jays group, not being able to sweep a series or to put a significant win streak together right now is not helping deter the front office from becoming sellers at the deadline. It’s inevitable.

So the mere fact of the Jays defeating the Rays 6-3 on Wednesday night at Rogers Centre, behind a solid starting effort from Yariel Rodriguez and nice work by four men out of the bullpen, the Jays have set themselves up for a minor victory, a chance to win the rubber-game on Thursday afternoon, for a rare series win. But that won’t be good enough to save the six expiring Jays contracts from being dangled in trade.

The Jays got 5-2/3 quality innings from RH Yariel Rodriguez, then watched for one of the rare times as manager John Schneider’s bullpen plan worked to perfection, with LH Brendon Little, followed by RH Chad Green, LH Genesis Cabrera and finally RH Yimi Garcia. But the deadline is likely to mess with even that simple pleasure.

“Minus the walk when Little came in, it was great,” Schneider said. “Kind of underrated, (Cabrera’s) been really, really good for about a month now. And it’s nice to have Chad and Yimi to kind of close it out. It’s nice to have those options, for sure.”

The major-league trade deadline is less than a week away, arriving, this year, on July 30 at 6:00 p.m. Eastern. The struggling Blue Jays are reliably rumoured to be listening to offers on each and every one of their six expiring contracts, a list that includes LHP Yusei Kikuchi, DH Justin Turner, CF Kevin Kiermaier, C Danny Jansen, RHP Trevor Richards and RHP Yimi Garcia.

If the team’s deadline deck is, indeed, cleared by GM Ross Atkins, with all those listed names actually being moved, it means the Jays would lose two additional of their season-opening bullpen arms, Garcia and Richards, joining, as unavailable, the injured RH Jordan Romano, out for the year, and the released LH Tim Mayza.

That’s basically four key members of a Jays’ bullpen that had been projected to be a strength as the club opened spring training back in February. Now, with over 60 games left, the burning bullpen question is “who’s got next?”

In fact, in this scenario, post-deadline, for the final third of a hugely disappointing season, if all those deals are completed, Jays fans could wake up, July 31, with a bullpen pecking order of: closer Chad Green, setup men Erik Swanson and Brendon Little; middle relievers Nate Pearson, Genesis Cabrera and Ryan Burr, plus, a need for two more MLB pitchers to complete the Jays’ eight-man ‘pen.   

Even if Green stays, signed as he is through ’25, there will be added pressure and responsibility for the 30-year-old Swanson, acquired with LH Adam Macko, currently one of the Jays’ top starting prospects, from the M’s in time for the ’23 season in exchange for OF Teoscar Hernandez. Is Swanson ready to assume a key role?

Swanson’s 2024 long and grinding road

It has already been a year to forget for Swanson. Reporting to spring training after back-to-back solid years, at Seattle in 2022 and with the Jays in ’23, near-disaster struck the family in late February, as Erik and Madison Swanson’s 4-year-old son, Toby, was struck by a car on Clearwater Beach and airlifted to a children’s hospital in St. Petersburg. Swanson was excused from spring workouts to take care of his son for as long as he needed. When he returned to camp in eight days, he had understandably fallen behind in his prep work and never caught up.

In fact, maybe due to that, the Fargo, North Dakota native began the year on the IL with right forearm inflammation, returning to the ranks of the active on April 15.

“One-hundred percent of my attention and emotion,” Swanson explained of his spring headspace. “A lot of people are caught up in looking at this from the outside, instead of trying to put yourself in the shoes that a lot of these guys are in. Especially, most of us have family, most of us have children. You ask pretty much anybody in this world what is the most important thing to them and they’re going to tell you, their family. That’s always where my attention is at.

“Obviously when I’m here and I walk through the doors, I’m doing everything I possibly can to leave stuff at home at home and vice-versa. When I go home, I leave everything at the door when I walk out of this place too. But, early on, yeah, that’s where 100-percent of my attention was.”

If one was to ask Jays’ fans about Swanson’s season thus far, the word “disastrous” would be front and centre. In his first game back, facing the Yankees, in April, Swanson gave up three runs, while managing to record just one out. Combined, in his worst five outings this year, he allowed 11 earned runs in 2.1 innings, with his ERA remaining above 10.00 until May 24. He could not locate his four-seam fastball to fortuitous spots in the strike zone, nor throw his splitter below the belt buckle in order to be effective. Then on May 27, he was shockingly optioned to AAA-Buffalo.

“I think his actual line was, ‘I wish I could sit here and curse at you guys, but I got nothing. I’m not good right now,’” manager John Schneider recalled of the emotional demotion meeting in his office. “So, for as tough as it was, it was probably the most professional conversation I’ve had in a while when you’re dealing with that kind of player and that kind of news. He was great with it and he was great the whole time he was down there.”

Schneider must mean “great” off the field, because in his 19 games in the minors, there seemed no indication he was ready to rejoin the big-league club. Swanson allowed 28 hits and 13 walks in 17.2 innings, horrible, if you are simply looking at numbers. But Swanson saw more in himself.

“I think I was caught up so much early on in wanting to get back as fast as I could and it was taking my main attention, my mindset off where I needed to be,” Swanson explained of his early negative attitude with the Bisons. “And where I needed to be was, in the present, in Buffalo. Sometimes you get caught up in that. Once I was able to recognize that and take a step back, everything kind of fell into place and I was really able to get to work and figure out some of the things I needed to figure out in the time I’m there.”

So, truthfully, Swanson doesn’t want to talk about the disappointment of the season until it’s over. There are two months left, but he is confident that if called upon for a larger role, post-deadline, he will be ready. His two outings since his recall have yielded two hitless innings, on just 27 pitches, with a walk and a K.

“There hasn’t been a lack of confidence at all, this year,” Swanson shrugged. “That has not been my issue. I know exactly what I’m capable of doing. I’ve done it for a few years and every time I step on that mound, I feel like the best player on the field. It’s always been my mindset.

“Part of this game sometimes is you get beat. Sometimes you can beat yourself as well. That’s what I was doing early on in the year. I got into some bad habits and it kind of snowballed. So, it was never a confidence thing. It was moreso figuring out what we needed to fix. Once we addressed that, got to that point, things started to synch up again. The confidence comes from what you’re doing pre-game. When you can start seeing results, feeling certain things, then you go out and you have results on the field. Confidence builds up off of that as well.

So what if Chad Green was to be among the departed, or if at some point Swanson was called upon to be the closer for a team that could, in reality, be desperately short of leads to preserve down the stretch.

“That’s what every reliever strives to do, throw in the highest leverage innings that you can possibly throw in,” Swanson said. “If you ask anybody out in that bullpen or in any bullpen, everybody wants the ball in a game-defining moment. That’s what we work for our entire lives. You work to get to the big leagues and you work to throw in the highest leverage innings you can. You want to be the guy that they give the ball to and I look forward to getting back to that point and throwing those innings again for years to come.”

The Jays in ‘24 can no longer concern themselves with talk of the playoffs, but with 61 games to go, they will surely need contributions from the remaining players in that clubhouse in what has become a lost season. Swanson may be key to the bullpen.