Michael Saunders had two favourite teams when he was growing up. He’s spent the last decade of his life playing for the first one, drafted as an 18-year-old out of Victoria, B.C. and climbing his way up the system to eventually become an everyday outfielder for Seattle and the longest tenured Mariner after Felix Hernandez. Then, on Wednesday night, as he watched his two-year-old daughter Aria’s swimming lesson, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and found out he’d been traded to the other one.
“If I had to get traded to a team, I couldn’t have picked a better one than Toronto,” Saunders said Thursday afternoon on a conference call with reporters. “I’m extremely excited to play for the Blue Jays. It’s not just about representing the Blue Jays, it’s about representing my country.”
The Blue Jays acquired the 28-year-old Saunders Wednesday night in exchange for back-of-the-rotation starter J.A. Happ, bringing the Canadian into the fold to play left field in 2015 in place of the departed Melky Cabrera. The club is hoping Saunders can continue to build on a very productive, yet injury-shortened 2014 (he hit .273/.341/.450 in 263 plate appearances) and provide a comparable level of production to Cabrera for a fraction of the cost, allowing the team to spend money elsewhere. Saunders is just hoping to be given a chance.
“I definitely got the feeling that I was wanted; that they’re going to let me go out and play,” Saunders said. “I know there’s some talented outfielders in the organization. And who’s to say that Alex is finished making moves. But I’m going to do everything I can to hold down the everyday left field job. And if they need me to play centre of wherever else—I’ll just be happy to be playing and happy for the opportunity.”
Saunders has had a slow developing career that has looked ready to take off at times and stuck in neutral at others. He’s everything you look for in a ballplayer—tall, athletic, driven—and plays the game as hard as anyone. But at times he’s had to literally fight himself in order to succeed.
Saunders is six-foot-four and 225-pounds, a long, lean stature that gives him natural leverage when swinging the bat. But he found over his early career that his swing was getting too long and not taking a quick enough path to the ball. It gave him less time to see pitches and manage the strike zone, which in turn led to poor results at the plate. After his first three seasons in the majors, spanning 204 games, he held an unfortunate .196/.263/.306 slash line with strikeouts in nearly 30 percent of his plate appearances.
By the time he was 24, seven years into his career and still a part-time player bouncing between the Mariners and their triple-A affiliate in Tacoma, Saunders felt he had to do something to turn his fortunes around. So, working with private hitting coach Mike Bard during the winter of late 2011 and early 2012, Saunders began an unconventional process of reinventing his swing.
He strapped a short foam tube, fashioned from a swimming pool noodle, under his left arm to prohibit his left elbow from travelling too close to his body and limiting his power. He used a rubber strap running across his chest and over his right arm to hold his other arm tighter to his body so he wouldn’t fly open during his swing. He wrapped another strong rubber strap around his knees to force himself to steady his lower body and limit his stride. He used a 52-ounce bat during batting practice to help keep his swing controlled. He did everything he could to minimize the moving parts in his swing, be shorter to the ball and, as Saunders puts it, beat his body into submission.
“I went outside the bubble. I wanted to do anything I could to progress,” Saunders said. “I’m trying to get the most out of my body.”
The eccentric approach worked, limiting much of the movement that was weighing down his swing, and propelling Saunders to his best season yet in 2012 when he hit .247/.306/.432 with 31 doubles, 19 homers and 21 stolen bases, taking over the Mariners starting job in centre field. “It was a turning point for me,” Saunders said. “That was a season where I proved to myself that I could compete and be a productive major leaguer.”
After a good, but not great 2013—Saunders’ batting average dipped but his on-base percentage climbed as he worked deeper into counts and drew more walks—he made more adjustments to his approach, shifting his hands back to try to eliminate movement during the early part of his swing and simplify his mechanics. He credits that tweak with helping him play his best season yet in 2014, posting a .273/.341/.450 slash line and cutting his strikeout rate to the lowest it’s been in his career.
