PicoBlog

They're not a good team. They're not a fun watch. And they're a very small run of wins away from being back in the conversation. This is simply baseball in a just-win-54% world. This is the whole-summers-of-”contending”-ball expanding the playoffs was designed for.

I tweeted the above words last Wednesday night, just after the conclusion of the Blue Jays’ third straight loss at the hands of the Boston Red Sox, and already they feel dated. A seven-game losing streak and an 80-game PED suspension handed down to the club’s just-debuted top hitting prospect will do that, I suppose. The last week has made not just the run of wins the Jays would need to get back into the conversation seem much larger, but the sense that this group simply doesn’t have it in them to do anything like that.

Amazingly, the team is actually only a single game farther back of the third American League Wild Card spot than they were then, though the Rangers, Astros, Tigers, and Rays have all since passed them. But that’s not really my point anyway. We can dig deep into the Jays’ chances another time if for some reason anyone really wants to at this point, but that tweet was about as concise an expression of what I was feeling in that moment that I think my brain can come up with. Baseball is in a bad place right now—and it's not just here.

The National League has just six teams over .500, for example. Back when I wrote the tweet they only had four—they may again soon.

Over in the AL, the temporarily hot Red Sox only just took hold of the third Wild Card spot from a Royals team that was projected to win a mere 76 games when the season started. Boston was only projected to reach 83. And while obviously projections are far from infallible and change as we learn more about what each club is really made of, being five or six games back of those kinds of teams is not the same as being that far behind, you know, a good one.

The Jays are 6.5 games back. There is a lot of mediocre baseball still to be played.

I don't say this to sell hope to anybody or to pretend the Blue Jays are going well or something that they're not. I don't say it as though being here is an acceptable goal, or that getting out of the hole they’re in is going to be easy, or even possible. Trades and a turn toward 2025 are likely coming—i.e. not the kind of sell-off every clickbait site seems to be clamoring for—and probably for the best. I certainly don’t say it to suggest there’s some systemic reason for this team’s failure that absolves the people in charge. I say it because it's reality—a reality I think fans would do well to wrap their heads around, because it's a reality I think all baseball fans are going to have to get used to.

Everybody knew over the winter that the Jays didn't do enough to project to be at the top of the AL East or to otherwise distinguish themselves from the pack. Back in March, FanGraphs’ Depth Charts projected them as the sixth-best team in the American League at 84 wins. A very good season is well within the error bars there, but so is a pretty bad one.

The team eventually talked about banking on internal improvements, but a lot of that was baked into the projections. The systems already believed, based on track record, that guys like Vlad, George Springer, Daulton Varsho, and Alejandro Kirk would play more like their previous selves. Yet they still saw this team as only a fringe contender.

If those guys didn't turn around, if the pitching didn't stay as healthy as last year, or if they didn't find unexpected impact production elsewhere—all things that, to varying degrees, have not happened—they were going to be in trouble. And, indeed, here we are.

So why didn't they do more?

There likely isn't just a single reason for that, but one that I can't possibly imagine it was is that Ross Atkins and company thought what they had was good enough and decided to put their feet up.

I want to be careful not to give this front office too much credit, because lord knows they don't deserve it, but they talk about projection systems, they use projections, they have internal projections, and there's not going to be enormous variance between different systems. PECOTA, for example, was more bullish on the Jays—87.6 wins, fourth in the AL—but only had them less than 1.5 wins ahead of the three teams behind them, with two more teams not far behind that. It's hard to imagine there was a system that didn't have them as part of a fairly sizeable pack—not a great spot to be when you also play in the one division where everyone's a potential contender. And even if their internal projections were some kind of an outlier that didn't have them in the mushy middle, surely they're cognizant of what the public-facing systems were saying, if only for the sake of comparison with their own.

I mean, I suppose I can't rule the possibility that a collection of too-clever-by-half executives thought they had the rest of the AL exactly where they wanted them. The bizarre way they chose to allocate their money gives me pause on this question. But there are more sensible answers, I think.

For one, the free agent market lacked ideal options to address their specific needs. For another, their weak farm system, and the need to eventually stop thinning it out, likely made the trade market less appealing. They also seemed to very consciously want to avoid taking on long-term money—an attempt to maintain future flexibility that also serves as an acknowledgement that they may not be allowed to run $225 million payrolls in perpetuity.

Money is always going to be a major factor for teams, and I understand that picking on a Blue Jays organization that broke its franchise record for opening day payroll for a third straight season this year may seem unfair. But seeing as their record-breaking 2022 figure was just a couple million dollars higher than the Yankees' opening day payroll in 2005, I think it's fair game. And this is the thing…

Upgrade to paid

The Jays showed with their pursuit of Shohei Ohtani that if the business case for extravagant spending is solid, ownership can be convinced. Even if that one resulted in failure, they also have done a very good job in recent years of getting funding out of ownership. This has been especially impressive because they were the team most impacted by the pandemic—the team that was in as good a position as any to sell the lie that spending needed to be reined in.

Opening day payroll went up about $35 million from 2021 to 2022, closer to $40 million from 2022 to 2023, but only by about $15 million from 2023 to 2024. Again I ask, why didn't, or couldn't, they make the case for more?

