The swing and the miss on Olerud
Former GM Ash would like to have the 1996 trade of Blue Jays batting champion back
Under normal circumstances our sports pages would be filled with NHL and NBA playoff coverage, and how the Blue Jays look in the early going. But these aren’t normal times. Instead, with the games on hold during the pandemic, we’re offering an occasional series: Hindsight In 2020, which digs deep into some of the most significant moves and moments in Toronto sports history and examines their lasting impact. Hirings and firings, trades and non-trades, things you knew a little bit about or didn’t know at all. Today, the trade of John Olerud.
John Olerud is remembered for having one of the sweetest swings in Blue Jays history. He was an all-around hitter who worked the count, used the entire field and almost always put the ball in play when the bat left his shoulders.
The two-time all-star might not have possessed the power typically associated with first basemen, but he did just about everything else. His .395 onbase percentage is the best in Jays history and his .293 average ranks sixth. His resumé includes a batting title, three gold gloves, a pair of World Series rings and a spot in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame.
The swing was so pretty, so smooth, that when watching old highlights, it seems almost unfathomable someone would have wanted to mess with it. Yet, while Olerud is known for his 1993 chase of .400 and his contributions to the Jays’ championship teams, his stature within this city wasn’t always so positive. For as talented as he was, nothing Olerud did — besides that memorable ’93 run toward Major League Baseball’s still seemingly unachievable feat — was never enough. People always wanted more. It ultimately led to a trade — Olerud for New York Mets right-hander Robert Person — that former Blue Jays general manager Gord Ash wishes he could have back.
“They just weren’t on the same page,” Ash said recently in reference to Olerud and Toronto’s coaching staff, which at the time included manager Cito Gaston and hitting coach Willie Upshaw. “John was not a pull hitter. John was a guy who liked to spray the ball around the field, (with) a high batting average and a good on-base percentage.
“A lot of people like to think of first base as a power position. I don’t think it’s essential, but it just got to the point where it was better for him and better for us if we moved on. I don’t think we got enough return for him at the time.”
By the end of the 1996 season, it was all but a foregone conclusion that Olerud was operating on borrowed time. Toronto had Carlos Delgado waiting in the wings at first base and an aging Joe Carter required at-bats at designated hitter. There was no room for Olerud, and even if there was it would have been difficult on everyone after a couple of tumultuous years.
Toronto’s coaching staff was obsessed with turning Olerud into something he wasn’t. They wanted the Washington native to hit for power, pull the ball with increased regularity and be more aggressive at the plate.
“I don’t think that suits my strength,” Olerud lamented at the end of his last season in Toronto.
There were almost as many mechanical adjustments as there were home runs in his final two years with the Jays.
He moved up in the batter’s box and then back. He opened up his stance, then closed it off. Hands up, hands down. It was a complicated game of Twister and everyone had an opinion on how Olerud supposedly could be fixed, even when nothing was broken. The frustration mounted. “Our option, quite frankly, is to trade him,” Ash said at the time. “We obviously feel he has not lived up to what we thought he could accomplish.”
In the weeks leading up to the December trade, Olerud took a beating in the press. A Toronto Star column — under the headline “Would Olerud bite the bullet and offer Blue Jays a refund?” — made the case that Olerud’s production had been so bad over the previous two years that he should play a year for free.
A few weeks later he was gone, sent to the Mets for Person, with the Jays picking up $5 million (U.S.) of the $6.5 million Olerud was owed on the final year of his contract.
After acquiring Olerud, Mets general manager Joe McIlvaine was asked about the possibility of a bounceback season. The answer was telling. “Only God has the answer to that,” McIlvaine said.
Even the easy going Olerud seemed beaten down by his performance and the frequent criticism. “If I have a regret, my regret is the way I played these last two years,” he said.
Based on those quotes, you’d think Olerud had become a replacement-level player. The numbers tell a different story. He hit .291 with a .398 on-base percentage in 1995. The following year: .274 with a .382 OBP.
