TORONTO – There’s no longer much mystery about what the next couple years look like for the Toronto Blue Jays.
Instead of trying to maximize wins at the major-league level, they’ll prioritize youth and attempt to expand their talent base with an eye on the future.
At this point, the Blue Jays don’t consider themselves close enough to contention to seriously prioritize one area of the roster over another. They just want impact players right now. Making the pieces fit via trade and free agency? That’s a challenge for another year.
“I’m looking forward to the day that we can clearly identify where the gaps are for us to be a championship team,” team president and CEO Mark Shapiro said Friday. “Because that will mean we’re on the threshold of being a champion and that will mean we can start to supplement with free agents and fill those gaps in.”
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Part of what happens next is an assessment of what exists in-house. On Friday, the Blue Jays beat Cleveland 3-2 as Kevin Pillar hit a walk-off home run on another double-double night from Rowdy Tellez. As the game unfolded, though, a clear contrast emerged on the mound.
Starting for the Blue Jays was Marco Estrada, a valuable regular season contributor since 2015 and an exceptional post-season performer with a 2.16 ERA in six playoff starts. He had his best start in a month, completing six innings while allowing just two runs on a day his fastball reached 89.2 m.p.h.
His location improved Friday, partly because he’s feeling stronger physically.
“It’s slowly getting better,” Estrada said. “I know I don’t throw very hard, but the velo’s starting to come back to normal.”
Yet at age 35 Estrada’s leaving his prime, not entering it. For the season, the pending free agent has a 5.32 ERA.
Meanwhile, Cleveland started Carlos Carrasco, the fourth-place finisher in AL Cy Young voting last year. He remains an exceptional pitcher, but there’s more to it than that. Stylistically he’s much different than Estrada — different than anyone the Blue Jays have had on their roster all season, really. When he’s on, Carrasco can completely take over a game.
“He’s one of the better pitchers in baseball,” manager John Gibbons said. “There’s probably not a better slider in the game and he’s got a good arm. He attacks. You know going into that game that if he’s on you’ll see some guys walking back to the dugout.”
Added Pillar, “When you’ve got a guy like Carrasco on his game throwing four plus pitches, you know it’s going to be a tough day.”
The 12 strikeouts Carrasco collected Friday are more than any Blue Jays pitcher has managed in 2018. J.A. Happ whiffed ten on two occasions before being traded and Sean Reid-Foley struck out ten Marlins in his last start. That’s it.
As a staff, Blue Jays starters ranked 28th in baseball with a 5.26 ERA entering play Friday. They’ve whiffed 19.2 per cent of opponents, which ranks 21st among the 30 teams. They tied a franchise record with 14 starting pitchers used already.
Understandably, the Blue Jays aren’t at the point of creating organizational wish lists just yet. There’s at least one more consolidation year coming, maybe more. By then, Reid-Foley or Nate Pearson or Hector Perez could be the frontline arm the Blue Jays need.
And, as Shapiro says, baseball’s a game of depth. Fixating on aces won’t help them much if they lack answers in other areas.
“It had better not be built on two, or three or five guys,” he said. “It had better be built on ten, 15, 20, 25, 30 guys. There had better be waves of talent coming throughout the organization.”
No doubt about it. But it sure would be nice if one of those waves included a legitimate frontline arm. That’s something that’s been missing in Toronto of late.
