Blue Jays avoiding arbitration with Bichette and Guerrero an important step – for now

A potential Bo Bichette vs. Blue Jays front office clash in an arbitration hearing wasn’t necessarily going to be a showdown of ill will between star player and team.

Avoiding it, however, was a nice piece of business for both sides now that Bichette has reportedly signed a three-year deal that will take him straight through to free agency.

With Vlad Guerrero Jr. settling before the arbitration date on a $14 million US deal for one year, the cornerstone pair of the Jays roster should report to spring training next week in a good frame of mind.

Always looming with Bichette and Guerrero, however, is whether one or both will be part of the long-term plan going forward. Both are under control for three more years and talk of extending them before free agency will be an ongoing storyline with the team.

“There are multiple ways for that to happen,” Jays president Mark Shapiro said in an interview with the Toronto Sun when we asked him how the club will approach such strategy. “The plan is to continue to explore multi-year deals. It’s about trying to find the sweet spot of sharing the risk. It’s hard to do. It takes an uncomfortable leap by both the player and the team. Sometimes organizations are able to do it. Sometimes they don’t.

“Regardless, we’ll be okay and we’ve got a heck of a window ahead with those two players being part of it.”

The closer they get to that window closing, of course, the greater the challenge will be to find that sweet spot.

To his point, Shapiro is of the belief that building a winning team around the pair will help in that regard. A taste of greater success over the next couple could go a long way to make Guerrero and Bichette want to get an extension done while added revenue from the team’s success would help on that end.

“The focal point for (Vlad) and Bo is we’ll deal with the system that’s in place which provides us with three more years of certainty of them being here,” Shapiro said. “We’ll utilize every opportunity within that time frame to explore whether there’s the opportunity to keep them here.

“We want to do that. We want them to stay here. But the only thing we have to do is win. There are multiple ways for that to happen as well.”

The Jays and Bichette appeared to be headed to a Thursday arbitration hearing which Shapiro maintains would have been approached as an unemotional bit of business necessitated by the CBA.

While it may be counterintuitive to oppose a key asset in a boardroom, it doesn’t have to be disruptive. The Jays had zero intent of acrimony.

“It is the only time we’re not working with complete alignment for the same result,” Shapiro said of the arbitration process. “Every other effort the entire year is solely focused on helping them be the best they can possibly be. Whether it’s the facilities and resources we provide them or the way we choose to surround them with coaches and other support (staff). We want our players to know how much we care, (but) there is one small period every year that we have to deal with contractual issues.”

Of the 11 arb eligible players on the roster, only Bichette was headed to hearing after the team filed a $5 million US offer and the Bichette camp checked in at $7.5 million. Compromise worked for the first year of the deal, which Sportsnet’s Ben Nicholson-Smith reported will be $6 million (followed by $11.5 million in 2024 and $16 million in 2025.)

“The system in place is the system in place,” Shapiro said. “When we have opportunities to impact and influence that, it’s during a collective bargaining period. I don’t think any of us would like the arbitration process. If we could avoid that, we would. It’s just the mechanism for determining a player’s salary. That’s it.”

Shapiro is well aware that the combined $20 million Guerrero and Bichette are making this season is just a ripple in the payroll pool compared to what an extension will cost.

But if that’s the cost of winning, so be it.

“We want to pay our players more because we want them to achieve more,” Shapiro said. “If they achieve more we have a better chance to win.”

There’s little dispute that those chances escalate if Vlad Guerrero Jr. has a more impactful 2023 season than he did a year ago. Shapiro, like many around the Jays, can see it happening.

“The expectations would be that he continues to grow into one of the highest impact offensive players in the game,” Shapiro said. “He does things and is capable of offensive performance that very few players in the game are capable of.

“Last year was a great year, but still he’s capable of more than that. He’s already shown more than last year. So last year was also a growing year for him.”