TORONTO – Well, that was gross.
Litigate and parse Ross Atkins’ words Saturday any way you’d like – this is article of faith stuff deserving of scrutiny – but far more important than anything he said in wrapping up the Toronto Blue Jays’ season and gutting wild-card sweep to the Minnesota Twins is what he didn’t say.
Two things in particular would have gone a long way in healing his fractured and factionalized club, statements along the lines of, “whatever decisions John Schneider makes, he has my unequivocal support,” and “we didn’t lose because Jose Berrios was pulled from the game, win or lose, we do it as a collective group and all bear equal responsibility.”
Even better, after confirming that Schneider will return as manager next year, he would have added something like, “I don’t want John to feel any pressure about his decisions and if he did, I’ll make sure that he doesn’t feel any shred of doubt about his autonomy going forward.”
Instead, the eighth-year GM engaged in what felt like 47 minutes of butt-covering – 27 minutes before broadcast cameras, then 20 more in a separate session with writers. Rather than taking an opportunity to show leadership by protecting his manager and coaching staff, while unifying his players after a hard season and gutting loss, Atkins went all Shaggy singing, “It Wasn’t Me.”
“I have 100 per cent confidence that it’s not front-office pressure,” Atkins replied when asked if he believed his manager would have replaced Berrios with Yusei Kikuchi if he didn’t feel any sense of pressure or expectation from above. “I would love for you to talk to John Schneider about that (the Blue Jays have no plans to make him available to media).
“What I can share with you that I feel, and I’m trying not to speak for him but I’ve obviously spoken to him a lot in the last 24 hours, but I feel based on some of the things that he said, the fact that the plan was somewhat in place, Yusei (Kikuchi) had been warming, there was this opportunity to get the right-handed hitters into the game early, which would set us up great late, trumped what he was feeling on the field,” Atkins continued.
“And he was feeling it, too, how well Jose was pitching. There was not an influence from the (front) office that factored into that, other than maybe that it was an organizational strategy that had been communicated to players. When I say organizational, I’m including players, many players, over the course of the days prior to that strategy. In our view, the strategy ended up getting us to a point where we deployed the right-handed relievers in an effective way against a more right-handed hitting lineup that led us to an outcome where we allowed two runs in a playoff game. We see that from a run-prevention standpoint as a solid outcome and a good chance to win a game.”
Who came up with strategy? It wasn’t me.
Who presented it to the coaching staff? It wasn’t me.
Who was in the pre-game planning meeting? It wasn’t me.
Who’s responsible for locking in reliever scenarios? It wasn’t me.
Atkins did detail the thought-process behind the strategy – which has merit if Berrios was grinding, not shoving – and described the team’s pre-game planning meetings, which he said are attended by Schneider, the coaching staff and Theron Simpson, the club’s game-planning co-ordinator. Omitted is that there’s always someone from the front office there, too.
And while he purposely recuses himself from those meetings so no one feels influenced by his presence, any front office member present could, by proxy, have that effect.
Atkins said he was “surprised” when Berrios was pulled for Kikuchi, but refused to answer multiple times when asked if he thought the move was a mistake. “I’m not going to go into revisionist and second-guessing,” he said. “The outcome of us getting to the end of the game and only allowing two runs is a good one and put us in a position to win. We didn’t score runs.”
That’s not wrong. But among the many, many words said, not one was accountability, which would be expected from a leader at a time of crisis, and none expressed full support for the manager and his decision-making regardless of outcome, which would help Schneider with players next season.
In that way, that micro details Atkins entered into the public discourse were both distracting from and reflective of the wider issues the Blue Jays must resolve.
Asked about some of the post-game comments from players, he said, “we’ve all got to get better. I have to get better. We have to make this organization better,” but stressing that the decision was Schneider’s and not his won’t help the club’s cohesion.
As much as Atkins was speaking to the public, he was also speaking to everyone in the organization Saturday. You can be certain that voices that matter weren’t exactly sitting there thinking, he’ll have my back if things go bad, or I’d run through a wall for him.
To be fair, Atkins was facing the nearly impossible task of making sense of a bad decision at the end of a beneath-expectations season and a missed-opportunity wild-card series in which the Blue Jays got bounced by an inferior opponent.
Really, given all the bile everywhere, there’s probably nothing he could have said to make things OK.
But there might have been a win in circling the wagons, in being as open as he at points was while avoiding the litigation, in saying repeatedly something like, “we are one team, we weren’t good enough this year and we’ll collectively make sure we’ll be better next year.”
Because if he thinks that he told his organization what it needed to hear, well this was akin to watching Jerry Dipoto’s season-ending news conference and telling his Seattle Mariners counterpart, Mr. Doing-Fans-a-Favour himself, to hold his beer.
Where the Blue Jays go from here is unclear, but it’s imperative they get things right, fast.
The offence, as Atkins mentioned, is in need of fixing and work is underway in digging into this year’s shortcomings.
Atkins spoke of his pending free agents as if they were already gone, saying that “we’ll miss Matt Chapman and Brandon Belt and Kevin Kiermaier and we’ll see opportunities to work to fill those holes from within and externally,” only to describe them as “alternatives” when later asked to clarify.
Their imminent departures, as well as those of Hyun Jin Ryu (he “could also be an alternative for us”) and Whit Merrifield open up a significant chunk of payroll, although internal salary growth will eat up some of that.
Nonetheless, freed-up money will give the Blue Jays a chance to shop where they want in a thin free-agent class in which Chapman and two players they traded last winter, Teoscar Hernandez and Lourdes Gurriel Jr., are among the best hitters available.
The biggest prize, of course, is Shohei Ohtani and some industry chatter in recent weeks suggested he’d be more open to an East Coast club this time around, had taken notice of the Blue Jays’ player-development resources and that the idea of adding a third country, Canada, to his prime fanbase carried some appeal for him.
Whether that’s more than just the usual grist for the mill is a fair question, but it also underlines the current stakes for the Blue Jays.
They’ve done really strong work in establishing themselves as a player-driven franchise. Prior to Game 2, when asked about his pending free agency and his interest level in returning, Chapman said “the thing that I enjoy the most besides my teammates and being here in the city is just how well the organization takes care of their players.”
“They really care about their players, and there’s nothing that they wouldn’t do for you,” he added. “So I have a lot of respect for everybody in this organization and definitely open to coming back.”
He’s not alone.
After hitting the 200-inning mark for the first time in his career, Chris Bassitt, signed as a free agent last winter, noted that, “you have to have so many people to trust you” to reach the plateau. “To have this organization believe in me like they do, it means the world to me.”
Those are powerful endorsements and offer market credibility that’s being eroded at the moment by the Game 2 mess and the fallout since.
The Blue Jays have five days to figure something out as president and CEO Mark Shapiro is scheduled to meet with media Thursday, his first time taking questions publicly since the first phase of the Rogers Centre’s renovations were unveiled before the season.
What he says and does will carry weight for a baseball side that underperformed and is ununified, a public that’s being canvassed for buyers of the new premium experiences being created during this winter’s renovation, and free agents that will want to know what, exactly, they’re signing up for.
And it better be good after a Saturday that really wasn’t. Atkins may have had good intentions in trying to be transparent, in trying to illuminate how the franchise’s most controversial pitching change went down. But he could have also better defended the manager he hired just a year ago from wearing this alone, while telling his people, in every department from the clubhouse to the analytics group, that fingers don’t get pointed, that everything the Blue Jays do is done as a team.
That he didn’t is a real problem, one far deeper than a negative news cycle, one that the passing of time won’t make go away.
