Even good gambles don’t always pay off
Derek Fisher was behind the eight-ball from the moment he joined the Blue Jays. Then on one of the first chances he got to make a play in the outfield, he took that sentiment a little bit too literally.
Things never got better for Fisher, and Monday’s trade that sent him to Milwaukee for a player to be named and cash considerations means that the Jays cashed in the lottery ticket they picked up in July 2019 for a whole lot less than they had hoped.
Fisher was acquired from the Houston Astros as the last move the Jays made in their sell-off at the 2019 trade deadline, which started with Eric Sogard, Marcus Stroman, David Phelps and Daniel Hudson, who would go on the record the final out of the World Series for Washington’s first championship. Then, nearly an hour after the deadline passed, word came that the Jays had traded fan favourites Aaron Sanchez and Joe Biagini to Houston. Fisher was headed to Toronto. The overwhelming sentiment was “Who?” and “OK, but who else did they get?”
I’m not sure there’s ever been a louder collective “That’s it?” expressed about a Jays trade when it was revealed that not only was Fisher the entire return, but that they had also sent minor-league Cal Stevenson to the Astros as part of the package.
Later that afternoon, Jays general manager Ross Atkins addressed the media — the same conference call in which he said his infamous “42 years of control” quote — and talked about all the things the front office saw in Fisher, who had his path to the majors blocked by a strong group of outfielders with the perennial contenders in Houston.
Atkins said at the time that Fisher was a player the Jays had “targeted for a long time.” He raved about Fisher’s elite speed, top-flight exit velocity and barrel rate, a keen eye at the plate and, of course, his “handedness,” which is just a front-office way of saying he liked that Fisher is a left-handed hitter.
Nobody really wanted to hear those things about a guy who had hit .201/.282/.367 over three shots at earning a bigleague spot, while striking out more than a third of the time. And nobody could really understand why it cost so much to get him.
Biagini and Sanchez had been major contributors to the Jays’ playoff run in 2016, when Sanchez won the American League ERA title and Biagini went from Rule 5 pick to high-leverage reliever, but neither of them were anything close to that by 2019.
At the time of the trade, Sanchez had been through two years of frustrating blister and finger tendon issues and was the worst regular starting pitcher in the majors by most metrics, dealing with shoulder problems that would eventually lead to surgery and him missing all of 2020. He was very likely to be non-tendered at the end of the 2019 season and leave for no return.
Biagini had bounced back to the bullpen after a failed experiment in the starting rotation, and was an adequate middle reliever in 2019, often having to pull a Houdini act to get himself out of trouble he had pitched himself into. He also continued, as he had since his stellar rookie season, to have problems keeping the ball in the ballpark.
The Jays weren’t trading the 2016 Sanchez and Biagini, which made one wonder why the Astros, gunning for their third straight division title, would give up a talent like Fisher for a middle reliever, a reclamation project and a minor-league corner outfielder who didn’t hit for power and was years away.
Then we saw Fisher play.
The first impression, a fly ball off his face in the first inning of just his second game as a Blue Jay, was pretty ugly.
So was the last, when he butchered two fly balls while Taijuan Walker looked on helplessly from the mound in what turned out to be a sevenrun Yankees rally in a battle for a playoff spot.
The elite speed was there, but only sometimes on the basepaths and hardly ever when loping after balls hit into the outfield corner.
Big-time power? We definitely saw that a few times, most notably on a 447-foot home run he hit down the right-field line at Rogers Centre against his former team at the end of August 2019. It was his sixth home run of the month, but he would only go deep one more time as a Jay. It’s also tough to display that power when you’re striking out in 43.5 per cent of plate appearances, as Fisher did as a Jay.
He had a great eye at the plate, and often got himself into good hitters’ counts, but it felt as though he had a hard time pulling the trigger in those situations. The numbers bear that out. While Fisher took his share of walks, he hit a paltry .167 (11-for-66) over the past two years when he was ahead in the count.
Ultimately, the Derek Fisher trade was a good gamble that worked out horribly. Exactly the kind of move teams that were in the Blue Jays’ position a year and a half ago should be making. Find someone you like and trade away pieces you don’t need to get him.
The problem was the Fisher’s combination of talents didn’t actually translate to him playing the game well at the majorleague level, which is the most important of all the tools.