‘UNDENIABLE’: Blue Jays GM Ross Atkins’ body of work will be put to the test this winter.
Shapiro was referring to Ross Atkins, his longtime sidekick and general manager for the past eight seasons. He was also using the platform of his season-ending news conference to put out fires that had been ignited a little more than a week before, when his team went up in flames in one of the more dramatic and frustrating season finales in franchise history.
While the boss’ statements served as a validation for Atkins to continue his job in Toronto, it is also apparent that all signals lead to the GM’s most critical and possibly most difficult winter yet.
While we’re on the subject of “undeniable,” the unpleasant reality is that a team that has made the playoffs three of the last four seasons has been washed away in each of those. It is a team that has yet to win a postseason game with a squad assembled by the Atkins-led front office.
So, after last season’s blueprint for improvement resulted in regression, despite the fact that the Jays had one of the top pitching staffs in baseball, Atkins confronts a significant hurdle in rebuilding an offence capable of complimenting that defensive greatness.
And it will most certainly not be easy.
With a slew of players set to become free agents, Atkins will need to be both creative and productive. From the likely departure of Matt Chapman at third base to the expected departures of Brandon Belt, Whit Merrifield, Kevin Kiermaier, and others, Atkins will need to be both creative and effective.
He’ll also have to find a way to enhance his team at numerous positions, and with few internal choices available, he’ll have to do so from a free-agent class that won’t have many of his other general managers salivating.
On top of the apparent wish list, the Jays front staff will need to clean house following a raucous postseason exit in which players openly questioned the decision to pull Jose Berrios from Game 2 of the ill-fated series against the Minnesota Twins. The communication failure that surrounding it exacerbated the situation, a flaw that reappeared all too frequently in 2023.
And looming above it all is the issue of whether the current administration can withstand another year of slippage and playoff disappointment.
To his credit — and in line with Shapiro’s continuous advocacy — Atkins built a team that averaged 91 victories over the last three seasons, lifting a promising young core to contender status. During his eight-year career, Atkins oversaw the transition from the John Gibbons-Jose Bautista-Josh Donaldson playoff seasons of 2015-2016 to a young squad designed for long-term success. He’s gone through two managers and overhauled several aspects of the business.
Now, however, the Jays risk being overtaken by other youthful teams while watching a pair of teams — the Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks — that had 100-plus losses just two seasons ago compete for the World Series.
Atkins and his baseball operations staff are still under contract for a five-year deal in 2021. The nucleus remains, the pitching staff has the potential to be excellent, especially if Alek Manoah returns to form, and there appears to be enough of Rogers Communications money to invest.
It remains to be seen how long the vault will remain open after the team have squandered a record payroll in 2023. However, there appears to be more where it came from in the short run.
“I don’t expect a dramatic philosophical shift in payroll next year,” Shapiro said, explaining that the communications mothership is unsurprisingly short on financial details. “I expect it to say in the same area for now.”
With that, all indications lead to another significant Atkins-led attempt at this. Adding to the difficulty is the upcoming job of re-signing homegrown talents Vlad Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette, who now have only two years of club control.
The obvious immediate priority, meanwhile, is to discover a boost to re-ignite on offence that was such a liability throughout the 2023 season and into a short-lived playoff season that yielded just one run over two games.
Besides diminishing the entertainment value of the Jays, the drop in production has been precipitous: From 846 runs in 2021, which was third best in the majors, to 775 in 2022 (fourth) to 746 (14th.)
“We didn’t score enough and we didn’t reach our goals,” Atkins admitted succinctly of his team’s inadequacies. “It was excruciatingly painful for me.” This has been one of the most difficult periods of my career.”
The objective now is to avoid further anxiety. One of the most difficult off-seasons he has experienced in his career.
That corpus of work praised by Shapiro is, in fact, a work in progress at a vital juncture.
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