Now is the spring of our discontent

There was a time this winter when it looked like the Toronto Blue Jays were going all-in to try to make the World Series. That time has passed

It is not a great sign of the quality of your baseball team’s off-season when the highlight was the few hours during which a cast member of Dragon’s Den flew home with his family to Toronto from Los Angeles.

And yet, that fleeting time when it was thought — and, awkwardly, reported — that the plane contained not Robert Herjavec but Shohei Ohtani, stands out as the moment when it seemed like anything was possible for the Toronto Blue Jays.

Instead it was just a rich guy flying home and wondering what all the fuss was about when he got off the plane at Pearson.

The Blue Jays’ early-winter dalliance with the Japanese unicorn was enough to make you wonder if it was a whole new era for the Jays. Some of us wondered it publicly. Even though it was just chatter, it was the kind of chatter that the Blue Jays, in the Mark Shapiro/Ross Atkins era, simply didn’t, er, chat. They weren’t just trying to land the biggest free agent on the market, they were trying to land the biggest such player in the history of the sport. Even if Ohtani wouldn’t sign with the Jays, and it always seemed unlikely that Yusei Kikuchi would end up being the world’s greatest Toronto salesman, what did it mean that after seven-plus years of cautious pragmatism, Jays management was now acting like a guy on tilt at the high-stakes poker table?

Not much, it turns out. Three months after the glue-sniffing highs of Ohtanimania, the Jays have assembled in Dunedin with a roster that is, maybe, if you squint at it just the right way, kinda-sorta the same as the one that squeaked into the playoffs last season and then lost two straight to the Minnesota Twins. With the lights-flashing caveat that this is an exceptionally weird off-season of MLB inaction and that more moves could yet be made, Toronto lost Matt Chapman, Brandon Belt and Whit Merrifield from the regular lineup and replaced them with Justin Turner and Isiah Kiner-Falefa. Turner’s a nice bat, with an OPS of .800 last season that would have been third-best on the Jays, but he’s also 39 years old, or right about the age where sluggers often find themselves swinging wet noodles. Pumpkin City, population: you. Kiner-Falefa is a perfectly mediocre player who was attractive presumably because he could be perfectly mediocre at several positions. Seriously, his WAR with the Yankees last season was 0.1, as close to replacement level as it gets. Cooperstown does not await.

After the failed pursuit of Ohtani, it appears as though Shapiro and Atkins are banking on improvement from within to get them beyond the 89 wins of last year’s team. It’s not the craziest idea, since that team managed to be the dreariest 89-win team imaginable, and better batted-ball luck alone in 2024 could improve the offence significantly. Vladimir Guerrero, Jr., Alejandro Kirk and Daulton Varsho, to name just three guys, all had steep declines at the plate relative to 2023, and at least have the potential to outperform this season. They also have the potential to hit into eleventy-seven double plays.

But the Jays also play in the toughest division in baseball, where four teams are projected to be among the top ten in MLB. Even if you imagine bounce-back years for some of their better hitters now that Don Mattingly has been rebranded as the offensive coordinator — I hope desperately that he wears a headset like they do in football — they are likely to be in a fight just to make the playoffs again.

And that’s what makes the moves this winter, or lack thereof, so odd. When they were making the Ohtani push, showing him the sights of greater Dunedin — “look, there’s the Scientology headquarters! — and selling him on the merits of the Toronto theatre scene, we all wondered a little if the front office was hopped up on goofballs. This kind of a free-agent play was so out of character. But reasons were also offered. Yes, Ohtani was a unique business proposition, but also the Jays had new premium seating to sell and also there was an urgency to strike while Bo Bichette and Vlad Junior were still, you know, here. Those guys, long imagined as the leaders of a new era, were now 0-6 in the post-season. Maybe some combination of front office and ownership decided that it was time to shove all-in.

Or, maybe not. Shapiro and especially Atkins come in for a lot of criticism in this market, some of which is unfair simply because they can’t do anything about the fact that they replaced Paul Beeston and Alex Anthopoulos, guys who locally gave everyone warm fuzzies. They also have a tendency to lapse into corporate-speak that is, let’s say, not endearing. Ask Atkins how the Jays are going to improve the offence and he will talk about opportunities on the run-creation side and “synergies” will come up there somewhere and you will eventually fight the urge to walk away mid-sentence. But, even allowing that this has been a playoff team for two seasons and that the front office can’t entirely be blamed for the bats going stone-cold at that point, it’s hard to come up with a positive spin on what has transpired this winter. They went super-aggressive and then in the end decided that prudence was the new market inefficiency? They had a licence to spend big on a free-agent deal, but it was time-limited? They saw Vladdy Junior’s slimmed-down workout videos and decided he would solve all their run-creation issues on his own?

It’s true that cautious pragmatism could yet win the day. Blue Jays 2024: Improvement from Within. It might work, but maybe don’t put it on a t-shirt.