After throwing six innings of a combined no-hitter in his debut for the Houston Astros on Saturday night, Aaron Sanchez said, “You can’t write it up any better than this.”
No, probably not. As long as the genre is horror.
When the Toronto Blue Jays traded Sanchez on Wednesday, they were trusting him to do a few things in Texas. First, be mediocre. Second, lose a few more (he’d come out on the wrong end of 13 successive decisions at that point). Third and most important, be inconspicuous.
Sanchez decided instead to humiliate his former team in the most hurtful way possible.
A few days ago, the Jays looked simple. Thanks to Sanchez, they now look ridiculous.
The glass-half-full way of considering the Jays currently is that they know something the rest of us don’t. Sure, the roster may resemble the stock-market floor an hour after the crash, but that’s only because we cannot see the totality of the grand plan.
That plan – which is never quite articulated beyond phrases such as “years of control” – is rooted in talent evaluation. Player X may seem to you better than Player Y, but the Jays are here to tell you that certain complicated baseball matters should be left to the experts. Still at issue is who, precisely, all these experts are.
In attempting to rationalize trading Sanchez, reliever Joe Biagini (who also pitched an inning of that no-hitter) and a prospect for a nearly 26-year-old Triple-A outfielder, Jays general manager Ross Atkins opted for Scoutspeak instead of English.
Atkins listed off Derek Fisher’s physical attributes with such fawning admiration that it sounded as though he were punching up the guy’s Tinder profile. The word “handedness” featured so often in multiple interviews that it began to lose all meaning.
The unfortunate part of working in sports is that you can’t spend your career going around a boardroom table saying “handedness” over and over again and congratulating one another on being geniuses. Eventually, your thought experiments must be tested in the field.
In his Houston debut, Sanchez pitched pretty close to the best game of his life. On the same night, Fisher went to field a pop-up in shallow right field, misjudged it disastrously and got hit in the face with the ball.
Sanchez ended his evening by leading off ESPN’s SportsCenter. Fisher ended his by going to the hospital. So much for those magical hands.
Just as knowing how to drive should be a prerequisite for becoming a driving instructor, I’d be so bold as to suggest that being able to spot talent in your own midst – like, you’ve been living with the guy for six years – is a basic requirement for calling yourself a talent evaluator.
Another important element is that your talent evaluations turn out. Jays management is having some issues there as well.
Despite all the horse trading they’ve done in the past few years, not a single one of those transactions is an undeniable win. I’m not talking about this guy being a little better than that guy. I’m talking a Josh Donaldson trade, one in which you saw that what someone else considered garbage was in fact gold, and then convinced them to give you that gold for real garbage.
The only Jays players anybody wants are the ones Atkins and team president Mark Shapiro inherited from the Alex Anthopoulos regime. All Atkins and Shapiro have managed in four years on the job is a flurry of activity, thus far adding up to uniform mediocrity.
They were right about one thing. This isn’t a rebuild. Instead, it is redecoration.
A rebuild’s goal is radical improvement. A redecoration’s goal is moving a bunch of furniture around in order to end up with the same room, only one that looks a little different.
A rebuild suggests moving to a low point as quickly as possible and from then on showing constant progress. Redecoration confuses change for enhancement.
It’s too late to turn this redecoration into a rebuild. Talent evaluation hasn’t worked. We’ve all been evaluating the talent together for a couple of years. It’s not very talented.
And now, sadly, there is no one left to trade. Sad for Blue Jays fans and sad for the Astros. Houston was two more deals with the Jays away from becoming the 1927 Yankees.
There is only one way out of the bind all the big brains on Level 300 have put the Jays in – spending a lot more.
In the hierarchy of words you can say around a boardroom table at the Rogers Centre, if “control” is the most holy, “spending” would be the most profane. That concept is so verboten that the Jays can’t even allude to it without squirming.
Here’s Atkins on another deadline giveaway, Marcus Stroman, and whether they had discussed a contract extension: “It felt as if the gap was too big for us to continue.”
How, exactly, does one “feel” something about a contract gap? Either you want to spend the money, or you don’t. So say that.
According to Stroman, the Jays never made him any sort of offer. It must be a real work of emotional labour to feel something about a price discrepancy when you haven’t yet been quoted a price.
What the Jays actually felt was that they didn’t want Stroman at any cost, because that would mean spending money. Which they are not allowed to talk about, much less do.
This all adds up to an insoluble conundrum.
It’s not just that they don’t have the right players and won’t pay for the right players. With the proper application of time, pressure and money, those are solvable difficulties.
It’s that the Jays don’t seem to know what the right players look like. No amount of boardroom sophistry can solve that problem.
Cathal Kelly