Time to trade in Atkins if Stroman deal bombs.
In less than three years, a contending baseball team in Toronto, the most powerful offensive team in the sport, has gradually been turned into a weakling.
Attendance has been slashed almost in half. Blue Jays fever, awakened from a 22-year nap in 2015, is once more in hibernation.
The executive who created that bighitting, contending Jays team, Alex Anthopoulos, is now running a firstplace team in Atlanta.
These are the facts. They are not in dispute.
What is in dispute is whether this Blue Jays situation could have been avoided in any way or was inevitable, and if it has been managed effectively, aggressively and efficiently. That debate rages on. It’s why Sunday’s big trade was less about Marcus Stroman and more about general manager Ross Atkins. Stroman was always going. He pretty much talked and tweeted himself out of town. Atkins, meanwhile, is still here, at least for a while yet.
Stroman had become a symbol to this Jays management team of Atkins and his boss, Mark Shapiro, who have put together a team that might win 60 games this season, and then again might not.
Stroman represented a chance to undercut the most negative thing that has been said about Shapiro and Atkins, that they have squandered the assets of an aging, winning team by dithering and waiting until those assets depreciated.
Josh Donaldson, former American League MVP, would be example No. 1 of that.
So Atkins better hope that many of the initial assessments of the Stroman trade are dead wrong, or he’s going to be out of work when his contract extension — announced this year as quietly as possible — expires at the end of the 2020 season.
So far, pundits are suggesting Atkins either did OK on the deal, or that he didn’t get nearly enough. Both of those results would be disastrous for him.
He needed to win this deal, and win it significantly. Not necessarily Mark Teixeira-to-the-Braves big like Texas did more than a decade ago, but a recognizable victory on the trade market, with the New York Mets forced to give up assets they did not wish to surrender. Something that will help the Jays in a substantial way this season or next season at the latest — that’s Anthony Kay — and something to help further on down the line. That’s Simeon Woods Richardson.
Stroman was the last major asset left from those 2015 and ’16 playoff teams unless you count first baseman Justin Smoak — they’ve waited too long to trade him, too — or Aaron Sanchez, who is enduring another struggle of a season.
They got nothing for Edwin Encarnacion, nothing for Jose Bautista, nothing for Donaldson. On and on it goes. They were so busy trying to con the fans about having a contending team that they failed to maximum the value of some very good players.
With that as the background, more nothing for Stroman would be an absolute disaster for Atkins. It would be a damning piece of evidence to suggest he simply doesn’t know the marketplace, has no sense of timing and can’t horse trade effectively with other GMs.
Remember what Atkins said when he was hired to replace Anthopoulos in the final weeks of 2015? “I’m honoured and I’m humbled to be coming into this city and this country to help lead this organization to have a sustainable winner,” he said.
Right now, it’s hard to see him as a leader, more like Shapiro’s gopher. There’s also no sustainable winning in sight. Just steady losing, getting a little worse every year.
Reality has hit home hard this summer. This team won’t be back in postseason contention until 2023 or 2024 at the earliest. Jays fans have made a strong statement about what they think of this baseball team. Attendance, impressive at an average of 41,878 in 2016, is hovering around 21,000. It’s unlikely a franchise-worst 19,173 average (2010) will be reached, but it’s not impossible. Right now, all we can say for sure is the Jays’ average attendance will stay ahead of that of the 0-6 Argonauts.
The allure of rookie Vladimir Guerrero Jr. hasn’t been enough to keep the turnstiles spinning, but that’s not surprising. Jays fans have rarely been persuaded to attend because of one player (see Clemens, Roger). Right now, they’re not coming to watch a loser, period.
Still, Atkins needed to make a splash with a Stroman trade to give the fan base more to believe in and change the narrative, at least a little. To make those fans believe they’ve got somebody as sharp as Masai Ujiri at the top of the Jays’ management team.
As mentioned, the initial evaluation of the Stroman deal isn’t that positive, but we have to give the Jays GM a little time to prove he knew what he was doing and plucked at least one, and possibly two quality players from the Mets. If that turns out to be the case, this could be the deal that begins to make Jays Nation believe in Atkins.
Atkins has had some little victories. Lourdes Gurriel Jr.’s turnaround this season would be one of them. But he needs a big victory now. He’s got no more major cards to play, no more marquee names to move, no significant assets to swap unless he starts panicking and digging into the likes of Guerrero, Cavan Biggio and Bo Bichette.
It’s hard to believe he’ll get that chance.
Teardowns and rebuilds are always messy, particularly when a management team doesn’t clearly articulate its intentions to its fan base. Right now, it sure looks like Atkins has fumbled the assignment, and that’s what makes this Stroman deal such a symbolic one.
The Jays GM needs a win here. Or somebody else is going to be sitting in his chair soon.