The final month of the MLB regular season is underway, and while it hasn’t been a successful campaign in the standings for the Toronto Blue Jays, wins weren’t exactly the sole goal of the year for the rebuilding club.
The 55-85 team is coming off back-to-back losses to the Braves in Atlanta to open up September and is now preparing for a four-game series against the Rays. The home stretch will also include the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. In other words, it won’t be an easy stretch to close out 2019 – and that’s a good thing.
“I view that as a positive. I think it’s great for our players to measure themselves and to see what it takes to be not just in the big leagues but what the elite teams look like,” Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro said during an appearance on Baseball Central on Sportsnet 590 The FAN Wednesday. “I think since the middle of June, we’ve been competing extremely well.”
The 2019 season has seen several young players get the call up to the big leagues, giving Blue Jays management plenty to work with and providing exciting moments for fans with an eye to what’s to come: wins.
“The next step is to move from competing to winning,” said Shapiro. “We’ve got young players and when you transition young players all at once – which you ideally don’t want to do but circumstance has us doing that – you’re going to have some challenges. Young players need to be surrounded with players who are in their prime and veteran players who can kind of help them balance, but we’re moving towards that and right now we are learning about our young players, they are learning about what it takes to compete in the big leagues, they’re learning about major-league life … which is an adjustment in and of itself. There are great things happening and reasons to be extremely optimistic and positive looking around our major-league diamond and then throughout our entire system.”
That system has helped develop young and exciting talents like Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette and Cavan Biggio, three youngsters who have given Blue Jays fans plenty of reasons for optimism about the direction of Toronto’s team.
With talk of the future comes, naturally, talk of future contracts. As some of Shapiro’s peers have opted to lock up their youngsters to lucrative long-term deals earlier than has been the norm (Eloy Jimenez and Ronald Acuna Jr., for example), the Blue Jays president was asked if he’s considering a similar approach – especially when it comes to Guerrero and Bichette.
“It will not happen until we’re done our off-season business and will probably happen more towards the spring and spring training,” Shapiro said. “But we will certainly, when it comes down to our zero-to-three players – with zero to three years of service – anyone in that group we’ll kind of evaluate, think about, do they fit the values and what we value as far as teammate, leader, championship makeup and character, and we’ll look at their talent and ability and I would expect that, whether it’s public or not, we will explore alternatives for multi-year deals for our young players every year, whoever fits that criteria. You talk about guys that we feel are among the best young players in the game, those would be natural conversations to have.”
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