A few minutes before Wednesday’s trade deadline, the Blue Jays dealt the man who was once their bright, shining hope.
Starter Aaron Sanchez, reliever Joe Biagini and a minor-league prospect are off to the Houston Astros. In return, Toronto receives Derek Fisher. That’s the end of that paragraph.
Odds are you haven’t heard of Fisher, nor are you likely to in the future. He is a nearly 26-year-old fourth-outfielder type who has never caused the heart of even the most optimistic scout to race.
Jays general manager Ross Atkins on the deal: “[Fisher] couldn’t fit better with our young core right now, with … the success he’s had in the minor leagues.”
Fisher has been in the major leagues for three years.
We may have misjudged the Blue Jays management these past couple of years. Perhaps this isn’t incompetence. Maybe it’s sabotage. If that’s the case, everyone deserves raises. They are doing an incredible job.
It’s becoming old hat to go in on Atkins and Jays president Mark Shapiro any time they do anything. They’re easy targets. Most of Atkins’s public pronouncements are so mired in shifty bureaucratese that you never know what the hell he’s saying. Shapiro never says anything at all. The result is a general disdain that follows them around like an odour.
But the past few days have been a red line in their tenure. There is no explaining what they’re up to.
We do hear a lot about The Plan™. There may even be one. If so, the pair on top has never been able to clarify it to anyone, which would seem to me the primary job of a business executive.
They have two signal achievements this year – they bought Vlad Guerrero, Jr. a bus ticket; and they have turned a bad major-league team into a good Double-A one.
Guerrero and his Athos and Aramis, Bo Bichette and Cavan Biggio, may one day become stars. But that is years off.
When and if it happens, someone will need to pitch. After all this flurried movement, the Jays still don’t have any truly elite pitching prospects.
It’s considered optimal that there be a few veterans with tenure on a team, to give it stability and emotional ballast. The Jays don’t have any of those any more either.
How understaffed and inexperienced are the Jays now? Justin Smoak is the only person left on the 25-man roster who’s played more than a couple of seasons in Toronto. He’s also the only responsible adult left. Trent Thornton, a rookie with an ERA over 5.00, is the de facto staff ace.
Also, you should check your messages. It’s possible that you – yes, you – may be coming out of the bullpen in the next few games.
Hold up. Are you good at baseball? Well then, forget it. The Jays can’t make that work because it’s too late to trade you.
The Sanchez swap looks far worse when coupled with the Marcus Stroman trade two days earlier.
The Jays got two average prospects for Stroman from the New York Mets. The most charitable spin was that the Jays had been forced to dump Stroman in a buyers’ market.
A few hours later, Cleveland traded Trevor Bauer. Speaking in broad terms, Bauer is Stroman’s doppelganger – same age, same pedigree and same amount of controlability. The biggest difference between the two is that Stroman is having a wonderful 2019 and Bauer is the guy who tried to chuck the ball into the centre-field stands from the mound.
Somehow Cleveland turned its equally distressed asset into Yasiel Puig and four other players, a couple of whom are actually good.
Atkins’s verdict on one versus the other?
“We feel even better about [the Stroman return] after having seen what teams were willing to do.”
I can’t even.
Maybe the Toronto Blue Jays are becoming to Major League Baseball what your dumb friend Doug is to neighbourhood poker night. Doug likes action. Any sort of action. Coupled with a tenuous understanding of poker and human motivation, that makes Doug everyone’s favourite poker buddy. Because he is a gold-plated sucker.
A few years ago, the Jays were the ones fleecing other teams. They got someone to take on the dead weight of Vernon Wells’s contract. They rid themselves of Alex Rios when he was a toxic asset. They got the Oakland A’s – a smart baseball team – to give up a future MVP, Josh Donaldson, for … and I’m going to start screaming here … Brett Lawrie. In most countries, that’s an indictable felony. Now they are reduced to this.
The Jays have some competition in terms of being the worst team in baseball. But as strategic thinkers, they are clearly leading the whole shebang in wretchedness.
They inherited a successful product with a loyal customer base and have spent most of four years diminishing the quality of the first and enraging the second. In any rational market, this club would be on its way to bankruptcy.
But baseball operates in a business fantasyland, the sort in which you can say things like, “We won’t have game-changing talent in our system until it’s doing it in the major leagues,” which Atkins did on Wednesday, and no one stands up to say, “I don’t think that sentence makes sense in English.”
If I were employed by the Blue Jays in a non-playing capacity, I’d be checking for dynamite around the Rogers Centre’s pillars before heading up to my desk on Thursday morning.
Because given the events of the past few days, the next logical step is blowing up the building.
Knowing this club, the evacuation email will go out 10 minutes after detonation.
However, to hear Atkins tell it, everything is fine. The team has “depth.” Fisher is “depth.” The two guys they got for Stroman are depth. The kid no one’s ever heard of, who they just flipped reliever Daniel Hudson for, is depth. They have depth to spare.
What they don’t have is anywhere close to enough top-end talent, and are now left with no way to get any but to buy it. Which means they have no way to get any.
“We’re not done, in terms of acquisitions,” Atkins said.
That should be a hopeful thought. With the current Toronto Blue Jays, it sounds like a threat.
Cathal Kelly