Unsettled Blue Jays facing many issues, including where to begin

TORONTO — Rather than doing a tea-leaf reading of Mark Shapiro’s first media availability since March 21, let’s take the conversation around the myriad questions facing the Toronto Blue Jays in a different direction: What exactly should their order of operations be?

There are so many vital calls to be made in the weeks ahead — front-office status, how to handle the looming free agencies of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette and setting an organizational direction for 2025 and beyond, prime among them — and so many of them are intertwined, that settling on one inherently impacts others.

Hence, can you realistically replace Ross Atkins as general manager if Shapiro’s contract as president and CEO runs only through 2025? If neither has term, how can they implement a meaningful plan that extends beyond the expiration of Atkins’ contract after 2026? Or, for that matter, offer up the type of nine-figure contracts it would take to lock up Guerrero and Bichette, committing the franchise to a path future executives may not want to take?

At the same time, what if it’s getting extensions done with one or both of the dynamic duo that decides how the Blue Jays approach the coming years, which is entirely reasonable? And what if it’s how the team fares in 2025 that settles whether one or both of Shapiro and Atkins continue their stewardship of the club?

For those reasons, what the franchise needs to decide isn’t singularly who’s the GM or president, or how much money there is to spend, or whether to try and contend next year.

Circumstances made their approach at the trade deadline — an astonishing selloff featuring eight present-for-future deals in five days — clear and obvious. Now though, the choices come in sets, which is what makes this moment especially complicated for the Blue Jays. 

To that end, after Shapiro offered up an impressively opaque soundbite hinting at Atkins’ return while leaving all avenues open, he made a couple of intriguing comments that underlined why the order of operations matters. 

Having described stability and continuity as “competitive advantages in professional sports,” he was asked how he weighs those benefits against how change after nine years of stability and continuity can help push things in a different direction.

"Be certain you can be better if you make a change,” he replied.

How do you assess that?

“I'm not going to go through that with you now,” he answered. “That's personal and a process I will go through.”

OK, fair enough, but that’s a macro issue that ties into all the micro matters in need of resolution.

If Atkins is to remain in charge, a rationale stronger than “best in class organizations and sports teams … weather pressure and weather challenges and stick with people and allow them to make adjustments,” is needed from Shapiro to help him navigate the path ahead, because that’s setting the club down one path. 

And if a change is made, well, Shapiro’s status beyond 2025 needs to be settled because who’s taking a GM job when the boss has only on season left on his deal? Realistically, no candidate of substance is taking the job with less than a three-year term, which could potentially set up a new president with two years of a GM they don’t want, so that’s another path.

Whichever route the Blue Jays take impacts the subsequent baseball issues that need to be settled and Shapiro said the focus of his discussions with Atkins have centred around “roster construction, handedness, balancing offence and defence,” all ongoing problems. 

For instance, the Blue Jays rank dead last in at-bats taken with platoon advantage at 39.6 per cent this season, something they were 28^th in last year and 30^th the previous two seasons. That wasn’t a major problem in 2021-22 when the Blue Jays had the personnel to bang with the best offences around, but as they’ve gradually shifted to more of a mix-and-match roster, they’ve had too many redundancies to effectively play that way. 

Some of the trade deadline return helps out there — Joey Loperfido hits left-handed as does Will Wagner, who’s currently at triple-A Buffalo with Jonatan Clase, a switch-hitter — but expecting them alone to suddenly change the franchise’s trajectory is both unfair and unrealistic. 

Solving those issues, then, begins with settling the front office, so the types of players targeted in the off-season can be refined, but that also ties into short- and medium-term approach, financial resources and organizational direction. And while Shapiro stressed the club’s deadline approach made clear the club’s intent to compete next year, “there's a lot of work still to be done before we can make definitive statements about '25.”

Given that, the Blue Jays sound like a team that’s drifting between lanes, trying to keep both directions in the road’s coming fork open, which can easily become a recipe for reacting to circumstance rather than driving for an outcome. 

At a time when the Blue Jays have to figure out how to best leverage their remaining season of Guerrero and Bichette, how to meaningfully build around them if one or both can be extended, or what to do with them if both plan to enter their walk year unsigned, while rebuilding a farm system that even after the deadline reset ranks in in baseball’s bottom third, that’s a way to roll into baseball’s wilderness.

Through that lens, the breadcrumbs of information offered by Shapiro don’t add up to much of a trail to follow. 

If the Blue Jays truly believed “that there's enough talent in place to build a contending championship-calibre team next year,” as Shapiro said, why the equivocation on approach next year? If stability and continuity are such bedrock principles, why not kill the speculation around Atkins and make clear to both the organization and the fanbase that he’s still in charge? If the “greater focus for us is what can we learn” from the struggles this season, isn’t that cause to bring in someone with an outside perspective to help find some answers?

All of that points to a team far more unsettled than it would seem, one facing an immense amount of organization-wide work to be a legitimate contender next year, one lacking an order of operations for where to begin.