Kirk LaPointe: Betting on the Blue Jays? Don’t even think about it

Now that Justin Trudeau is leaving, isn’t the country’s most intriguing possible departure Vladimir Guerrero Jr.?

The 25-year-old, Montreal-born, Toronto Blue Jays all-star, signed as a 16-year-old in the Dominican Republic, is the talented crux, reputational face, and emotional heart of a franchise—and he is able, in mere months, to flee for the first time to richer pastures.

The Blue Jays have a chicken-and-egg problem this off-season as they struggle to return to competitiveness in one of baseball’s toughest divisions: free agents won’t sign with Toronto if they think Vladdy (and to a lesser extent, his BFF Bo Bichette) aren’t signed beyond this season, and Vladdy doesn’t appear willing to sign if he isn’t surrounded with a revamped team that can win now.

Not to be overlooked, one supposes, is that ownership and player seem maybe a hundred or so million dollars apart on what is fair market value for one of the game’s half-dozen best sluggers. He and the team agreed to a $28.5 million USD deal Thursday for his final contract season on the eve of arbitration, but that solves nothing. The task is to secure his services in one of those lifetime deals, and soon.

January is never a sleepy baseball month. Billions of dollars of work-flesh is purchased, teams are gutted and rebuilt, and fans get to recalibrate their expectations. January will be Vladdy prime time. He won’t negotiate a contract extension once spring training starts in February, and he would be the biggest catch of the next batch of free agents. The two New York teams, Boston, pretty well everyone, would want him; by all accounts, he’s also a nice guy.

If you’re the brain trust piloting the budget under the Rogers Communications ownership, you’re likely saying, “Someone, anyone, please: take our money. It sits there, waiting for you, in crisp, clean American dollars. All you need to do is come and play.”

But they won’t, and day upon day, free agent upon free agent, name brand upon name brand, saviour upon saviour, these last few weeks have been a season of snubs and sneers, as hurtful and humiliating as Donald Trump’s Social Truth postings.

Ten surnames come to mind of those who could have been foundational blocks: Soto, Snell, Burnes, Hernández, Fried, Walker, Naylor, Torres, Bellinger, Adames. But the Jays, last-place last season, looking among them for at least one big bat and big arm? The front office swings and misses. The players balk.

What the weak-hitting, wobbly-bullpened Jays have to show so far for the off-season is one player, Andres Giménez, another great fielder to indulge their fetish for defence—someone inclined to keep the ball in the infield rather than drive it beyond the outfield. They seem “in” at the moment on discussions for a couple of sluggers and a relief pitcher (on Friday they signed all-star Jeff Hoffman, who gets a shot at being the closer), but far short of restoring the hope that was there only a handful of seasons back.

It is in lamentable times like these that Toronto’s team—and Canada’s, if you buy into the Rogers narrative they’re a nation’s team—learns what the market thinks of it. In short, the message is that it’s a nice city, a lovely country, but the taxes suck and the team isn’t champion grade. True, some teams will simply invest more than Toronto in offers to players, but mostly now the players aren’t themselves prepared to invest in Toronto. They don’t envision a winner of their making. Vladdy can give the suitors a chance; his departure would be a catastrophe.

American dollars and Canadian taxes are far from soulmates in sport, as every franchise will attest. If only Doug Ford would create a special tax exemption for major league athletes. If only Toronto were about four longitudinal degrees west so the Detroit Tigers, and not they, were geographically situated appropriately in the brutish American League East.^{1By the way, why isn’t Cleveland in the AL East? Toronto is 2.3 degrees more westerly; let’s get on that.}

Rogers Communications stock fell 35 percent in 2024, and the Blue Jays should have been the company’s pride and joy instead of a pain point of declining attendance and dire outlook. Roughly $400 million in renovations of Rogers Stadium took nearly 20 feet off the distance to the right field fence and 10 feet from the left field fence, making it an even juicier exit point for round-trippers—initially, though, it has been mostly for the opponents.

Athletes prefer to visit more than reside in Toronto (even if the dual citizenship for the children they have here is an asset). Typically it would then follow that, if you can’t extend hundreds of millions to assemble a dream team, you craft your franchise from the bottom up with encumbered homegrown talent you draft or collect through trades in their early-stage careers, so their salaries are arbitrated and their freedom is (as Vladdy and Bo’s are until this season’s end) “under team control,” as they say.

