Stroman trade was inevitable, but the end still came with surprises

Scott Mitchell

Follow| Archive

KANSAS CITY — Midway through season six of The Stro Show, the lights and camera powered down in Toronto.

An inevitable set change finally came to fruition.

The bright lights of New York will be the backdrop now, but the borough isn’t the one everyone was expecting.

Instead of trading Marcus Stroman to the Yankees, a team always considered to be at the forefront of the sweepstakes for the 5-foot-7 right-hander, the Blue Jays traded their best pitcher to the Mets on Sunday evening.

Queens instead of the Bronx is the surprise.

The fact Stroman was traded is not.

Instead of waiting things out a bit longer, Jays GM Ross Atkins struck first, deciding the package of 24-year-old left hander Anthony Kay and 18-year-old righty Simeon Woods Richardson was the best the market would have to offer with about 72 hours to go before Wednesday’s 4 p.m. ET trade deadline.

It’s a somewhat intriguing return, if only because the initial reaction around baseball is that it’s a tad light.

Neither arm was considered a top 100 prospect, a subjective number that fails to even begin to tell the whole story of what a player could eventually become.

They are two very different pitchers at very different points on the development curve.

In Kay, the Jays get a close-to-ready MLB arm, one who had success in Double-A this season before struggling in his first taste of Triple-A.

Woods Richardson is the upside play.

A second-round pick in the 2018 draft, the A-ball results are encouraging and the power stuff and pedigree are aspects of the profile that allow you to dream, but Woods Richardson could also be two years away from being two years away.

The package is far from what Blue Jays fans were expecting in terms of name value and prospect ranking, but it’s impossible to fully evaluate what Atkins was able to extract without knowing where the market truly sat.

One source confirmed the obvious: The Blue Jays front office liked both of them more than the industry consensus.

More and more, teams are awfully hesitant to part with their top prospects in exchange for veterans, even if they come with a year and a half of team control like Stroman does.

This much is certain: The Mets are getting a consistent, close to top-of-the-rotation starter who craves the bright lights and the big stage.

Not an ace, but if Stroman’s your No. 3 starter, your rotation is likely one of the best in baseball.

For the Jays, this trade was about gathering more assets that line up better with the current youth already on the roster, but also about ridding themselves of a personality they deemed to be high-maintenance and not quite worth the better-than-league-average innings he provided every fifth day.

Stroman wanted an extension.

The Jays weren’t as eager thanks to the price and the antics.

The relationship between Stroman and the team’s decision-makers has been fractured for some time now, and emotion and ego, on both sides, turned things sour.

It’s fair to wonder whether the front office has been too thin-skinned, but whether it was the tweets sent out when he lost his arbitration case and when good friend Ryan Goins was let go, or a situation as recent as Stroman blowing up new manager Charlie Montoyo on the mound for all to witness, the Jays simply weren’t overly interested in making him a well-paid piece of the future puzzle.

Especially when you can get something you like in exchange for that asset.

Will the sensitivity come back to haunt them?

That will depend more on their evaluation of Kay and Woods Richardson rather than anything Stroman does or doesn’t do in the future.

The 28-year-old, health permitting, will have success.

He’s proven he’s deserving of a lucrative contract extension with a 3.76 career ERA and a sparkling 2.96 mark through 21 starts this season, it just wasn’t going to be the Blue Jays giving it to him.

In the National League, if that’s where he ends up staying, the numbers will look even better.

As Stroman himself has noted over and over again, the AL East is a beast and, thanks to the bandbox ballparks and the tendency for a couple of deep-pocketed teams to go to great lengths to compete each and every year, it’s an extremely tough place to pitch.

It would not be shocking to see Stroman go out and author a career year or two, which would steer public perception towards the Blue Jays losing this trade, no matter what the young arms become.

A Stroman with something to prove is always the best Stroman.

After creating a narrative over the years that nobody believed in him in order to be at his best on the mound, now Stroman truly has a storyline that will provide motivation and you better believe he’s going to do everything in his power to make Atkins regret this decision.

The Stro Show may be over in Toronto, but story of this trade and whether it was the right move for the Blue Jays’ rebuild has just started being penned, with a couple new characters in Kay and Woods Richardson being written in.