Blue Jays made error reading Encarnacion
In his final moment as a Blue Jay, Edwin Encarnacion let his emotions get the best of him. He was standing at the plate against the Cleveland Indians in the Rogers Centre with one out in the ninth, and the place was full of people standing and chanting his name, the way they had chanted for Jose Bautista and Josh Donaldson before him. “Ed-die! Ed-die! Ed-die!” He stood at the plate, and he felt it.
“Normally he wouldn’t have swung at those pitches,” translator Josue Peley said afterward, after Edwin had struck out on three pitches, and delivered his post-game answers in Spanish. “Too much emotion coming out, too much energy. He didn’t get down. He didn’t get sad. He got excited. He tried to do too much. He said, ‘I got emotional. I tried to do too much.’ ”
On Thursday night, Edwin Encarnacion signed with Cleveland. The deal was reported as a three-year pact worth $60 million (U.S.) with a $5-million buyout on a possible fourth year — four years and $80 million if the option is picked up. Or, a slightly worse deal than what the Jays had offered him before free agency began. Whoops.
It was the end of a series of miscalculations. You can say that Encarnacion’s agent, Paul Kinzer, misread the market and is offering comical explanations, though that just places him at the top of a long list. You can say the Jays read the market correctly, but making the offer before free agency opened and signing a lesser player three days after free agency began suggests something else, doesn’t it? You can say the Cleveland Indians cleaned right up, and . . .
Wait, yes. Cleveland made out like bandits, albeit bandits with a racist mascot. Now small-market Cleveland can add an elite power bat to the switch-hitting, smart-pitching, slick-defending, manager-of-thegods outfit that knocked the Toronto Blue Jays out and came within a play or two of the World Series. Between Boston and Cleveland, the favourites in the American League are well-established, and formidable.
As for the Jays, well, this is Plan B. You can forgive president Mark Shapiro and general manager Ross Atkins for not wanting to grind into the future with a roster full of guys in their 30s. You can accept that this team’s ownership treats the team like a business, while its fans treat it like a passion play. You can see how the Jays are not, and may never be, as big as their market. Life is about limitations, if that’s how you want to look at it.
But this didn’t have to happen. The Jays made their four-year offer before the market opened with a deadline, and if you were Edwin Encarnacion, what do you take from that? You have waited for free agency your entire life, and your agent is telling you there’s more money out there, and the Jays are saying: take it or leave it, very soon. Does that sound like a team that really wants you? Does that sound like home?
No, it doesn’t. If Toronto had shown patience, maybe this deal could have circled back to Toronto. But even in a market full of bats, the Jays didn’t wait. They made their offer, waited five days, and signed Kendrys Morales to a three-year, $33-million deal. Morales is a worse bat, a near-pure DH, a slow runner, and all of six months younger than Encarnacion. Edwin was emotional about Toronto. His franchise didn’t return the favour.
So here we are. The outfield is full of holes, and the offence looks like it shrunk. Maybe Jose Bautista could come back to fill it, if everyone gets desperate enough. Instead of Encarnacion at first base and DH, there will a platoon of Steve Pearce and Justin Smoak, whose two-year, $8.3-million extension last year feels like it could be a canary in a coal mine.
The Jays still have excellent starting pitching, though it stayed mighty healthy in 2016, and may be due for a correction. We’ll see. Win, and Edwin becomes a pleasant memory.
Edwin was the quiet one, and the one whose home runs felt like they made the horn boom a little louder
But if it starts to fall apart, then what? If they ever wanted to blow this thing up, the fuses have been laid. Marco Estrada is 33, as is Russell Martin. J.A. Happ is 34. Troy Tulowitzki is 32. Josh Donaldson is 31. If they decided to start selling pieces, they’d have pieces to sell.
That’s an uncertain future, though, so we can take a minute to look at the past. Edwin was the quiet one, and the one whose home runs felt like they made the horn boom a little louder. Edwin was the guy who sat in the dugout and tried not to cry after his last regular-season home game, and who was so moved by the love they showed him at the end that it got to his major-league nerves. I wonder what did it, I really do. Was it the memory of how he was a spare part when he got here? How he was called E5 when they stuck him at third base, and it made him feel like a bit of a dancing bear? How he became a giant instead, and one that people loved? Boy, they loved him. Whatever it was, it’s over. As Jerry Howarth might say, yes sir. And there he goes.