That’s the player the Blue Jays are hoping they’re getting; an athletic outfielder in his prime who was worth 2.4 wins above replacement in just 263 plate appearances last season (Melky Cabrera, it should be noted, was worth 3.1 WAR in 621 plate appearances). Of course, like all things, there are arguments for and against whether this can happen.
Working in Saunders’ favour is a change of location. He’ll be going from Seattle’s Safeco Field, the worst park in the majors for hitters in 2014 according to ESPN’s park factors, where the damp, dense marine air weighs down fly balls, to Rogers Centre, the ninth-most favourable venue for hitters. Saunders has hit five home runs in 18 career games at Rogers Centre; the only park where he’s hit more is Safeco, where he’s hit 23 in 281 games.
There’s also the lineup he’ll be joining, a stacked batting order that projects to be one of the most dangerous in the American League, and could afford Saunders better pitches to hit and more opportunities to bat with men on base. “I’m most excited to be put in that lineup that’s there right now. You have multiple all-stars, MVP finalists, guys that really know how to hit,” Saunders said. “There are certain people in the game that strike fear into you when you’re on the opposing team—and there’s a couple different guys in that lineup that do that.”
Working against Saunders is an abnormally high batting average on balls in play (.327) in 2014 which likely helped inflate his numbers. In 2012 and 2013, his BABIP was .297 and .298, which might mean his numbers from those years are more reflective of his true talent.
There’s also the issue of health. Saunders played more than 130 games in 2012 and 2013, his first two years as an everyday player, but missed more than half the season in 2014 with various ailments from inflammation in his right shoulder, to a strained left oblique, to an unfortunate bout of Fifth Disease which he contracted while on a rehab assignment. He lost 12 pounds and couldn’t eat for four days during the illness, and when he returned to the Mariners in September he found he’d lost his starting job in right field and would be platooning for the rest of the season.
The day after his Mariners finished their 2014 season one game shy of the playoffs, Seattle general manager Jack Zduriencik had this to say about Saunders: “I think what Michael has to do and has to answer to himself, is ‘how do I prepare myself to play as many games through the course of 162 that I can possibly play without being set back by injury.’ Some are freak injuries. Some are things that just happened. But some of these things need to be handled from a maintenance standpoint where he put himself in a position where he’s able to compete through the course of the season.”
Saunders was blindsided. He’d never had his conditioning or his work ethic called into question before. He spoke to Zduriencik several times in October and November, looking to clear the air. He remained coy in responding to the criticisms in the media, choosing to speak generally about his training and preparation rather than fire back at his now ex-general manager. He thought things had been smoothed over. But Zduriencik still traded Saunders in a puzzling move for the Mariners who gave up a young, affordable, talented player under control for the next two years and created a hole in their outfield, all for the 32-year-old Happ, who’s owed $6.7-million this season and projects as a fourth or fifth starter. Still, Saunders is taking the high road.
“I think the comments might have come out of more frustration than anything; due to the fact we were one game away from going to the playoffs,” Saunders said. “But as far as calling my conditioning into question—that’s something that I think is uncalled for. I work as hard as anybody to prepare myself to play 162 games.”
Whether Saunders can stay healthy or not, especially on the treacherous Rogers Centre turf, remains to be seen. He plays the game with abandon and has amassed an impressive highlight reel of catches, laying out to grab line drives off the grass or crashing into outfield walls to make leaping grabs. And that’s not going to be any different in Toronto. “If you play the game hard, sometimes you put yourself at risk of injuring yourself by trying to make the play. But you do that for the team,” Saunders said. “I’m not going to change the way I play. I know I play hard and I can’t envision myself playing any other way.”
And so, Saunders now heads into a crucial season—both for the Blue Jays and for himself—with a number of questions to answer: whether he can maintain the refinement of his swing, whether he can carry his 2014 production into 2015, whether he can stay on the field at all. After changing organizations for the first time in a decade, all Saunders knows is that he’s ready for whatever comes next.
“I really think you learn more from failure than you do from success,” Saunders said. “I know what I bring to the table. I try to continually get better at that. I try to bring an all around game. And I try to do whatever I can to help the team win.”