In December 2017, Mark Shapiro explained why his Blue Jays had pushed to stay competitive that season and were about to half-heartedly do so again in 2018.
“I’ve said all along, if we were just running our team without fans and it was an intellectual exercise, we probably would have hit reset over a year ago,” he told reporters.
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It was a quote that didn’t sit well at the time with fans, who seemed to be taking blame for enjoying the successful ball club that Alex Anthopoulos had largely built. It didn’t help matters that he also spoke somewhat derisively about the “very, very, very high price” that was paid to turn the Jays into what they had become in 2015 and 2016.
“As we deliberate on the different strategies and the different directions to go, we feel an obligation to try to field a contending, competitive team and at such a time we feel that is not possible, we will pivot,” Shapiro said. “Proactively pivoting, based upon the price paid and the way our fans have responded, that’s why we’re not doing that. That’s why we’re trying to remain competitive.”
If it wasn’t entirely clear then that what he was talking about wasn’t any kind of covenant between fans and the team, it has become abundantly clear in the nearly two years since. The Blue Jays of 2019 feel very much like they’ve been run as the kind of intellectual exercise Shapiro was referring to.
The club has just finished a season of going through the motions, in a competitive sense. Sure, there was a lot of player development taking place at the big league level, and many auditions for future roles being carried out. The Jays didn’t “waste” the season, so much as they wasted the time and money of fans.
That, of course, was all part of the plan: Offset the attendance you expect to crater by raising prices on tickets for those most devoted to going to the games in person. Spend as little as possible while the big contracts of yesteryear slowly come off the books, building future payroll flexibility for an increasingly broken and fruitless free agent market. Insist that one of the key tenets of your shrewd management style, and a feature of the the modern game, is that “there’s no way to just spend your way out of a hole” — as Shapiro said to reporters this week, during the club’s traditional end-of-season media session.
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Back in August, when Shapiro trotted himself out for a bit of damage control in the wake of the vitriolic response to the club’s trade deadline deals, he preached similarly about taking a cautious approach with the club’s budget.
“All wins aren’t created equal, right? So a player who’s a three-win player who takes you from 82 to 85 wins probably doesn’t move that needle,” he said. “But if you’re at 87 wins and it takes you from 87 to 90, does that make sense? So it’s more like when we’re at that point, when you can get the player who helps take you from a good team to a team that’s a potential championship team, we need to go out and get that player, and (ownership) support will be there.”
That sort of vague talk would be more comforting if it weren’t the same thing we’ve heard over and over in the Rogers era from Blue Jays executives running their big market franchise like a small market one. Or if it weren’t plainly obvious that there’s nothing stopping a team, except for their own lack of ambition, from adding multiple players to take them from an 82 win projection to one over 90. Or from adding a big ticket player one winter, then adding another the winter after.
The Jays, however, as Shapiro made extra clear this week, have no interest in taking that path. “I think looking at other teams even in recent history — San Diego, Philadelphia — that added big name free agents,” he told reporters, referring to last winter’s megawatt deals for Bryce Harper and Manny Machado. “It’s kind of thinking about are we looking at winning the offseason or are we looking to take that next leap for this team?”
Translation: the teams that went out, spent a bunch of money, energized their fan bases, sold a ton of tickets and jerseys they might otherwise not have, but then ended up missing the playoffs in year one of those big deals aren’t the ones to be emulated.
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For most fans, who don’t keep up on the latest sabermetric evolution or have never been members of the cult of the GM — who really just want to see their team win, or at least try to win — that’s the kind of attitude from this front office that really gets noticed. It’s felt deeply. And not in a good way.
The Jays might get more leeway from those who nerd out on the day-to-day details and goings on of the club and the industry, but even for those types the veneer is wearing thin. It’s hard to watch a team like the Red Sox announce a ticket price increase, while simultaneously looking to potentially offload marquee players like Mookie Betts and J.D. Martinez, and not notice that something is terribly off about the industry right now.
The Jays’ current situation is merely one symptom of an ever-deepening rot that has put the owners’ interests far ahead of the players’ and the fans’.
The Rays will face the Astros in one of the two American League Division Series that begin this week. It’s a matchup that pits one of the league’s extreme low payroll teams against one that features two pitchers — Astros Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole — whose individual salaries alone are nearly as high as that of the entire roster of their opponent. The scandal there is that the Rays payroll is so low, not that two elite pitchers are compensated so well, but that doesn’t feel like the way the situation is being cast in this tweet from ESPN — an MLB rights-holder that signed a $5.6 billion deal with the league back in 2012.
Gerrit Cole's and Justin Verlander's combined salary is nearly 78% of the Rays' 25-man payroll 😬 pic.twitter.com/00jJdqao6n
— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) October 3, 2019
Yes, smart teams are able to do more with less. But at what cost? The Rays and their shabby attendance numbers (they finished dead last in the American League in total attendance this season; the awful Blue Jays finished eighth) are not a great example, because there are other problems with that market, but the levels of apathy around a Blue Jays team behaving in much the same way — participating in the same business culture, being as disciplined as everyone else about player value and grinding as much as possible out of service time loopholes and the increasingly stingy non-elite free agent market — are high.
The expectation from the club is that a reinvigorated Blue Jays team will, in a year or two, make us all forget about the three dark seasons we’ve just been through. Maybe they’ll be right. But it’s not a given that they’re going to get there, and they only make it harder on themselves by insisting on putting ownership’s resources so far ahead of the fan experience.
“We want to take that next step, moving from competing to winning,” Shapiro said this week. “What those opportunities are and when they present themselves, we have to be prepared starting this offseason.”
What I hear, and what I think a lot of fans hear, when I try to decipher such pablum is the classic Bart Simpson line: “I can’t promise I’ll try, but I’ll try to try.”
For most Jays fans that simply isn’t good enough.
(Photo: Vaughn Ridley/Getty Images)