Blue Jays Hire Baseball Players to Play Baseball

The Free Friday newsletter.

(Photo by Norm Hall/Getty Images)

Hi friends-

Before we get started we have some announcements:

• As a reminder, our December/January book club selection is Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original by Howard Bryant. Howard is coming over to my house to talk about his book, Rickey, and the writing process, and we’ll be live over zoom on Tuesday, February 11th from 5:30-6:30 PM PT to chat with you all. Please add the date and time to your calendars. This zoom will be open to all paid subscribers.

• I’ve reached out to the Red Sox to buy group tickets to Dodgers vs. Red Sox on Saturday, July 26th and I’m reviewing pricing options now. I’ll have more to say soon but I’m probably going to buy 30 tickets and then offer them up for purchase to the first 30 people who claim them. Then, we can add more tickets if we need to.

• We will resume our weekly Saturday baseball zooms tomorrow at noon PT. These zooms are for all paid subscribers.

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It’s been a rough few years for the Blue Jays and their fans. As you know, I don’t have much sympathy for teams run by owners who aren’t even trying to win. Writing about the end of the Oakland A’s was one of the more infuriating assignments of my life.

I’m tired of billionaire owners lying and crying poverty and gaslighting fans into believing that teams that spend money are the real problem to distract people from realizing the owner of their favorite sports team is a cheap corncob. The fact that the Twins and the Cardinals have combined to sign zero free agent players to major league contracts this off-season is a much bigger problem, in my view, than the Dodgers spending two billion dollars on their starting rotation.

Every billionaire owner comes to a fork in the road and must decide whether they want to spend $70 million on Tanner Scott or another westside mansion. I mention this because 12 years ago the Dodgers had owners who did not believe in signing players like Tanner Scott. Instead, they used the team as their own personal piggybank, going so far as to take out loans against future season ticket sales to buy themselves a dozen luxury properties, and stopping only when they literally bankrupt the team and could not afford to pay their players one Friday.

Having seen what I’ve seen over the past decade in Los Angeles, I’m fully confident that a non-leveraged billionaire could buy any baseball team in North America, inject cash into it, and watch profits roll in.

Anyway, we’re talking about the Blue Jays today because they, like the Giants, have made a tradition out of finishing as the runner-up choice for so many top free agents over the past few off-seasons that the “give-us-a-gold-star-for-trying!” bit was starting to get a little sus.

First, Shohei Ohtani was a Blue Jay last off-season until he wasn’t.

Then we watched this winter as the Jays reportedly courted then failed to land Corbin Burnes, Max Fried, Clay Holmes, Juan Soto, and Gleyber Torres.

The real knife to the kidney came when Japanese phenom pitcher Roki Sasaki narrowed his list of choices down to the Dodgers and Blue Jays (!), before ultimately picking LA.

The fact that Ohtani nearly picked Toronto, and that the Jays got so close to signing Sasaki when a great pitching org like Seattle wasn’t even granted permission to meet with him tells me the Blue Jays organization is doing something right. Whatever their front office is selling right now plays good in the room; they just don’t currently have the track record of success to beat out teams like the Dodgers if the dollar offers are similar.

But as half the league has been in a spending freeze this off-season, it seemed like only a matter of time before the Blue Jays convinced a clutch of good players to take their money to play baseball. This week, they did.

After trading for second baseman Andres Gimenez back in December and Miles Straw earlier this month, the Blue Jays finally struck in free agency signing relief pitcher Jeff Hoffman and outfielder Anthony Santander. Then earlier today, sources told multiple reporters that the Jays were in agreement with future Hall of Fame starting pitcher Max Scherzer. It’s unclear what Scherzer has left in his right arm, but there’s no such thing as a bad one-year deal—even if it’s for $15.5 million.

I’d like to see the Jays either extend Vladdy Guerrero Jr. or sign Pete Alonso to play first base before they do anything else. According to reports, the Jays are still currently weighing both those options. They probably could have used Jack Flaherty in their rotation, who remains the top free agent starting pitcher on the market. But Flaherty is much more expensive than Scherzer, and the Jays are already set to enter 2024 with a team record CBT payroll of $275 million.

However, the team is owned by behemoth Canadian media company Rogers Communications, which did $19 billion in revenue in 2023. Earlier this week, Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner said it was “difficult” for other owners to spend the way the Dodgers do. And while I’m sure writing large checks is painful (even for billionaires!), it’s clear that the people who own the Blue Jays could put together a talented roster to rival LA’s if they want to win as much as the Dodgers’ owners do. I still don’t believe you can buy championships in MLB. The sport is too random. But you can absolutely sign star players fans want to purchase tickets to see to put on a show. It’s good to see the Jays are actually trying to compete in the AL East while so many other teams are content to sit on their thumbs.