Are big-spending Toronto Blue Jays aiming low? Feels like it

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It was a vastly different Canadian Thanksgiving weekend for Blue Jays management than it was a year ago.

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In 2024, it was quiet resignation far from the spotlight for a team that was nowhere near good enough as the American and National League championship series got under way.

A year ago, it was mayhem.

Freshly eliminated from the playoffs with nowhere to hide — not even an attempt to bury the gloom with a Thanksgiving Saturday press conference would do that — a defiant general manager Ross Atkins threw manager John Schneider under the bus for the Jose Berrios playoff disaster.

Fun times.

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And now as baseball’s final four are squaring off, we’re left to ponder if perhaps the Blue Jays are aiming too low.

With a top-tier payroll and a bottom-10 performance, the Jays are in stark contrast to the surviving teams. It has to pain the Toronto front office to see the Dodgers thrive with the one that got away (Shohei Ohtani) and the one they gave away two years ago via trade (Teoscar Hernandez). But that’s baseball.

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What’s more concerning comes after parsing some of the comments of team president Mark Shapiro in his season-ending address a day after this year’s playoffs began.

“Ross needs to be better,” Shapiro said in the contrition portion of his comments. “I need to be better. Our entire baseball operations need to be better. But I also think about the fact that we played in the playoffs three of the past five years, that four of the past five we played meaningful games through September …”

Not exactly reaching for the sky, are we?

Left unsaid is that in three of the past seven full seasons, the Jays have had fewer than 80 wins, including the embarrassing regression of the just-completed 74-88 effort. And those three playoff appearances have yet to yield a single win, with the past two exits being particularly gruesome.

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Furthermore, for a team with an opening-day payroll estimated at $234 million US (the ninth-highest in MLB) to finish decidedly bottom 10 in results speaks volumes.

Sure, there were injuries and dips in performance, but few teams in baseball don’t suffer through those issues. Bloated payrolls don’t always lead to results, either, but they sure have this October.

The Mets may be the only non-division winner in the championship round, but they led all of baseball with a payroll of $332 million while the Yankees ($311 million) and Los Angeles Dodgers ($266 million) rounded out the top three, according to MLB. The Guardians are the bargain-basement over-achievers with a payroll of $109 million.

The fact that the Yankees, Dodgers and Guardians all are division winners also flies in the face of another Blue Jays front office head-scratcher — the idea that just getting into the post-season is enough of a pre-season goal. Each have benefited from not merely sneaking in via the playoff back door.

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In citing the recent “success” of his team, by the way, Shapiro was rationalizing a defence of the spotty record of his GM, Atkins.

“To me, that’s not grounds to make a change,” Shapiro said. “If I felt there was a better alternative to run our baseball operation, I’d make that change.

“There had been a lot of success here over the last five years. It doesn’t feel like that in this moment because it was so tough to watch what we watched. But those same people built a very good baseball team over the past four years prior to this. So we need to be open-minded. We need to completely reconsider the things we’re doing.”

The only hard truth in any of those comments is the final sentence: There is a clear need to re-evaluate how the team spends the hundreds of millions of Rogers Communications cash, an exercise that got a head start this off-season.

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Then again, Atkins seemingly contradicted his boss’s view, preferring to cast 2024 more as an outlier than source of outrage.

“Talent acquisition, in our view, has been strong,” Atkins said. “Our pro scouting and research group has been strong in that area. It’s on me to complement it better and then it’s on us to deploy it in a way that is maximizing the group.

“We are definitively committed to this core.”

How they intend to add to that core is the multi-million dollar question of yet another critical off-season. Nothing wrong with being a big spender, but as the Dodgers and Yankees especially have shown, spending wisely is the key.

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