Chris Bassitt Stirs the Blue Jays Pot

Chris Rose interview revisited and explained

Blue Jays starter Chris Bassitt prefers to position himself as the smartest person in the room, whether it’s the Jays clubhouse, the post-game media setup at Rogers Centre, or a hotel room in Anaheim on the team’s recent road trip to face the Angels, consenting to a national podcast interview on the Chris Rose Rotation. Bassitt has known Rose for a while.

That is the likely reason why the latter incident, part of a Jomboy interview on Aug. 13, landed him in hot water with Jays management forcing him into an awkward, unwanted, somewhat unconvincing apology/clarification, at Rogers Centre attended by a select, sympathetic media group, when the team returned home from its 4-2 trip through Anaheim and Chicago. The 35-year-old righthander was unconvincing in his “what I actually meant to say” moment.

The four minutes of controversial clips that made it to Toronto social media, seemed worse standing alone and are a smaller part than one might think. Nevertheless, for a team that is spiralling through the standings, at this point, to help out a front office that must convince a sceptical fanbase that they are fully in charge of where they are headed in 2025, any Bassitt apology or amendment was deemed necessary.

For comparison purposes of Bassitt’s mindset, think of Bassitt as the John Goodman character in The Big Lebowski, The Dude’s best friend and bowling partner. The character, Walter, has a definitive explanation and opinion for everything, most involving deep conspiracies that only he finds normal and is oblivious to the waves that he may be causing, caught up in his “rightness.” That’s Chris Bassitt and the internal issues he caused via his one-on-one explanation to Rose of the Jays’ failed off-season Shohei Ohtani pursuit, his statement that the team has (unexplained) problems, some that are “not fixable” and his insistence in the belief that “three or four superstars” are the only way for a team to contend for a World Series are the only truth. The fact is that Bassitt is genuinely cerebral,m but not as correct as he thinks.

Bassitt on Ohtani:  The front office “put $700-million into the Ohtani basket. The pivot was … we really didn’t have a pivot.”

The Bassitt logic is that if the Jays were going to spend $700M on one player, then they should have put more thought into what happens to that committed cash to help the team in the very likely event that Ohtani chooses another destination – i.e. the Dodgers.   

What Bassitt fails to understand is that that ridiculous amount of money would have been considered a money-making business investment by Rogers ownership, with the team’s on-field improvement secondary to the opening up of the the Japanese market -- in fact the entire Asian market – in areas of streaming, wireless and the other services they now offer in Canada. With the megawatt broadcast fees, the Ohtani merchandise and everything else that goes with it, the $700M investment would have paid for itself. Any other player, for Rogers would simply be baseball team payroll and not worth the expense in exchange for a few more wins.

“The free agent market was Ohtani,” Bassitt explained to Shi Davidi of Sportsnet. “There wasn’t like a No. 1 and a No. 2 and a No. 3. It wasn’t that.” He then went on to throw (wilted) flowers at Justin Turner and Isiah Kiner-Falefa. The perception lingers that Bassitt’s belief is that GM Ross Atkins should have been ready to throw Ohtani savings around to others in free agency.

Bassitt on  Jays “not fixable” problems: Bassitt was mysteriously vague when he told Rose on the podcast, “(Blue Jays) do a lot of things right. Everybody has issues. I don’t want to identify problems because some are not fixable.” Very vague and ominous.

Bassitt made it sound like there may have been real clubhouse culture issues that seeped in from up above and could have been including the coaching staff, clubhouse personnel and teammates. He then told Rose he didn’t want to get into saying publicly, because he had been with other organizations and never did it with the White Sox, A’s or Mets.

That sounds like problems quite specific and alarming and thus that needed to be kept away from the fanbase. But in the follow up interview with Sportsnet.ca he attempted to clarify the unfixables by talking about a) the age of the rotation, with him, Kevin Gausman and the innings total for Jose Berrios; b) not being able to control the two calf injuries to Bo Bichette and c) the surgery to closer Jordan Romano, that led to the dismantling of the bullpen. If those were truly the “not fixables” he was referring to on the podcast, then they easily could have been stated.   

Smartest guy in the room: Here are some examples that may shed a little light on the “smarter-than-the-rest” cryptic statements Bassitt made to Rose on the aforementioned podcast. Bassitt claimed they were misinterpreted. He always knows what he is saying. We should, too.

Ever since the introduction of the new pitch-clock and the PitchCom communication system, in the hat, with the catcher, Bassitt has been refining unique ways to “game” the system.

For instance, using the two-year-old pitch clock, Chris will throw a pitch, then turn his back on the plate and walk to the back of the mound to regroup. The 15 or 18-seconds don’t start until he takes the throwback. Then, with runners on any base, in order to reset the clock, he will, at the last second, step off the rubber and look at the runner, because he knows he is allowed two pickoff attempts per new player at-bat and that a simple foot-off-the-rubber disengagement counts as a pickoff, even if he has a Sal Perez-type non-threat on base.

Consider also, the batter has to turn his full attention on the pitcher by the 9-8 second mark of the clock or it’s a strike. The timer is clearly visible from the mound. He will often come set and stare in, freezing the hitter until the 1-second mark before beginning his delivery. Any edge.

In terms of the two-way communications with the catcher, Bassitt prefers to call his own game and, granted, he has an 8-pitch repertoire so he will always know what he wants to throw, so he uses his own touchpad on his belt to alert his catcher, but still.

Bassitt is an emotional athlete and I’m sure there are times when things are not going well and he tries to be defiant instead of logical and, of course, that does not always work out in sports. The sage lefthander Mark Buehrle never shook off his catcher and once told me as he pitched to his third different receiver in three starts, “Hitters can’t guess with me, because three guys may have three different plans. But if I execute the pitch they want...”

Then there’s Bassitt’s, every fifth day, post-start media sessions that have become quite useless to writers. As good a teammate and as glib and helpful as he may be in the clubhouse, he is equally as condescending to media after he has pitched. Even intelligent questions about specifics within a game that may not have been noticed when they happened are greeted with a stare and a cliché. Bad questions are greeted with a string of throwaway clichés. But the best example of toying with media came after his terrible six-run first inning on Aug. 11 he went into a long explanation of how the roof being closed affected the break on his pitches and even had the exact change in break and plane. Right!

There is no doubt the guy is a gamer on the mound and can still pitch for any team as a mid-rotation option, but with one-year and $21-million left on his three-year contract, perhaps this off-season, Jays’ management might consider him as one of their Options 2-3 or 4 that they were not prepared to execute following the failed Ohtani pursuit.