NEW YORK – With Noah Syndergaard on the mound, throwing six brilliant innings as the Blue Jays’ 11-game win streak came to an end (in extras, once he was long done for the night), many thoughts obviously turned to the “coulda, shoulda, wouldas” around the Blue Jays’ decision to trade the young righty to the Mets along with catching prospect Travis d’Arnaud in exchange for a package headlined by R.A. Dickey, who at the time was coming off a Cy Young season.
If today’s Alex Anthopoulos could hop in a souped-up DeLorean (with a working flux capacitor, of course) and go back and talk to the 2012 version of himself, he would tell Past Alex not to make the deal. But that’s only with the benefit of two and half years’ hindsight, and it’s less about what Dickey wound up being for the Blue Jays than it is about a whole bunch of other things.
At the time the trade was made, Dickey was supposed to be the cherry on top of a finally-contending Blue Jays’ team. You can never have enough starting pitching, and you can certainly never have enough starting pitching that just won a Cy Young Award. Expectations were high, indeed, but the thought was never that Dickey was going to have to be the ace of the staff. To repeat a Cy Young year, especially moving to the much-more-difficult-to-pitch-in American League, was going to be exceedingly difficult. But had the Blue Jays’ rotation in their go-for-it year shaken down as it was supposed to have, Dickey would have been the third starter, on a performance basis.
He got the opening day start because he was coming off the Cy Young, as he should have, but the expectations were that a healthy Brandon Morrow and the newly acquired Josh Johnson would wind up being the No. 1 and 2 starters in the rotation when all was said and done. Had that happened, no one would be upset about the price paid to acquire the knuckleballer. That didn’t happen, as Morrow and Johnson combined to make just 26 starts that were, for the most part, terrible, and neither did a whole bunch of other things.
J.P. Arencibia, whose power overshadowed a lot of the other flaws in his game, and who was two years removed from a Pacific Coast League MVP season, crashed and burned. Emilio Bonifacio was abominable. Ricky Romero fell off a cliff and his replacement as the fifth starter, J.A. Happ, missed half the season after being hit in the head by a line drive and hurting his knee as he collapsed to the ground. Colby Rasmus didn’t work out, and neither did Esmil Rogers (now THERE’S a trade you should really want to have back). Melky Cabrera played like an old man, carrying around a tumour in his back, and both Jose Reyes and Brett Lawrie had an ankle explode on slides into second base.
Lots of things went sideways for the Blue Jays in 2013, leading them to a last-place finish, but an average season from Dickey was pretty low on the list.
In 2014, Dickey was the Blue Jays’ best starting pitcher (not including Marcus Stroman, who did only have 20 starts, after all) by WHIP and by innings pitched in a season in which the Jays missed the playoffs by five games. As the Blue Jays faded in July and August, Dickey posted a 3.64 ERA and 1.21 WHIP in 11 starts. He wasn’t the problem.
The problem is this: Syndergaard has made it to the major leagues, and seven starts into his career he’s pitching well with great promise for the future, and the Blue Jays’ big gambles in the Dickey and Marlins trades haven’t paid off with a playoff appearance.
Of course, you have to give up something to get something, but remember that in the winter of 2012-13, Anthopolous was trying to reshape his team into an immediate contender, both to try to give the fans a payoff after a couple of decades of waiting for a post-season appearance and to make sure he took a shot while Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion were still at the top of their games, mindful that the Blue Jays wasted the best years of Roy Halladay and Carlos Delgado.
The plan was put into fast-forward, and prospects had to go. The Blue Jays traded two of the Lansing Big Three – Justin Nicolino to Miami as part of the big deal and Syndergaard to the Mets. Aaron Sanchez stayed.
Sanchez made it to the big leagues first, gave the Blue Jays’ bullpen a massive boost in a pennant race late last season and in 11 starts this year (before going on the disabled list with a strained lat muscle) has allowed more than three runs just once. Did the Blue Jays keep the best of the Lansing Big Three? Only time will tell. But they certainly kept a good one. They also kept Stroman, Daniel Norris, Roberto Osuna and Miguel Castro, all of whom got to the big leagues before Syndergaard did though, obviously, Norris and Castro have gone back down to the minors.
Syndergaard was a big prospect to give up, but the Blue Jays were trying to accelerate their timeline and the idea was that they’d have been playoff contenders for a couple of years before he even made it to the big leagues, if he ever did (remember how many “can’t miss” prospects have completely missed). Between the time of the trade and Syndergaard’s debut in the majors, Dickey threw 485 innings for the Blue Jays with better-than-average results.
Those innings were supposed to be for teams headed for the post-season. They weren’t. But that doesn’t mean the gamble shouldn’t have been taken. We’ve been waiting a long time for the Blue Jays to be playoff contenders and what we wanted then, and what we want now, is for them to take a shot. Gambles are so named because they’re not guaranteed to pay off, and the fact that it hasn’t worked out to this point doesn’t mean it wasn’t a shot worth taking.