Jays all in on Dickey in white-knuckle deal

TORONTO — The Toronto Blue Jays cannot control what happens when the season starts, but they can hope. R.A. Dickey is 38 and he won the National League Cy Young in 2012 and the Jays are very close to trading for him. If Toronto can agree on a contract extension with the warrior poet of baseball — and the sense is it won’t be a problem — they will send two of their top three remaining prospects to the New York Mets, swap backup catchers and warm bodies, and hope not to look back. It will be a bold move.

But it will be a reasonable gamble, and that’s what matters. Yes, it will pain general manager Alex Anthopoulos to send catcher Travis d’Arnaud and pitcher Noah Syndergaard — No. 1 and No. 3 in their minor-league system, if you believe Baseball America — for Dickey. The rest of the deal sends backup catcher John Buck and a warm body for Dickey’s personal catcher, Josh Thole, and a different warm body, but the prospects make it go.

It will be a steep price, plus the extension. This isn’t a heist. The Mets aren’t the Marlins.

But that is where the Jays are. This is what they are. They are not waiting for players to develop anymore, for the crop to come in. They added US$166 million in contract commitments when they raided Miami for Jose Reyes, Josh Johnson and Mark Buehrle, and that’s before a Johnson extension is discussed. They threw another US$16 million at Melky Cabrera.

Dickey is 38, but he’s great right now. Now, to Toronto, is what matters. And if it didn’t, they would be going the other way. They would be trading Jose Bautista (32) or Buehrle (33). They would be restocking the minor leagues.

At this point, the Jays are either in or they’re out and clearly they’re in. D’Arnaud and Syndergaard might be good major-leaguers, but it won’t be this year.

The deal hinges on Dickey, obviously, and if his knuckler loses its fairy dust, then it’s a bust and Anthopoulos will get killed.

But Dickey’s magic seems replicable, which means the rotation could go Dickey, Johnson, Brandon Morrow, Buehrle and Ricky Romero.

Dickey doesn’t throw Tim Wakefield’s 66 m.p.h. floater; his knuckler doesn’t bob and float and dance in the traditional way. He throws a fast one and a slow one. And he mixes in fastballs for effect. His pitches aren’t mere objects of faith, even though he’s a religious man. He threw four wild pitches last year and his walk rate is low and steady. He appears to have unlocked something and it has only got better.

(For the record, R.A. Dickey in six starts against American League East teams since 2010, including three against the Yankees: 42 innings, 20 hits, eight earned runs, 45 strikeouts and 11 walks, and a 1.71 ERA. And Dickey in seven starts indoors since 2010: 52¹/³ innings pitched, 42 hits, 10 earned runs, 44 strikeouts, 10 walks, and a 1.73 ERA. Those are small sample sizes, but he’s also logged 616 stellar innings during the past three years since committing to the knuckleball. It’s hard to luck your way into 600 innings.)

Over the last three years, Dickey has compiled a 2.95 ERA, a 1.15 WHIP (walks plus hits per inning), a leagueleading 230 strikeouts in 2012 (when he started to throw his hard knuckler more, which tops out in the low 80s), and a Cy Young award. He’s an ace. Anthopoulos could sign Dickey to, say, a three-year, $40-million extension on top of his $5-million price tag next season — Dickey was asking for two years and $26 million from the Mets, but the Jays love adding club options to their deals — and he would still cost less than half of what the Dodgers will be paying Zack Greinke every year until 2018.

Since knuckleballers age like Robert Redford and since Dickey has only been mastering the knuckler for a short time, this isn’t like trading for, say, Bartolo Colon. Last year, Dickey led the National League in innings pitched, complete games, strikeouts, shutouts and was top-three in WAR, ERA, WHIP. He was great. He got better.

So it’s not just a matter of faith; it’s faith with evidence. The Jays have a three- or fouryear window with this group to do great things, and Dickey fits the plan. He has talked a lot about how he became an unlikely and romantic star — he wrote a memoir about how he was sexually abused as a child, how he was a lousy fastball pitcher, how he found peace with himself, and finally, how he gave himself over to throwing the strangest, most magical pitch in the game.

As he said earlier this year, “When I really committed and surrendered to being a knuckleballer, I got pretty good at it.”

Well, the Jays are committing. The Jays are surrendering themselves. The Jays are all in and here we go.