For context, both OBPs would have led all Blue Jays in 2019, and only twice in Jose Bautista’s career did he exceed either one.
Former Blue Jays pitcher Pat Hentgen can’t help but laugh about it now. He looks back on those 1995 and ’96 seasons when Olerud registered an on-base plus slugging (OPS) of .802 and .854, respectively, and is baffled at how the production was perceived.
In his mind, Olerud’s overall numbers would get more praise today than they did back then when people were more concerned with the traditional power numbers. Olerud averaged just 13 home runs and 58 RBIs over his final two years in Toronto.
“Look, I never saw a down year, personally,” said Hentgen, a former Cy Young Award winner who played with Olerud from 1991-96 and pitched against him later in his career.
“I know as a starting pitcher, facing a guy like John Olerud was a nightmare because he’s going to walk, he’s not a selfish hitter and he could spray the ball over the field. He was an incredibly tough out and he could beat you in many different ways. Even a down year for him was a great season overall.”
A lot of the unfair expectations can be traced back to the start of Olerud’s career.
After being selected in the third round of the 1989 draft,
Olerud, an accomplished amateur pitcher with a fastball that exceeded 90 m.p.h., was called up to the big leagues at age 20 having never spent a day in the minors. He entered the following year as the third-best prospect in the game, per Baseball America, and almost immediately became an everyday player.
His first big season was in 1992 when he hit 16 home runs with 66 RBIs and a slash line of .284/.375/.450.
The next season he flirted with hitting .400 deep into August and finished the year leading the majors in doubles (54) and OBP (.473) and the American League in average (.363) and OPS (1.072). Suddenly, the internal expectations, which were already high, went to levels Hall-of-Famers would have difficulty meeting.
Some of the outside pressure was mitigated early on because there were bigger names, and much bigger personalities, on those World Series teams. The star power allowed Olerud to partially blend into the crowd, but he was as integral to those rosters as anyone.
During the 1992 post-season, Olerud hit .333 with a .389 OBP. The following year, he had a .348/.464/.391 slash line in an AL Championship Series victory over the Chicago White Sox before struggling in the World Series against Philadelphia.
“He was not just one of the pieces of the World Series teams, he was a significant part of the whole thing,” former Blue Jays president Paul Beeston said. “He filled out the middle of the lineup for us. You had the great players who went into the Hall of Fame, Roberto Alomar and Paul Molitor. You had Joe Carter, Tony (Fernandez) came back. (Olerud) was an integral part of it because he was always getting on base and he just did his piece.”
After Olerud left town, his solid production continued. Over the next six years — three with the Mets and three with the Mariners — he hit .305 with a .412 OBP while averaging 20 homers a year and collected all three of his gold gloves.
Person, on the other hand, posted a 5.61 earned-run average in his first season with the Blue Jays, 7.04 in his second and 9.82 in his third. The franchise hadn’t just given Olerud away, they had paid someone to take him off their hands.
On the surface, today’s game appears obsessed with exit velocities and launch angles, but there’s also a better understanding of a player’s overall value and skill set. There have been just seven Blue Jays with more wins above replacement (WAR) than the 22.6 Olerud produced during his six years in Toronto and only two of them — Tony Fernandez (37.5) and Delgado (36.8) — won a ring with the Blue Jays.
“He would be very valued today,” Ash said. “That’s exactly what teams are looking for. Guys who get on base, guys that put the ball in play. I think people appreciate those skills more now. It’s not like we didn’t know how good he was. We did. But I think people look at the whole package now, not just power, regardless of position.”
Narratives change over time. Usually the memories get embellished as years go by and the stories start bordering on fiction. In Olerud’s case, history made his case stronger. The lanky first baseman with the beautiful stroke was appreciated for a time in Toronto, but not for as long as he should have been, even if most of us have conveniently forgotten that minor detail.
John Olerud’s resumé includes a batting title, three gold gloves and a pair of World Series rings