BALTIMORE — Two trades amid two games, never mind the rain delay, netting the Toronto Blue Jays four more prospects, one immediately bound for the majors, with time to explore other opportunities, heavy lifting done, before Tuesday’s 6 p.m. ET trade deadline.
Between the emotional goodbyes, the asset reallocation and corresponding roster churn, a wild Monday was yet another (very, very long) day where the actual baseball felt, and to a significant degree was, largely immaterial to the larger happenings around the club.
The trades of Yusei Kikuchi to the Houston Astros, especially, and Justin Turner to the Seattle Mariners in time may be transformative, or perhaps not, as is the inherent risk in such present-for-future transactions. But if the Blue Jays are a house, these deals and the three before them over the weekend, were essential, akin to selling the main-floor furniture to patch up a rotting foundation.
“Obviously (this was) for the good of the team,” Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who had a remarkable 7-for-10 day with two homers and three doubles in the two games, said through interpreter Hector Lebron. “The front office believes in the trades that they’re doing right now, that the people that they bring in are going to help us. Just keep going.”
So, painful as this period is for the franchise — Danny Jansen’s dispatching to Boston on Saturday hit particularly hard up and down the organization — this is what had to happen to reverse a Blue Jays’ collapse several years in the making. Recent drafts didn’t do enough to bolster the organizational base so this season, when injuries and underperformance pressured the entire structure, there wasn’t enough support beneath to hold everything up.
The jaw-dropping return for Kikuchi — dealt between an 11-5 loss and an 8-4 victory against the Baltimore Orioles on a sweaty day at Camden Yards — may very well turn out to be the most significant fix.
Jake Bloss, a 23-year-old right-hander ranked by Baseball America as Houston’s No. 2 prospect who started the year in high-A before landing in the depleted Astros’ rotation, would have been a strong get alone. But capitalizing on what was described as a robust market for the left-hander, the Blue Jays also got outfielder Joey Loperfido, BA’s No. 5 prospect who is slated to join the club in Baltimore, and No. 19 Will Wagner, a bat-first infielder who controls the strike zone very well and has some pop.
Both Bloss and Wagner, at least initially, will head to triple-A Buffalo, but the trio offers both instant and near-term help, especially if Bloss can stick in a rotation that now needs to backfill for Kikuchi.
“Love what we got,” said manager John Schneider. “Kooch, it’s tough to say goodbye to him because we’ve known him for three years and he’s just a great dude. But really excited about what we got back for him in Wagner, Bloss and Loperfido. Loperfido is a dude we’ve seen recently and he’s got a really, really bright future. Bloss, you can pencil him into what we’re doing going forward. And we’ll take another bloodline guy in Wagner (the son of former all-star closer Billy Wagner). I really like what we did there and I think it shows that we’re going to get after it next year, as well.”
Turner, pulled from the dugout during the second inning of the first game, returned interesting double-A outfielder RJ Schreck, adding to the previous stockpile of seven prospects headlined by triple-A outfielder Jonatan Clase, another near-term player, in the deal that sent Yimi Garcia to Seattle.
The volume – 11 prospects – matters because of how attrition impacts player development. Most prospects don’t reach their peak. Those that contending teams trade generally come with clear risks, which is what makes clubs willing to surrender them. But the Blue Jays were so far from a critical mass, adding them was essential to begin repairing the underpinning of their shaky 50-57 big-league home.
Save for Nate Pearson, the Blue Jays have focused their trade efforts on selling off their pending free agents only, and the club still has two more expiring contracts remaining in Trevor Richards and Kevin Kiermaier. Given how hot the market has been, meaningfully exploring what some players under contractual control into next year might return is intriguing, although that continues to not be the club’s posture to the industry.
And so, the discussion on what comes next and how realistic another run at the playoffs in 2025 actually is, can start taking shape.
Certainly, the ongoing resurgence of Guerrero Jr., who has homered in three straight games for the third time this season, all since June 27, is pivotal to those hopes.
The Blue Jays will need to complement him meaningfully to make any conversation about contention next year worthwhile and with Bo Bichette on the injured list and Turner no longer in the picture, the lineup is glaringly thin.
Why on earth the Orioles kept pitching to him Monday as he hit laser after laser is a legitimate question. At the same time, he’s so locked in right now, that Guerrero looks as dangerous as he did during his MVP runner-up season of 2021, and he was able to shake off the chaos of the two-trade day to still perform.
“It’s difficult to deal with the situation,” Guerrero said of the two-trade day. “But I had to accept that. We kind of knew what’s going on. We knew what’s going to happen. In this case, JT traded during the game, it still catches you by surprise. But it is what it is and hopefully we keep the rest of the guys.”
That starts with Guerrero and Bichette and their pending free agency, along with that of others, after the 2025 season. Barring an extension or extensions, the Blue Jays will face similar pivot-point junctures after this season and again at next year’s deadline, especially if they decide to take a run at competing again.
Failure at any point means more days like Monday.
“Definitely mixed emotions is the right way to put it,” Kikuchi said through interpreter Yusuke Oshima. “My tenure with the Blue Jays didn’t start off well, but even through my struggles, the pitching coaches and everybody believed in me and helped me through my struggles. Definitely thankful for them. Going to the Astros, they’re a contender and it shows how much they value me as well. As an athlete, that’s something you feel good about.”
There’s been far too little of that for the Blue Jays, who “had a little bit different intentions on the way this season was going to go,” said Turner, and “when it didn’t quite go that way, as a guy on an expiring contract, you expect that there’s a chance this could happen.”
As for why the season flew off the rails, he said, “I don’t know,” before pointing to “some streakiness and slumps, myself included,” he said. “I had probably one of the worst months of my career in May after having a great April. I just didn’t really feel like it all came together. Not too many games where we are hitting on all three facets of the game, pitching, defence and offence. We get a good outing from our starter, we didn’t hit. We put up a bunch of runs, we give up some runs. For whatever reason, it didn’t go the way we wanted. That’s disappointing to me because that’s not what I came here for. I came here to help us win and make a post-season run. It feels like I let an entire country down, really.”
That’s Turner being harder on himself than he should be, as one player alone wasn’t going to fix all that ailed the Blue Jays, just as one deadline selloff isn’t going to suddenly fix all the cracks in their foundation. But, the patchwork is underway and there are two months remaining in the season to see where they stand before deciding on the next project.