What Atkins does next will be critical for Blue Jays after stunning setback

TORONTO – There’s no making what happened to the Toronto Blue Jays in Game 2 any better, nothing anyone can say to ease the anger, erase the hurt, or change the bitter outcome. Much like the 1985 American League Championship Series, the seven straight losses to close out 1987 and the playoff drubbings in 1989 and 1991, the wild-card series against the Seattle Mariners will be part of the franchise narrative until a new round of October success ensures it’s not.

This is the show-us-don’t-tell-us space in which the Blue Jays are now firmly planted.

Still, how general manager Ross Atkins and the baseball operations department processes this is vital, because the next steps really matter.

Absent long-term extensions for cornerstones Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette and, time to include him in this category, Alek Manoah, the clock is ticking on this core. The bullpen can’t be a soft-spot again in 2023 after costing the club a trip to the playoffs in 2021 and undermining their chances against the Mariners this year. They can’t spend another summer working through the issues with consistency, focus and attention to detail that, particularly early in 2022, nearly submarined their season.

Having whiffed in the hiring of Charlie Montoyo, with whom it’s reasonable to wonder if he ever really meshed, Atkins must get the hiring of the next Blue Jays manager right, which is why he left himself some very notable wiggle room even after saying that, “I think it will be very difficult for us to find better than John Schneider.”

“Out of respect for the organization, out of respect for John Schneider, I do want time to work through the process with him,” Atkins added during his season-wrap meeting with media Tuesday.

Translated from executive-speak, every single thing the Blue Jays do must run through their beloved processes and they need to go through one before removing Schneider’s interim tag. That will involve, at a minimum, talking internally about a few other names but the bigger piece will be Atkins and Schneider both hammering out what a long-term relationship looks like.

It worked over 74 games this summer because it had to after Montoyo’s firing but, over the long-term, are they ready to work together? Do they see eye-to-eye on enough things, including a balance of control? Can they build a trust that never developed between Atkins and Montoyo? Can they avoid the same pitfalls?

No one should doubt Schneider’s commitment to the Blue Jays after two decades with the organization, but with four other vacancies around the majors, he’d be well within his rights to explore his options, too.

Still, given the way he worked to establish consistent requirements for his players, emphasized attention to detail, both publicly (think of him calling out Guerrero Jr. for poor baserunning) and privately quashed moments of carelessness, and tried to mould the clubhouse into a more cohesive group, he established himself as the right person for the job.

“If you think about his history with this organization and his history with the players, you’re seeing how he handled the pressure, seeing how he handled decision-making, how he handled communication, we feel that he's a very strong candidate,” said Atkins. “And if you put all of those pieces together and then knowing what we know about external candidates, I feel like it would be very difficult to do better than him.”

Resolution on that front should come in the next two or three weeks, with decisions on the coaching staff to follow, and while there’s plenty more on the docket, in some ways it’s the platform for everything that’s to follow.

After all, no matter what the Blue Jays do from a roster standpoint, and we’ll delve into that in a bit, the players must be deployed effectively. To do so requires alignment from the moment of acquisition, ensuring that the coaching staff knows how the player fits and how to help him deliver optimal performance. There needs to be more trust all around.

The Blue Jays need only to look at how they didn’t perform to their talent level on a consistent basis until after Montoyo’s dismissal, going 46-42 under him before a 46-28 finish under Schneider. Further closing the gap between how ability and preparation translated into consistent execution on the field is essential.

“I just feel like you continue to work to make it better,” said Atkins. “John Schneider was a big step in that process and that's why he's put himself in a good position.”

Personnel is part of that equation and despite the post-season outcome, worth remembering is that the Blue Jays won 92 games and have consecutive 90-win seasons for just the second time franchise history, so the roster starts in a good position.

With Ross Stripling ($3.79 million) and David Phelps ($1.75 million) the club’s only pending free agents, very little money is coming off the books and with 13 players eligible for arbitration, simply retaining their current roster will be significantly more expensive. Based on MLB Trade Rumors’ projections, the cost of Guerrero Jr. ($14.8 million), Teoscar Hernandez ($14.1 million) and Bichette ($6.1 million) and Jordan Romano ($4.4 million) will rise roughly $20 million alone.

As a result, the likelihood is that the Blue Jays, having shopped in the upper-end aisles (signing Hyun Jin Ryu, George Springer, Kevin Gausman and extending Jose Berrios) the past three winters, will likely need to make trades to get back there this winter. The financial flexibility of years past won’t return until after 2023, when several significant contracts, including that of Ryu, comes of the books.

Hernandez is one name to watch either way, as Springer – who suffered a concussion and a shoulder sprain in his collision with Bichette on Saturday and will soon be cleared for travel to determine if he needs surgery to remove a bone spur on his troublesome right elbow – may be better off in right field instead of centre.

A left-handed or switch-hitting centre-fielder would be ideal and one could perhaps be acquired with their surplus of catchers. The St. Louis Cardinals, set to lose the retiring Yadier Molina, have Dylan Carlson and right-fielder Lars Nootbar and make for an interesting potential match.

Regardless, balancing out a right-handed heavy lineup has long been a desire but one that’s easier said than done when the acquisition cost is factored in for a potentially marginal gain. There’s little point in change for the sake of change.

Yet, worth noting is Atkins pointing out that “there is something to having similar types of hitters and game-planning for them that we need to dig deeper into and how we can account for that and offset that." He is essentially acknowledging his lineup may need to be more diverse.

Stripling’s potential departure leaves a rotation fronted by Manoah, Gausman and Berrios, with Yusei Kikuchi and Mitch White as potential options for the mix. At least one, if not two arms is needed there while the bullpen needs more swing and miss, something Atkins acknowledged contributed to Saturday’s stunning setback.

Nate Pearson and Julian Merryweather are among internal options there, but like Kikuchi, they can’t be counted on to be major contributors. Building out a better layer of minor-league depth will be needed and there’s also a private acknowledgement that the Blue Jays should have done more on the minor-league free agent front coming out of the lockout, rather than counting on Bowden Francis, Thomas Hatch, Anthony Kay and Pearson to provide a layer of protection.

All of it will be done with the aim of avoiding a repeat of the weekend, when the Blue Jays went into a series with the Mariners expecting to be in Houston facing the Astros this week instead of home, pondering what went wrong and how to get better.

There will be a deep dive into that, too, trying to decide how much to read into a two-game sample, although one that came amid the highly charged pressures of the post-season.

“Some, for sure. We definitely want to think about why that occurred,” said Atkins. “Why were we out in two games and what needs to change to decrease the likelihood of that? But I still feel that the hardest thing to do is to win a division to get into the playoffs and you put yourself in those positions to then be successful. But yes, we definitely need to be thinking about that and determine how to weigh that we've just started that process.”

After adding to the wrong end of franchise lore, it’s the only path forward for the Blue Jays.