TORONTO – Shortly after the trade deadline had passed, John Schneider huddled up what remained of the Toronto Blue Jays’ core group for a talk. The gathering, the manager explained afterwards, was meant to answer questions from his players and to reinforce to them that the club wasn’t “totally rebuilding” and intended to be competitive again in 2025.
What Chris Bassitt took from the meeting nearly three weeks ago, “I’m not going to divulge,” he said Monday, but “the one thing I’ll say, just speaking for myself, is I take a lot of pride and I’m very grateful that the Blue Jays looked at the guys they looked at, looked at myself and said, ‘Hey, you’re the guys we’re trying to build around for next year.’”
“Never once have I thought, hey, I want to get traded. Never once have I thought, I don’t want to be here,” he continued during an interview with Sportsnet colleague Arden Zwelling and me. “I’m not someone to so-called run away from a problem. I want to be part of the solution. For them to say, ‘We think you are part of the solution,’ I was very happy for that. It makes handling the situation a lot easier. Not saying it is easy, but overall it makes it easier.”
All of which is why he feels some of his comments on an episode of the Chris Rose Rotation that dropped Monday — particularly the Blue Jays having some problems that “I don’t think are fixable” and that they “didn’t have a pivot” after Shohei Ohtani chose the Los Angeles Dodgers — were being taken “to the extreme” rather than how he intended.
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The problems he sees as unfixable are situational rather than structural, he explained, while the lack of an off-season pivot was a product of market options, not a lack of front-office ambition.
“I think too many people will see that and be like, ‘Oh, (shoot), he’s talking about a massive problem. Things are going really, really bad and they can’t solve them.’ That’s not what I’m saying,” he said. “I’m saying there are variables in the game that you literally cannot change.”
An example of those problems that can’t be fixed, for instance, “I’m going to be 36 next year. You can’t change me to 26. You can’t change age. You can’t change things like that.”
“I think we do an unbelievable job here,” Bassitt said. “I don’t think anyone in the league takes care of families better than the Blue Jays. From a front-office standpoint with the players, we have unbelievable discussions all the time. From the coaching standpoint, they love to listen to us. I think they do an unbelievable job. But there are variables that are issues. The reality is you can’t fix them. (Kevin Gausman) is going to be 34. (Jose) Berrios has a ton of innings on his arm. I would love to have Berrios having 200 career innings and me and Gausy being 24. But that’s just not the reality.
“I would love to have Bo (Bichette) not have two calf injuries this year. That stinks. I would love to have (Jordan) Romano not coming off the surgery. All those different things. There are things that we just can’t fix. They’re what we are handed. … It’s just a frustrating time because so many people here expected to be a World Series contender, to be a great team. And it just didn’t play out that way. That’s it.”
As for the lack of pivot about Ohtani, well, there certainly wasn’t a Plan B on the market, especially with Juan Soto being traded to the New York Yankees by the San Diego Padres, for a package the Blue Jays could not match, in the days before the two-way superstar made his decision.
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“The free agent market was Ohtani,” said Bassitt. “There wasn’t like a No. 1 and a No. 2 and a No. 3. It wasn’t that. We went after the biggest guy and, unfortunately, we didn’t get him. … There wasn’t another option. That’s just the reality. So then, OK, we tried to do the best we can. We obviously got Justin Turner and Justin Turner is absolutely no slouch. He did unbelievable things for us. (Isiah Kiner-Falefa) was someone we called ‘The War King’ because he was an unbelievable player. So, we got great players. It was just Ohtani was the best of the best.
“You can’t say the front office didn’t have a goal to be the best possible team. Because they went after the best possible player. Saying that doesn’t even make sense. But we want to be the best team. We want to win a World Series. And I think the front office obviously shares those exact same goals. It’s great to be here when you have a front office that truly believes that. But at the same time, everyone’s frustrated. It is what it is.”
Those frustrations are why Bassitt’s comments to Chris Rose may have landed in ways he didn’t intend. These are unsettled times for the Blue Jays, with major directional questions to be answered in the weeks and months ahead. He’s speaking hard truths amid a see-what-we’ve-got-in-the-young-guys, build-for-next-year finish.
“We have to have them be 100-per-cent capable, 100-per-cent ready for next year because this year expectations are obviously low, but what happens next year when expectations are super high?” said Bassitt. “And we’re in the thick of a playoff race and things are a hundred times harder mentally, a hundred times harder physically. Just because you’re chasing something now. You’re truly chasing something. So we’re just trying to get everything right, so that everyone is ready for that, everyone’s capable of that.”
