Columnist image

| Archive

TORONTO — No matter what city the Blue Jays are calling home this season, the expectations are sky high.

The dark, boring handful of rebuilding years are over and done with, and the honeymoon period that was the kids arriving and a surprise shortened-season charge to the playoffs are, too.

A significant amount of money has been poured into the roster and with the continued development of the young core, both the belief and the projections are as lofty as they’ve been since 2016.

When the Jays start playing meaningful games in April, they’ll call TD Ballpark in Dunedin home and that obvious and logical solution was made official by president/CEO Mark Shapiro on Thursday morning, just as pitchers and catchers officially got spring training 2021 underway.

We know the expected-to-contend Jays will call their minor-league complex — and the vast amount of resources that come with it — home well into the month of May at the very least, but from there the club is leaving its options open.

Hopeful they’ll be back in Toronto once virus concerns are eased and the border reopens, Jays brass is holding out hope it’ll be an option in the season’s second month.

As of today, the Jays are committing to Dunedin through their May 2 homestand.

Then there’s a gap to a long 10-game homestand that runs from May 14-24.

If there’s no way to return to Toronto at that point, they’ll simply stay in Florida and wait.

But this is where a contingency plan comes into play that could see the Jays return to Buffalo’s Sahlen Field, a ballpark they used to their advantage to go 17-9 at last year, for the summer months.

The reason?

The heat in Florida starts to factor in.

While the Jays would love to skip the upstate New York trip and head straight to Toronto when that door reopens, they could face the scenario of deciding exactly when to make that move, likely sometime in June when the mercury starts to rise significantly.

But unlike last year up until the last possible moment, there’s no mystery this time around.

It’s a three-city plan, but one where the Jays would love to cut out the connecting flight in Buffalo and take a charter straight back home to Toronto.

The virus is still holding all the cards at this point.

“I think some of the things that are most obvious to all of us, which is simply, what are the positive test rates? What is the access to the vaccine, the distribution of a vaccine? Have our players and other major league players been vaccinated?” Shapiro said on a Zoom call from Dunedin on Thursday. “All the variables that lead to having it be a safer, healthier environment and ensuring that our players playing in Toronto is no greater risk to Canadians and to the public health system. Those are the things that we'll look at. Safety, I guess, first and foremost.”

As the process played out over the winter, the Jays, with time on their side, looked into every possible option and kept landing back on the same options they had last summer.

In their extensive talks with the federal government, the Jays didn’t even put together a formal pitch to return to Toronto like they did numerous times last year, simply realizing the landscape had not changed enough, if at all.

It has left Shapiro and Jays decision-makers watching the news like the rest of us, hoping things will return to normal so that baseball can be played north of the border sometime in 2021.

“I think we'll all be watching the same things,” Shapiro said. “It's going to be clear to all of us whether the circumstances present a meaningful and healthy case for us to get back home. That's where we want to be. We hope to get there.”

As of today, the road to get back to the postseason is much tougher with expanded playoffs off the table. For now.

Don’t forget, though, the league and players association agreed to expand last year’s dance to 16 teams just hours before the regular season began. So never say never.

But as things currently stand, the Jays are back to fighting for one of five American League spots, which becomes a tough road when you have the New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays, even with a reshaped and depleted rotation, in your way.

It’s postseason or bust from this point forward for the Jays and even a 90-win season that results in a near-miss would elicit questions of “How did they screw this up?” rather than “Well, that was fun, there’s always next year.”

Inside the Jays’ clubhouse in Dunedin, it’s a different feeling for the players coming off their first bite of playoff pie, and you can be sure George Springer isn’t about to be celebrating just another step forward.

“We were there last year, everybody got a taste of it,” catcher Danny Jansen said. “We want more and we’re hungry for it. With the big off-season we had, we have all the tools and the personnel and the guys in the clubhouse to do so.”

For manager Charlie Montoyo, it’s a completely different set of expectations heading into his third year at the helm.

In 2019, there were no expectations and they lost 95 games. Nobody cared. They picked fifth overall and stole Austin Martin because of it.

Last summer, with everything going on in the world and most fans just happy to have a baseball season to see the kids play, the Jays rode the narrative of plucky upstarts who were overcoming the adversity of not having a home to a 32-28 record and a quick playoff exit as a clearly overmatched ballclub that had to face one of the best teams in baseball.

It’s much different within the walls of that locked-down clubhouse this spring.

“I think you feel it — you feel the vibe,” Montoyo said Thursday. “You feel like, ‘OK, we have a chance.’ With the people we added, ‘OK, we did it last year so we know for sure we can do it this year.’ That’s the vibe in this clubhouse right now, that we can play with the big dogs in this division and we can compete and we have a good chance.”

There’s no doubt the talent on the roster is there for that to happen, led by an offence that should be able to mash its way to a number of wins, especially inside homer-happy TD Ballpark in the early going.

“Certainly, it’s going to be left-handed hitter friendly, and it's going to be a smaller ballpark,” said Shapiro, who also noted that there could be some interesting moments with the lights due to the short stanchions allowing for the possibility of baseballs being hit above the lights and getting lost. “So it's going to be hitter friendly. That's for both teams, not just for us or for the visiting team.”

Even with a potent offence, a lot of things will have to go right, starting with the rotation, good health, as well as some sound decision-making from the bench.

Montoyo finished third in AL manager of the year voting last year, and since I had a vote, I’ll explain the thinking behind placing him third on my ballot behind Kevin Cash and Rocco Baldelli.

There’s a lot of subjectivity that goes into determining “best manager” and the job Montoyo did in keeping his players even-keeled on a day-to-day basis inside a Triple-A ballpark amidst an enormous amount of uncertainty deserves a lot of credit.

Managing people is an important aspect of the job, and Montoyo does that well.

Managing a game and a bullpen on the other hand?

Hoo boy.

You can question a lot when it comes to that, and that’s not going to change in 2021, especially with Montoyo entering the final year of his three-year contract and the Jays holding a club option for 2022.

The scrutiny will be intense this year, but Montoyo shrugged it off when I asked him about it Thursday.

“That’s part of the job,” he said. “It’s all good.”

While the players and coaching staff are expecting to win and win a lot, the front office, when you read between the lines, clearly knows this ball club is not a finished product.

They have not yet reached an all-in point like the San Diego Padres decided they were at this winter … but it’s coming.

The trade deadline will be an important time, especially if they play well in the first half of the season, and next winter should be fun for Blue Jays fans as the front office will be once again trying to make multiple big splashes, very likely in the rotation like the Padres just did.

Is the front office expecting a playoff contender? Definitely.

Are they expecting a World Series contender? That would most certainly be icing on the cake a little bit earlier than expected.

“There's a tremendous amount of positive energy and optimism around the team, which is great,” Shapiro said. “I think we were determined to kind of take the success (of 2020), the belief that our players had in each other and in their ability last year that transpired into a very positive step forward, and continue to maintain that momentum and move this team another step closer towards a sustainable championship-calibre team.

“We don't feel it's a perfect team. We know we're going to have to continue to make additions and improve and there will be other opportunities to do that — the trade deadline, next off-season. But we feel like we're on course. I think that's probably the best summary. We are on course in our plan to build a sustainable championship team.”

There’s no arguing that.

The Shapiro Plan is working, but patience isn’t something fans want to talk about, no matter if they’re paying to sit and watch in person or they’re watching their favourite players run around south of the border once again.

The fan base is thirsty for more postseason appearances, the players on the field agree, and expectations are high in 2021 because of it.​