Blue Jays Mailbag: Pursuing Darvish, Non-Tender Candidates, and Sanchez’s 2018 Role

MLB’s offseason remains a slow-moving affair, but we’re inching ever closer to the point where teams—maybe even the Toronto Blue Jays!—actually start making some transactions as they shape their rosters for the year ahead.

But having so many storylines up in the air just means that the possibilities for how the offseason will ultimately play out remain limitless. More or less. Which is to say, Blue Jays fans are still daring to dream, and I’m still daring to throw cold water on those dreams. Now onto the mailbag!

And remember, if you have a Blue Jays question you’d like me to tackle for next week, be sure to send it to stoeten@gmail.com. As always, I have not read any of Griff’s answers.

Well, yeah. Yu has a say in it. You can’t just “go get” a free agent—teams don’t do their winter shopping like they’re in a supermarket. And you especially cant just “go get” a top one—especially not at this point in the process this year. Right now it appears as though free agents are waiting to see where Ohtani lands, and perhaps even more importantly, where Giancarlo Stanton lands. Those two moves are going to significantly change the offseason plans for a couple of the league’s top teams, and they’re going to make the teams that miss out that much more desperate. Darvish and his agent, as well as the agents for Jake Arrieta, JD Martinez, etc., seem to believe that the offers are only going to get bigger once they’re clearly the top talents available. Until that happens, there’s probably not a whole lot any club could do to sign them, apart from offering to overpay them dramatically. Teams simply don’t operate that way, so acting like the Jays should be and then getting upset at them for not is pretty unfair.