Blue Jays still feel enough options are available for improvement

SAN DIEGO, Calif. — Much of the competition throughout Major League Baseball has been spending with two fists this week, almost as if its last call at a saloon in this city’s Gaslamp Quarter.

The Toronto Blue Jays at these soon-to-be-completed Winter Meetings? Not so much.

To push forward the San Diego analogy, in what feels like an outlier compared to the past several winters, owners have been spending like drunken sailors.

While the Jays’ off-season can’t be graded as a failure just yet, the fact that others have taken a leap forward has to be of at least some concern as the annual convention winds down.

Jays general manager Ross Atkins doesn’t see it that way, of course, and as the remainder of December plays out, he may, in fact, be right.

But for a franchise that came into the off-season with some fairly sharp needs and expectations, there is at the least some urgency going forward.

“I would say all the things I said (earlier in the week),” said an unwavering Atkins. “We don’t see Thursday (when the baseball world disperses from the Seaport District here) as a deadline. We don’t see that as a culmination. We see each day of the off-season as an opportunity for us to get better.

“We’re excited about our young core. We see opportunities to make it a significantly better team.”

Just how the Jays go about that is now an area of intrigue as they missed out on a number of free agent players that it appeared they were “in” on.

(While fans of the team tend to get fuelled by such talk — often to the point of the irrational — it’s prudent to suggest that being in discussions with players that could possibly help your team is the absolute minimum a front office should accomplish. It’s called doing your job.)

As the list of ‘ones that got away’ piled higher and other teams prepared to leave town with improved rosters, the Jays proclamation that they “are better positioned than any other team in Major League Baseball” is being put to the test.

To that end, the brass still sounds confident that enough opportunities remain on the market to make their desired improvements.

“I think there’s a lot of good players that are still free agents,” assistant GM Joe Sheehan said on Wednesday following the Rule 5 draft in which the Jays neither selected or lost a player. “There’s a lot of good players that are available in trade. … I think we’re in a fortunate position where we don’t have 16 holes to fill. We’ve got a pretty complete team returning.”

Where do they go from here? The pursuit for starting pitching remains the priority, though the market and the team’s position in it makes it clear that backend-of-the-rotation arms are the focus. Management and the coaching staff sound supremely confident that Jose Berrios will improve and, when paired with Alek Manoah and Kevin Gausman, the front end would be secure.

An intriguing possibility is fast-tracking the development of top prospect Ricky Tiedemann. Some in the organization are extremely enthused about the third-round selection from 2021. While there’s no way anyone in the organization is going to suggest an accelerated timeline for the 20-year-old and pile that kind of pressure on the youngster, he’ll be an interesting arm to watch in the spring.

There’s also a desire and need to add an outfielder to the mix, preferably a left-handed bat. Michael Brantley on a short-term deal, anyone?

Barring a late move Wednesday or into Thursday, however, the Jays will return home empty-handed, which isn’t exactly foreign territory at the winter Meetings. If there’s any panic or disappointment, Atkins isn’t showing it.

“The groundwork starts well before the Winter Meetings,” Atkins said. “We did as much work last week as we’re doing this week. If not more. Sometimes when we’re here, we get pulled away to do things that are atypical in your schedule.”

Others are in that same work flow, of course, and left here with at least something.

Though Atkins is correct in saying that the off-season doesn’t slam into a brick wall once the meetings end, pitchers and catchers are scheduled to report to spring training in 78 days. 

Meanwhile, the blockbuster nine-year, $360-million US deal that Aaron Judge signed to remain with the New York Yankees wasn’t exactly the news Jays brass were hoping for when they awoke on Wednesday. Let’s just say they were big fans of the reigning AL MVP landing in San Francisco.

And that, of course, prompts a fast forward speculation to what will happen three years from now when Bo Bichette and Vlad Guerrero Jr. hit free agency.

“Continue to dialogue, continue to have those dialogues in private,” team president Mark Shapiro said this week, when asked the team’s approach to avoiding a similar scenario to the one that unfolded with Judge. “I don’t believe in negotiating in public. Three years is a very long time, but we’re also cognizant that three years can come quickly.

“We’ll take every advantage of what that means to your window to compete and always maintain an openness and a willingness to keep them here longer.”