Blue Jays all in for Dickey in white-knuckle deal
“For years and years and years, it’s come with this mysticism around it, that it’s untameable, it’s so chaotic you can’t trust it. What the movie reveals, and hopefully what good seasons by knuckleballers reveals, is that you can depend on it. It is trustworthy. And hopefully, that will lay some foundation for the powers that be, whether it’s general managers, scouting directors, or player personnel people to give that pitch a shot. Those are the guys that make or break you.”
— R.A. Dickey, on the documentary Knuckleball!, to Time magazine, May 2012.
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 that 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 $166 million US 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 $16 million US at Melky Cabrera. Dickey is 38 years old, but he’s great right now. Now, to Toronto, is what matters.
And if it didn’t, then they would be going the other way. They would be trading Jose Bautista (32) or Buehrle (33). They would be restocking the minor leagues, rather than using them as currency. 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, and it might not be next year. Next year, they don’t help.
Dickey does. The deal hinges on him, obviously, and if his knuckler loses its fairy dust then it’s a bust, and Anthopoulos will get killed for chasing the wrong guy. That’s fine.
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-mile-perhour 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, and 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’s 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: 52 1/3 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 2/3 stellar innings over 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 league-leading 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. If he had won a Cy Young for the Jays last year, and they had made the off-season moves they have made, would fans want Dickey to be shipped to the Mets for d’Arnaud (who has had injury problems in his minor-league career) and Syndergaard, who isn’t a sure thing?
No, they wouldn’t. Anthopoulos could sign Dickey to, say, a three-year, $40-million US extension on top of his $5-million US price tag next season — Dickey was asking for two years and $26-million US 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.
And 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 and 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 threeor four-year 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 in, and here we go.