Spring training — the best word pairing in the English language other than “deferred” and “salary,” “private” and “jet,” …
OK, I’ll stop.
Shohei Ohtani’s free agency made this a winter unlike any other but now those time-tested rhythms take over: pitchers and catchers reporting. Workouts on the back fields. Players showing up in the “best shape of their lives” … and getting injured. New faces in new places. Prospects making their best/initial impressions while the rest of us try hard not to make too much or too little of it because, like anything else, it’s the hope that kills you. That comeback story, right, Alek Manoah?
In Dunedin, the Toronto Blue Jays enter the penultimate year of club control over Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette with hints that the focus has already shifted to the aftertimes because the game waits for nobody. So, in this corner at least, that will place an even greater spotlight on prospects such as Ricky Tiedemann, Orelvis Martinez and Addison Barger, since after their dalliance with Ohtani, the Blue Jays acted like a team all too aware of the competitive balance tax. When agent Scott Boras told reporters at the Winter Meetings that the organization’s “bird feeder is full,” he was right — although maybe not in the way he anticipated.
The Blue Jays won three fewer regular-season games in 2023 than in 2022 and the same number of post-season games: bupkis. It’s hard to see how the two significant position acquisitions — Justin Turner and Isiah Kiner-Falefa — make them as good defensively as they were in 2023, never mind better, but maybe Turner still has enough pixie dust left in his 39-year-old body. Maybe. And maybe the pitching will be as unusually healthy as it was in 2023. Maybe. Plus, there’s still time for more signings or a trade, right? Right?
What hasn’t changed is that sportsnet.ca will once again have the most complete Blue Jays coverage. I’ll try to help a bit with a Monday feature that will look back at the week that was and glance to the week ahead. So, let’s get it started, then …
Here are some things we learned this off-season:
Scott Boras doesn’t need to have the best free agent to control the market.
It took six weeks after Ohtani’s signing for the first of Boras’ major clients to go off the board — Rhys Hoskins, who was signed by the Milwaukee Brewers. Boras still has Blake Snell, Cody Bellinger and Matt Chapman on the market, knowing that even with the difference in handedness, Bellinger and Chapman appealed to the same group of teams.
Boras will be an even bigger player next winter as the representative for Juan Soto, Gerrit Cole, Corbin Burnes, Alex Bregman and Pete Alonso.
Bidding for Soto, who won’t turn 27 years of age until February of 2025, will start some place between $400-$500 million.
Cole can opt out of his nine-year, $324-million deal with the New York Yankees, leaving four years and $144 million on the table, which the Yankees can void by tacking on another year to the end of the deal for $36 million in 2029. In so doing, the Yankees would effectively be giving Cole a five-year, $180-million extension that would run through his age 39 season. Scott Boras will continue to run this game …
How about some soccer talk?
This was the winter that Boston Red Sox’s fans finally realized they are not the crown jewel in Fenway Sports Group’s crown: that would be Liverpool FC, and rightly so in terms of merchandise and value. They might not even be No. 2, after FSG’s $3-billion investment in professional golf.
With that in mind, it’s good news for the Red Sox that Theo Epstein has been repatriated from the commissioner’s office as a senior advisor and, while he’ll have his hand in many of FSG’s endeavours, the guess here is the Red Sox and new general manager Craig Breslow will get most of his attention.
How big a deal is this? Bigger than, say, Alex Anthopoulos returning to the Blue Jays. Meanwhile, to circle back to Ohtani, it’s true that the man who has run Chelsea FC into the ground using deferred contracts — Todd Boehly — also has an ownership stake in the Los Angeles Dodgers. But they keep him away from the sharp objects. So don’t confuse the two situations …
The Dodgers really know what they’re doing, which begs the question: how do they have just one World Series win since 1993 — that coming with a COVID-19 asterisk?
Yeah, yeah. Spend, spend, spend. But as The Athletic’s Keith Law details in his recent rankings of farm systems, the Dodgers are still among the very best teams in accumulating minor-league depth.
Law ranked them third overall and referred to the acquisition of pitcher Jackson Ferris from the Chicago Cubs in a trade that sent top prospect Michael Busch to the Cubs as a typically savvy Dodgers deal; ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel ranked them first in quality depth and had five of their prospects in his Top 100; and all told seven different Dodgers prospects made different Top 100 lists.
Now, I know: the value of a prospect or any player is determined by how much another organization is willing to give you in a trade. Back in the days of carrier pigeons, we used to joke about how the Dodgers were so good at talking up their prospects. “Typical Dodgers B.S.” we used to say — and in fact, it was one of the cautionary notes sounded when the Montreal Expos acquired Pedro Martinez.
But it’s a smarter world now, and the Dodgers have the type of minor-league assembly line that can fill in gaps due to injuries, offer the odd surprise … and pad out potential deals for major leaguers. Who knows? Maybe they’ll win another World Series before the decade runs out.
Theo Epstein’s return isn’t the biggest off-field news in the American League East. Neither is the Yankees trade for Juan Soto.
The Baltimore Orioles have the best young core in the game and, according to people who study this stuff, a top-three minor-league system and now they’re owned by private equity guys with community ties instead of the Angelos family. Their system is deeper than the Blue Jays ever was in the early stages of the Bo/Vladdy era. They finished in first place in 2023 without a bona-fide ace. That was just the beginning: the road to the AL East title runs through Baltimore for most of the next decade …
“Messaging” is one of those silly, new-age marketing things that is real.
The Red Sox started marketing the “Fenway experience” a few weeks ago after chairman Tom Werner admitted that doing nothing after promising to go “full throttle” in building a contender was “not the most artful comment.”
