TORONTO – In the midst of what so far feels like another “explain this to me like I’m a six-year-old” kind of off-season, let’s take stock of the Toronto Blue Jays as the holidays loom.
Their most significant transaction to date is the acquisition of Andres Gimenez, the three-time Gold Glove second baseman owed $99.357 million over the next five years, which is very quietly the fifth-largest financial commitment to a player in club history.
|
Player |
Contract |
Type |
|
George Springer |
$150 million, six years |
Free Agent |
|
Jose Berrios |
$131 million, seven years |
Extension |
|
Vernon Wells |
$126 million, seven years |
Extension |
|
Kevin Gausman |
$110 million, five years |
Free Agent |
|
Andres Gimenez |
$99.357 million, five years |
Trade
|
Along with reliever Nick Sandlin – also coming over from the Cleveland Guardians in the trade that sent out Spencer Horwitz (subsequently flipped to Pittsburgh) and prospect Nick Mitchell – and the reunion with leverage arm Yimi Garcia ($15 million, two years), the trio raises a Blue Jays floor that concaved badly during last season’s 74-88 misery march.
The question then is whether those moves were the winter’s appetizer or main course, and assessing that requires wading through the wildly contradictory information circulating in the industry about the club. The consensus is that the Blue Jays are trying to do more and remain engaged all over the market. But they are alternately described as having money to spend or are in every-dollar-counts mode, eager to pounce or prepared to be patient (lean toward patience). Meanwhile, an American League East already ahead of them in nearly every way keeps beefing up around them. Still, plenty of inventory and off-season remain.
As well, looming over everything for the Blue Jays is the still unsettled long-term future of Vladimir Guerrero Jr., the centrepiece among several players with contracts expiring after either the 2025 or 2026 seasons, who could fully collapse the current competitive window.
So, clearly, a precarious spot for the organization. Based on conversations with several industry sources, let’s break things down:
Adding Andres Gimenez
Gimenez, as noted, is a substantial spend, the first Blue Jays player with guaranteed money in 2029, a player who helps refresh the core, a game-changing defender heading into his age 26 season to boot. Unsaid is that he’s also positioned to take over at shortstop if Bo Bichette departs via free agency next winter, or gets traded ahead of the deadline next summer.
That’s one of the quiet parts. The other one, which isn’t so quiet, is that Gimenez has struggled at the plate since his breakout 2022, when he had an OPS of .837 and an OPS+ of 141. Those numbers dropped to .712/96 in 2023 and .638/82 this season, raising the possibility that his value to a team desperate for more offence will be primarily defensive.
During a Zoom call with media last week, Guardians president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti said, “we continue to believe Andres has a chance to be a really productive major-league hitter,” and the club had been working to “really clarify and align with him on what production looks like for him as a hitter and help him work back towards that.”
Asked to describe what that production looks like, Antonetti responded that “it’s best at this point to probably allow the Blue Jays to articulate exactly what that looks like. I can share that we think there’s a better offensive player in there than we were able to see over the course of the last year or so.”
Maybe, but even if the Guardians’ main goal was to reallocate Gimenez’s salary since they feel they have middle-infield depth, as Antonetti explained, they would have found a better return if more teams were willing to bet on his bat the way the Blue Jays did.
That makes this a significant risk, even if two rival executives said Gimenez’s defence is so elite that it alone justifies his salary. In a vacuum, sure, but as a third executive cautioned, the Blue Jays need to be wary of falling into a WAR trap, where a player’s primary value can’t be fully leveraged because of other shortcomings on the roster.
On a team with a deep and productive heart of the order, carrying a player whose value is mainly derived from defence is fine. But the Blue Jays need at least one more impact bat to help support Guerrero and as 2024 showed, counting on internal improvement and run prevention alone can blow up in a team’s face.
Maybe that happens again next summer. Or maybe Gimenez recaptures the 2022 form that earned him the big extension from Cleveland and joins with another offensive addition in strengthening the lineup. But the Blue Jays, presumably, scoured the market and concluded that Gimenez was the best bang for their limited bucks, an especially fateful call if it cuts them off from other pursuits.
