Deliberations over how the Toronto Blue Jays should handle Josh Johnson’s looming free agency took an intriguing shift Tuesday after the hulking right-hander underwent surgery to remove a bone spur and loose bodies from his elbow.
Just this weekend a club official was saying that the right-hander still wasn’t feeling right after weeks of rest for his troublesome right forearm. Whether the procedure gives Alex Anthopoulos enough reason to believe Johnson’s health issues in a dismal 2013 won’t be a factor next year is far from clear.
But with the general manager looking to add a couple of starters this winter, the devil he knows may be more tempting than the devil he doesn’t, and re-signing Johnson won’t require anything beyond a fistful of dollars and a one-year commitment.
“I’m not sure,” Matt Sosnick, Johnson’s agent, replied when asked how he thought the surgery might affect his client’s market this winter. “There was an expectation on our part that he was going to sign a one-year deal regardless, and with everything being equal, I think he would probably choose to go back to Toronto. That’s more about respecting the fact that Alex went all-in, and he believes in Alex’s vision.
“Having said that, he’s going to sign a one-year deal and he’s going to look to play in a place that is going to rebuild his value in the best way possible.”
Still, how to value Johnson is a tricky piece of business in a free agent market with a scarcity of starting pitching. Sosnick told sportsnet.ca last month that a $10-million base for 2014 was realistic and while teams are sure to debate that, two interesting comparables are worth considering.
In 2010, the Oakland Athletics gave Ben Sheets a one-year deal worth $10 million plus $2 million in performance bonuses after the right-hander missed all of the ’09 season because of surgery to repair a torn flexor tendon. And last November the Chicago Cubs handed Scott Baker $5.5 million for one year plus up to $1.5 million more in incentives with the righty coming off Tommy John surgery in 2011.
That suggests a range of $6–10 million for Johnson’s base salary plus incentives, despite the fact that he’s coming off the worst season of his big-league career, posting a 6.20 ERA with 83 strikeouts and 30 walks over 81.1 innings.
(Worth noting is that the Blue Jays’ longstanding reluctance to include bonus clauses in contracts under Anthopoulos is wavering, and the GM may very well sign deals with incentives for the first time this off-season.)
Whoever hands Johnson that type of money will be taking a significant leap of faith after he made just 16 starts and his homer-per-nine-innings rate spiked to 1.7, more than double his previous career high of 0.8. But the potential of a two-time all-star entering his prime is a gutsy gamble someone will probably take.
“Josh now understands where the pain was coming from and realizes it was something fixable,” said Sosnick. “He would never make it out that injuries affected his performance, he takes full responsibility for his stats, good or bad. But it gives him a tremendous amount of confidence to know that the bone spurs were leading to him overstriding and all this other stuff where he was trying to move away from the pain. He has a lot of confidence moving forward.”
Do the Blue Jays share a similar faith?
While they haven’t publicly ruled out the possibility of making the 29-year-old a qualifying offer—based on the average of the top 125 player salaries, a figure expected to come in at roughly $14 million—Anthopoulos said Sunday the club may no longer “be as willing to take on as much risk from a medical standpoint” as it had been in the past.
“Very few players are, for lack of a better term, clean in terms of their (medical) file,” he added. “If we are willing to take (a health risk), maybe that will influence us in terms of the acquisition cost, or what we would pay.”
While that doesn’t sound promising for Johnson, Anthopoulos also noted that quality starting pitchers are “one of the hardest things to acquire either through free agency or in trade, and rarely do they become available.” And Johnson did log at least 183.2 innings in three of his previous four seasons before joining the Blue Jays.
So perhaps Anthopoulos surveys the market, deems the other prices unpalatable, and finds the right combination of risk-sharing with Sosnick to bring back Johnson, who may legitimately want to remain with the Blue Jays.
“Josh likes Alex personally, likes his teammates, likes his manager,” said Sosnick. “He feels like it would be the best-case scenario for him to be able to go back and participate and be part of Toronto being successful.”
Sosnick added that with Johnson unable to throw a bullpen in the next few weeks in light of his surgery, as the Blue Jays had hoped, he pledged that “any way that we could facilitate Toronto being able to answer their own questions, we will.”
The Blue Jays have already completed their evaluations of free agents and Anthopoulos will be spending the next few weeks gauging who may be available through trade, and whether he has the pieces to pull off a sensible deal.
As that process plays out, Johnson will be lurking in the background, too tantalizing to ignore, but perhaps also too risky to retain.