Meanwhile, Seattle Mariners GM Jerry Dipoto prepared fans for the winter by talking about “sustainability” and how “we’re actually doing the fanbase a favour by asking for their patience to win the World Series while we continue to build a sustainably good roster,” adding that while nobody wants to hear “the goal this year is to win 54 per cent of the time,” the fact is “if you go back and look in a decade, those teams that win 54 per cent of the time always wind up in the post-season.”
As for the local flannel? Look: we won’t know the impact of the unravelling of the Blue Jays 2023 season until we see how many of those bougie premium seats are sold at the Rogers Centre — although publicly doubling down on the inherent romance of analytics the way the Jays front office has is … well, it’s certainly a choice.
The sports media landscape continues to evolve, and while every league is impacted, MLB with its 162-game schedule and status as a regional sport has more at stake than any other.
As ESPN’s Bradford Doolittle noted in this intriguing look at payroll polarization, Diamond Sports Group’s financial issues and the resulting haziness in the regional TV landscape hamstrung franchises like the Minnesota Twins and Milwaukee Brewers while some of the other affected teams — particularly, the Kansas City Royals as well as the Cincinnati Reds — were aggressive.
Truth is, no one much knows what the broadcast future will look like — and now ESPN, Warner and Fox are forming up — but for a sport that was at the forefront of the online revolution, having all that inventory spread out over all those days will either be a boon or a problem.
There’s a reason that MLB commissioner Rob Manfred thinks the league needs a direct-to-consumer streaming package for half of MLB’s teams ready for 2025 and from this vantage point, it’s difficult to talk expansion until the game has a better handle on it.
The Toronto Blue Jays are already thinking ahead to life after Vladdy and Bo.
And so, they should. Guerrero will be five months away from turning 27 years of age when he enters free agency after next season, Bichette will still be half a year away from turning 28, and that will put both of them on the radar for teams that might already have older first basemen or shortstops — especially if Bichette continues to rack up hits, stay healthy and play steady defence.
I know that a lot of folks put two and two together and figured the organization would take the money Ohtani turned down and use it to sign at least one of the two but it’s apples and oranges. The business case for signing Ohtani for $700 million or whatever doesn’t exist for paying half that for any other player.
Look: I could watch Bichette play 24/7. I think he is going to win a batting title some day and if it was me, he’d be locked up for another five years regardless of the money.
Vladdy … sweet baseball geezus, I want to believe in him, but my sense is the long-term train pulled out of the station already. I mean, if Vladdy has an MVP-calibre season, it won’t only be the Blue Jays who might have doubts erased, you know?
At any rate, the Blue Jays’ internal calculation is that putting a winning team on the field that will sell tickets, whether that team is sexy or composed of puzzle pieces and dull, analytical darlings. It’s been fun with Bo and Vlad; unfortunately, they and the team around them have been found wanting in the post-season.
It isn’t just Scott Boras. There are also a bunch of teams with unfinished business — particularly in the NL.
I mean, it sure looks that way, doesn’t it? The St. Louis Cardinals … Atlanta Braves … Philadelphia Phillies …. Chicago Cubs … San Francisco Giants. Even the Miami Marlins. All of them have so far done a little less than anticipated, either in terms of quality or quantity, although the Braves have done such a good job of locking up their core it’s probably less pressing. The Phillies bear watching if the free-agent market continues at this pace because, well, because of Dave Dombrowski. I’m surprised that the New York Mets haven’t locked up Alonso.
You think the Arizona Coyotes are a joke? The Oakland/Sacramento/San Francisco/San Jose/Las Vegas A’s would like a word.
I’ll buy Manfred’s suggestion that the lower-than-anticipated sale price of the Orioles owes to factors including the aforementioned media landscape, but keep in mind that rising franchise value is how Manfred’s employers grade his success or failure.
And while I’ve maintained for a while now that the city and county pooched the Athletics’ clear need for a new ballpark — and celebrated a planned move to Vegas — the winter has surely raised some disquieting matters on that front. What happens if Vegas, you know, doesn’t want the team? And where does the team play after this last season in Oakland? There are broadcast rights matters in play in addition to ground-level logistical matters and it really does sound all Arizona Coyotes, doesn’t it?
The whereabouts of the A’s determines potential expansion locales as well as expansion timetables, and we haven’t even touched on the fact that Oakland’s perceived glamorous neighbour across the Bay — San Francisco — is being talked down as a locale due to crime and deep-seated social issues by free agents and even its own Hall of Famers such Buster Posey. Instead of clarity, the situation only became murkier over the winter.
The Olympics bubbled up from the depths and unfortunately seems to have found some footing.
Predictably, with the 2028 games scheduled for mid-summer in Los Angeles, there’s been a rush to embrace the notion of MLB players taking part in the Olympics. Woof.
The World Baseball Classic has established itself. Why cheapen it by lining the pockets of the IOC, risking injury and interrupting your season? Wasn’t Edwin Diaz’s injury cautionary enough?
We’ve all seen how NHL players get misty-eyed at the concept of taking part in the Olympics and get tied up in knots when it comes to incorporating it into their collective bargaining agreement. Considering how little these guys make on their way up, the idea of being cheap labour for somebody else while in their prime seems self-defeating. It’s not the players’ responsibility to “grow the game” — not sure how the Olympics does it, anyhow — and the bottom line is always the same with the IOC: when it comes calling, keep your hand on your wallet and run away as fast as possible.
Jeff Blair hosts Blair & Barker, returning on Feb. 20 to its 11 a.m. ET timeslot on Sportsnet 590 The Fan.