Other Pursuits and Payroll Considerations
A natural byproduct of the Blue Jays’ omnipresent approach across all markets this off-season is that they can be anything to anyone, since their pursuits make everything seem plausible. On the one hand, they’re chasing Juan Soto a year after trying to lure Shohei Ohtani north, refusing to let cost serve as a barrier-to-entry. On the other hand, they’re non-tendering Jordan Romano, who ends up signing with the Philadelphia Phillies for more than what his salary would have cost in arbitration.
Reckless spendthrifts to heartless misers, they’ve got it covered.
Tough as that is to reconcile, the pattern of this front office is to pursue top talent while sticking to their valuation. At times, when they’ve needed to lunge to push a deal across the finish line (Hyun Jin Ryu and George Springer, in particular) they have. Since jumping early to sign Kendrys Morales ($33 million, three years) at the very beginning of the 2016-17 off-season, they’ve generally opted to wait out markets in search of the best deals.
So, they are engaged on Corbin Burnes, who is no doubt seeking a payday beyond Max Fried’s $218-million, eight-year contract with the Yankees. Given that the Fried contract blew past their comfort point, the same may very well play out with the ace right-hander.
The Blue Jays also continue to have interest in reuniting with Teoscar Hernandez and Anthony Santander, among other players, although how they value them and how much spending room they still have is tough to pin down.
Those pursuits suggest a certain level of spending capacity. Another clue is that they were in on Cody Bellinger, as John Heyman of the New York Post first mentioned, before the Cubs sent him and $5 million to the Yankees for righty Cody Poteet.
Since Bellinger is owed $27.5 million this year with a $5 million buyout on a $25 million player option for 2026, the Blue Jays could only have engaged if they were able to handle something along those financial lines.
Now, their payroll, as I understand it, isn’t simply here’s your budget, you have X to spend. There’s a baseline that gets established and that may be what president and CEO Mark Shapiro was referring to when he said on Oct. 2 that he didn’t see the payroll “either growing or decreasing in a big way” from 2024’s spending. But there’s leeway to extend for special opportunities – that’s how they would have paid for Ohtani and Soto – so they can push high for players with a justifiable business case.
FanGraphs currently projects the Blue Jays 2025 payroll for Competitive Balance Tax purposes at $228.5 million. Their belief is that they snuck under the $237 million luxury tax threshold in 2024, when their payroll began the season pushing toward $250 million, so that may very well be the band for them next year, when the first tax threshold is $241 million and the second is $261 million.
Hence, they appear to have some money to work with, but can’t spend indiscriminately.
Extending Vladdy
Just as Fernando Tatis Jr.’s $340-million, 14-year pre-arbitration extension with the San Diego Padres in 2021 changed the dynamics of early attempts to sign Guerrero and Bichette long-term, Soto’s $765-million, 15-year contract with the Mets is a new factor for future free agents.
The exact impact is open for debate, as even influential agent Scott Boras, who represents Soto among many other players, said record contracts are “kind of an umbrella and there’s shade to a point for the elite players, but not to his level.”
“One great generational talent does not impact a market exponentially,” he continued. “It’s something that graduates very slowly because we’re back to the theorem of good business. Owners are going to only do things for certain skill levels and ages. And those types of players only really come along once a decade, 20 years.”
Soto was the perfect storm of talent, age (selling his age 26 season and beyond) and market competition. Guerrero, another dynamic generational talent, will be selling his age 27 season and beyond and there’s good reason to think he could trigger a similar type of bidding frenzy, even if not at those lofty dollar levels.
The challenge for the Blue Jays, then, is buying Guerrero out of the opportunity to see how high the open market might push his salary, especially if he delivers another monster season. Assessing how far the goalposts have moved is complicated and perhaps other teams are needed to help define his value in the post-Soto world, because while teams negotiate off their valuations, players often look to established salary structures and slot themselves in relative to their peers.
For a deal to get done before Guerrero hits free agency, then, the Blue Jays will have to veer way out of their comfort zone and the four-time all-star first baseman will have to surrender some upside.
Threading that needle won’t be easy, but it’s possible. The time around the arbitration filing deadline of Jan. 9 and the beginning of spring training will be a leading indicator of where this is headed.
