Blue Jays executive James Click talks new front office role, future in Toronto

TORONTO – Within a week last November, James Click celebrated a World Series win as the Houston Astros' general manager, received a seemingly disingenuous one-year offer to stay on as GM and became a free agent after declining to stay in Houston under those circumstances.

The sequence of events was as unusual as it sounds. Just once in the last 75 years has the GM of the World Series winners not returned.

A few months later, without preamble or fanfare, the Blue Jays made an announcement. They’d hired Click, 45, as their VP of baseball strategy. Soon afterwards, he arrived at the team’s player development facility in Dunedin, Fla. and started to work. But he initially declined to elaborate on the sequence of events that led him to Toronto or his new job, preferring to familiarize himself with his new colleagues first.

Six weeks into his tenure with the Blue Jays, Click spoke publicly about his role with the Blue Jays for the first time. In an interview with Sportsnet, he discussed the path that led him to the Blue Jays, shared details on his role with the Toronto front office and said he can see himself staying in this capacity for "quite a long time."

As for the ending of his Astros tenure, Click kept his comments brief. "It's not something I'm focused on," he said. "I'm focused on the Blue Jays. That's in the past. I'm worried about the present and the future."

Once it was clear that his time with the Astros was over, Click started hearing from teams interested in his services. Knowing that he’d reached a turning point in his career, he also reflected on what he wanted for himself and his family.

At that point, Click wasn’t particularly close with Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins, though he knew him professionally as a rival GM. As the calls came in, Atkins expressed interest in getting to know Click more.

"It was an extremely flattering experience," Click said. "I was extremely fortunate to be able to have quite a few conversations with quite a few teams. For me, it was a great chance to take a step back, take a little time off and reflect on what is it about this game that really is important to me… the more that I reflected on that, the more conversations that I had, the more it led me to this situation here."

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Click's role with the Blue Jays will be unlike anything he's done in baseball. When he started with the Tampa Bay Rays in 2006, he worked on building out their proprietary database, using his coding skills to pull in as much information as possible.

Over the years, his role expanded as he worked alongside future GMs including Andrew Friedman, Chaim Bloom, Erik Neander, Matt Arnold and Peter Bendix. Looking back, Click believes he benefitted from "learning from those guys, working with those guys, being around those guys, being in that intellectually challenging, intellectually stimulating environment."

By 2019, his final season with the Rays, he was helping oversee various aspects of baseball operations alongside Neander and Bloom, thinking strategically about how to compete with fewer resources than the Yankees, Red Sox and Blue Jays.

By then he was no longer coding the way he did when he first broke in. "The math, quite candidly, has moved beyond me," he laughed. Soon, another opportunity emerged.

In Houston, Click inherited a World Series calibre team and his job was to keep the Astros performing at an elite level. The results over three seasons: a 230-154 record, three ALCS appearances, two AL pennants and one World Series win.

"I’ve been fortunate to be with to this point, two organizations that have been two of the most successful organizations in baseball over the recent past, and they each go about things differently," Click said. "Sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice. But part of the appeal of coming here is to see some of the lessons that I've learned over the past two franchises and see what I can bring to the Blue Jays to help them."

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Now, Click’s role will be different by design. Because Atkins handles the team’s day-to-day operations with assistant GMs Joe Sheehan, Mike Murov and others, Click has the freedom to work with various departments without having to worry about telling a reliever he’s been optioned, for instance, or leading the way on extension negotiations. Plus, all involved are taking the long view with the expectation that Click’s contributions won’t be limited to a single season.

"The role itself was designed to be fairly broad and to give me and the Blue Jays freedom," Click said. "Part of the appeal is that this is a situation where I can foresee myself being here for quite a long time. It's obviously a very exciting, very talented team."

Given Click’s background his work will likely include a close look at the Blue Jays' research and development operations, but he won't be limited to a single area.

With the daily operations already under control, Click will spend time thinking about "where this game is going to be five years from now and 10 years from now." To attempt to answer that question, he'll follow other sports and other industries with a view toward making sure "this organization is perpetually competitive."

Part of that challenge means pulling in as much information as possible and using it to create better decision systems. For instance, technology like TrackMan, Statcast and Hawk-Eye means baseball executives have more information than ever.

Which is good, "but that also changes how you do the rest of your job," Click said. "It changes how you scout, it changes how you develop players. And so making sure that we don't keep doing things the way that they've always been done in the face of all this new information is critical."

So instead of chasing exit velocity for the sake of exit velocity, executives attempt to understand the bigger picture. Ideally, that information — understood within proper context — helps identify, acquire and develop talent better.

"The reason that those things are predictive and informative of future performance is based on the context in which they're observed," Click said. "So if you start chasing those kinds of things and forget how to teach how to swing properly, how to work at that, how to recognize what a pitcher is trying to do to you and all the other skills that players need, (skills) that sometimes we can observe with our eyes and sometimes we can observe with cameras and sometimes we can observe it with other pieces of technology. But we have to make sure that we balance all of that and don't simply chase whatever the newest, latest, greatest thing is and forget about the reason why that’s important about performance."

First, though, Click's been making a point of getting to know as many people as possible. As Rays farm director Mitch Lukevics once put it to Click, seagull management — an approach where "you fly in, you (excrete) on everything, you fly out" — is best avoided.

"It's critical that I develop a level of trust with the people in this organization before I come in and start making recommendations," Click said.

"Obviously where I come from, things have been done differently," he added. "Just because they've been done differently doesn't mean they're better or worse. Yeah, I think it's critical for me to understand why we're doing the things we're doing here at the Blue Jays before starting to make recommendations on things I feel like could be changed."

There’s no shortage of territory for Click to cover with his new team as he familiarizes himself across multiple departments. It may take time to cover all of that ground, and that's seemingly fine with Click. Asked whether he’d want to be a GM again, he didn’t sound like someone in a rush to land elsewhere.

"One of the things that is important is stability," he said. "I have two kids that are in elementary school, and providing stability for them is, if not my primary focus, one of the primary focuses that I have. It’s something that was really important to me when I was making this decision. And this is a role, an organization that I could very easily see being here for a very long time. That's my focus."