Nice plan in principle, works many places elsewhere. But the Toronto farm system is perceived as one of baseball’s weakest for several years. It traded some prospects to get more immediate help that proved unhelpful, it seems riddled with bad injury luck in the ranks, and today lacks anything approaching the qualities of the two homegrown stars.

If I may further exhaust a cliché, the consensus is that the franchise is at a crossroads. Fans were led to believe the front office changeover nearly a decade ago was instilling competence to create a consistent contender if the base would just be patient. Well, here we are, twiddling our thumbs approaching what feels like an imminent tear-down, only without any studs upon which to build.

The evidence is of turmoil. Let’s go into the weeds for a moment:

1. The Jays looked past Vladdy and Bo to set aside nearly a billion-and-a-half American dollars last year and this year to court two generational talents in pitcher/hitter Shohei Ohtani and slugger Juan Soto, only to be runners-up without a strong plan B. Nowhere in baseball can you just run back the same lineup, but in 2024 they mostly did so.
2. Two terrible 2022 trades of batting muscle—Teoscar Hernandez to Seattle and Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and Gabriel Moreno to Arizona—returned an average set-up reliever and a defence-mainly outfielder. They traded offensive building blocks for defensive ephemeral pieces. Further embarrassment: all three traded players have since helped their teams to the World Series.
3. The team’s premiere pitching prospect, Ricky Tiedermann, is getting his arm rebuilt through Tommy John surgery, as is the team’s brief ace of 2022, Alex Manoah. Neither will be useful at length in the coming season.
4. Since it has few worthy prospects in the pipeline, it cannot use anyone as strong trade bait for an experienced hand. Indeed, it is generally trading for them, not trading them, the sign of a rebuilding franchise, one that’s running out the vestiges of the core, and not the all-in version expected last year and this.
5. The bullpen last season was one of baseball’s worst. It didn’t even tender a contract to the club’s former all-star closer, Toronto native Jordan Romano. It lost him for no compensation to Philadelphia, a perennial contender that paid him more than he would have earned in contract arbitration with the Jays. That, like so many other moves, looks like a decision that will bite them.

The upshot is that Jays will either a) overpay Vladdy and/or Bo to stay while bottom-feeding on what’s left of the free agents to surround them with at best cautious optimism, b) trade them for players upon which they can try to rebuild over time, or c) watch their stars play out their contracts and find new fields of dreams. Each option was unfathomable only a season or two ago.

We are now more than three decades removed from back-to-back World Series championships for the Jays, with the closest sniff nearly a decade removed in back-to-back American League championship series losses. Baseball expanded its playoffs to make more teams eligible, but the Jays have yet to win a playoff game since 2016.

It is not in our DNA to ever feel sorry for Rogers. To its credit, ownership has been gracious and silent about the failures of the front office to deliver, but there must be private fuming and has to be before much longer public firings if a plausible lineup isn’t assembled post-haste. The company builds its spring-to-fall Sportsnet television schedule around almost all of the 162 regular season games. It was banking on a successful franchise, not an also-ran.

Their gap has widened with the American League Champion New York Yankees since the last World Series, with New York securing a big bat (Cody Bellinger), starter (Max Fried), and reliever (Devin Williams). The Los Angeles Dodgers have added stars to their championship roster, and a half-dozen teams have outflanked them in signing key players in recent weeks—like the New York Mets, with their signing of Soto for $765 million USD. By my count, there are a dozen formidable franchises in the way of a championship.

It is exceedingly curious that the two main front-office executives, CEO and president Mark Shapiro (contract expiring at season’s end) and general manager Ross Atkins (contract expiring the season after) don’t appear to be sweating the sorrowful situation that succeeds only in antagonizing the fan base. Their media encounters are word salads about trusting the process, about upside clues in the analytics, about strategic stationing of minor leaguers in major-league situations, about anything other than delivering on their pledges way back when of dominance and a dynasty that would manifest under them. A more suspicious person would think they were the Manchurian candidates.

Last time I checked, the Jays’ odds of winning the World Series on schedule this year were 60 to 1, or in betting parlance +9000, meaning your $100 bet would win you $9,000.

Don’t even think about it.