It could simply be that there’s a hard line Rogers won’t ever let them cross. It could be that ownership understands that every dollar committed to declining over-30 guys beyond the end of next season is a dollar they could be pocketing for themselves if the team opts for a full-on rebuild post-Bo-and-Vlad.

But let’s assume that there was a way to have talked Rogers into giving them more. Let’s say that the Jays would have felt they needed to add four wins to really feel comfortably ahead of the pack. What’s the cost-benefit?

Well, first of all, they likely couldn’t do that without opening up a spot on their roster, which likely would have meant subtracting someone projected to ~1 WAR. Really, then, it’s more like adding five wins. Looking around at some analyses of the winter’s free agents and their projections, it seems like about $6 million per WAR was a reasonable ballpark in terms of cost, though obviously that varies. Cody Bellinger was projected to 2.8 fWAR per ZiPS and he cost the Cubs $27.5 million to bring back. And that’s just for this year. To get those Today Wins, Chicago had to stick their necks out by building a couple of very expensive player options into the contract.

For me, as a fan, spending $30-odd million of Edward Rogers’ money to give the team that much more of a chance is a no-brainer. But four extra wins would have only got the Jays to the level the Yankees were already projected to. And the Orioles, because young impact talent is harder to project, seemed likely to be better than what their their preseason one suggested. The chance of the Jays falling into the Wild Card round from there is still quite high, and you had a pretty good chance of ending up in exactly the same place before you went and spent that money.

Then, of course, you have to consider that the playoffs are more chaotic now than ever. Even if it works, is maybe getting to skip straight to the divisional round worth $30 million? Is there even an advantage? Last year the 100-win Dodgers played their last regular season game on October 1st, were off until the 7th, and ended up getting bounced by the 84-win Diamondbacks in three straight. Were they hurt by the disruption to hitters’ timing and pitchers’ routines?

I mean, probably not that much—weird stuff just happens in this sport—but I can understand how, in the just-win-54% world, one may not see $30 million worth of advantage in four extra projected wins when the team is already in a spot that should at the very least keep them in contention deep into September, barring something catastrophic.

That’s just one hypothetical, of course. And these types of calculations are hardly new. But the parameters have changed with the third Wild Card spot.

This is a sport that rewards mediocrity like never before. And when those mediocre teams get into the playoffs they have better chance than teams in other sports of pulling off upsets—especially in short series. I’m not sure how different it might be in the playoffs, but in regular season baseball the favoured team wins only about 55-60% of the time.

It's better to have a higher seed. It's better to skip the Wild Card series. But I suspect the lesson the ownership class is learning this year is that it's not better enough to justify ending up like the Jays, the Astros, the Mets, the Rangers, the Cubs, or the Giants. Those are six of the top 10 teams by opening day payroll this year, and all are currently on the outside of the expanded playoff picture looking in.

Meanwhile, if we put the Yankees aside, the other teams in AL playoff spots right now ranked 28th (Cleveland), 18th (Seattle), 27th (Baltimore), 20th (Minnesota), and 12th (Boston) by opening day payroll.

If you’re an owner, why try so hard? Why not embrace the middle? Everybody else is. As Jerry Dipoto said: “One year, you’re going to win 60 percent, another year you’re going to win 50 percent. It’s whatever it is. But over time, that type of mindset gets you there.”

Believe in nothing! Eat Arby’s!

I’m not smart enough to say for certain that this is how all of this is going to go, or how long it will last, but fear of a race to the middle was one of the main criticisms I heard for years when talk of expanding the playoffs came up—and one, I must admit, I happily ignored because PLAYOFFS!!!1!—and it kinda feels like it’s already here.

In a piece for the Athletic here on Thursday, Ken Rosenthal takes a look at the mess the “last place Blue Jays” are in, whether some version of a rebuild—or even a full-on immediate fire sale—is the best course of action, and suggests that “it would behoove Shapiro and Atkins to consider anything and everything. Or risk rolling out another uninspired product in 2025.”

An inspired product would certainly be ideal. It should, in fact, be the entire point. But are the Jays really so far gone that they won’t be able to crawl back to the middle next year? With Vlad and Bo? With Gausman, Bassitt, and Berríos? With $40 million off the books? With Varsho and the Buffalo Boys? With Ricky Tiedemann and Yariel Rodríguez and hopefully some better bullpen health?

Those are maybe not the makings of a great team, but there’s a path to being good enough. Especially with some shrewd deadline deals, free agent bargains, and if, as correctly maligned as it may be for its lack of top-end talent, the Jays’ farm system can keep pumping out a floor-raising Davis Schneider or Spencer Horwitz-type every year.

As Rosenthal points out without seemingly realizing it, all that the Jays really got from the last dismantling of their roster was Teoscar Hernández, the secondary player shipped out in the Berríos trade (Simeon Woods Richardson), and an excuse for Rogers to save tens of millions per year on payroll. It can be done better, of course. But muddling through and trying to fix things on the fly can work too. Now more than ever, I reckon.

It’s possible they think it’s not salvageable, and I wouldn’t go as far as saying that demanding everything be blown up is essentially just advocating for a massive financial gift being given to Edward Rogers, because the flaws and the frustrations are certainly real and their 2026 prospects look scary, but I wouldn’t not say it either. And this is the vision of the sport that he and his fellow owners tried to crush the players’ union to implement.

Welcome to the middle. Get comfortable.

Now let’s please put someone else in charge of the team.

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