Injury bug taking its toll on Jays
Success of past two years has left team wafer thin beyond starters
On a warm, sunny mid-March day in Dunedin, Josh Donaldson, who had yet to appear in a game for the Toronto Blue Jays, walked into the outfield at Florida Auto Exchange Stadium wearing shorts and a tank top.
As his teammates, in full uniform, prepared for batting practice, Donaldson walked around and showed off a dangly earring. The teammates alternatively laughed, pointed, and cussed.
Donaldson didn’t take part in formal practice, but came back later and, still in the tank top, took some swings in the cage and roped several balls into the schoolyard beyond the left-field fence.
After that, speaking to reporters, the Toronto third baseman said he felt ready to play. The medical staff was being cautious, though, and they didn’t want to rush his sore calf back out on the field. But if it were up to him, he said, he would be wearing the full uniform again.
It would still be more than a week before he would see live action.
This story is relayed not just as a reminder of the Blue Jays in happier times, but to note that, for all the injury woes the team has suffered in this young season, sometimes there isn’t much to blame other than stupid luck.
The team was almost comically cautious with its ailing veterans in the spring, fielding a lineup full of who-dats for many Grapefruit League games while keeping the regulars out of harm’s way. Donaldson and Steve Pearce, in particular, were both brought back slowly — and both have since ended up on the disabled list.
As much as fans might want to blame someone, anyone, for the disastrous injury funk — a dozen players have made DL trips already, and more than 300 man-games have been lost, more than double this time last year — sports are dumb that way.
The Jays have a US$90-million DL, which is more than the payroll of the 25-man roster of 11 major-league teams. It’s nuts, but sometimes guys get hurt.
The problem for Toronto is that it comes in a season in which the team, at the major league level, was already wafer thin. Fans, though, can at least console themselves with the fact that the lack of depth is a direct result of the success of the past two years.
Maybe that’s small consolation, but hey, check out that AL East pennant!
Jays president Mark Shapiro was a little too on the nose when he said before the season that his biggest concern was the drop off between Toronto’s fifth starter and his sixth. With J.A. Happ, Aaron Sanchez and Francisco Liriano all having stints on the disabled list, the Jays’ shallow pool of pitching talent has been woefully exposed.
Most of the arms who would otherwise have been available to step into the rotation were traded in July, 2015 — Daniel Norris, Matt Boyd and Jeff Hoffman — in the David Price and Troy Tulowitzki trades. (Admittedly, the could-have-been scenarios can only be imagined to a point: if Norris and Boyd were not traded in 2015, Toronto might not have signed Happ or Marco Estrada the following off-season, either. Both were highly valuable last year.)
Instead, the Jays were forced into using pitchers who couldn’t make the team out of spring training like Mat Latos and Casey Lawrence. Using either of them was a risk because they would be exposed to waivers if they were returned to the minors, which is exactly what happened. Both were ineffective and sent back down; Lawrence was claimed by Seattle and Latos cleared waivers. In the case of Lawrence, someone the team wanted to spend most of the year in triple-A in the hopes he would be useful at some point, Toronto got an 0-3 record, an ERA of 8.78, and then lost him. So, that could have gone better.
This kind of thing was always part of the mix for the 2017 Blue Jays. Their best prospects are kids like Vladimir Guerrero, Jr., and Bo Bichette and their best pitching prospect is Sean Reid-Foley, who is pitching for Double-A New Hampshire. The team is thin at the next level, not just because of the 2015 clearout sale that ultimately returned the team to the playoffs for the first time in the wild-card era, but because last year’s team did just enough to prevent an end-of-season prospect stockpiling.
Had Toronto been out of the playoff mix last summer, the team might have netted an arm or two for Edwin Encarnacion or Jose Bautista. Instead, the band was kept together and the team returned to the ALCS.
This is the bargain that a competitive team strikes: you try to win now, it will cost you some talent in the future, either with the players you trade to get immediate help, or the potential prospects you forgo in holding on to your own guys. The Jays did the former in 2015 and the latter in 2016.
If they can’t win their way back into contention in 2017, they won’t pass on the chance to add depth again. But again, small consolation.