Blue Jays Mailbag: Stroman’s Tweets, and What a Rogers Sale Could Mean

The Blue Jays’ offseason is hardly in full swing yet, but it’s slowly coming to life—a fact that could be slowed by a new revelation about Rogers potentially looking to sell the team. A lot of heavy lifting, on both the sale front and the roster construction front, still needs to be done, but things are actually starting to take shape.

Where that actually takes the Jays and their fans remains to be seen, but there are at least some new things to talk about in this week’s version of the ol’ mailbag for once! So let’s dive on in!

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.

This question, of course, is a reference to the tweets from Marcus Stroman at the end of last week, when the Jays cut ties with his good friend Ryan Goins, declining to tender him a contract and instead opting to trade for Aledmys Diaz of the Cardinals. The reality may simply be that these moves came together so quickly that there really wasn’t a whole lot of time to contact a bunch of players before they were announced. All this stuff has to be filed through the league, so it’s not like the Jays can just hold off on an announcement and feel confident that the information isn’t going to get out—especially when you’re dealing with a situation like a league-imposed hard deadline, as they were.

That said, I have a little bit of sympathy for Stroman here, even if, were I the Jays, I’d be trying very hard to impress on him that making his feelings so public doesn’t do anybody any good. I especially have sympathy if, as some have told me they read it, he actually meant it was Goins who found out over social media.

Whatever the case, if the team is going to get dragged on social media by one of its own players when these things happen, it perhaps behooves them to consider getting out in front of these things, whether it’s “reasonable” to do so or not.

This question, of course, comes straight out of today’s headlines, after Rogers CFO Tony Staffieri admitted to reporters that the long rumoured idea that the company is considering selling the Blue Jays is indeed true. “Rogers Communications Inc. is considering selling assets such as baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays and a stake in media company Cogeco Inc. to free up capital for other investments, Chief Financial Officer Tony Staffieri said,” reported Natalie Wong of Bloomberg on Tuesday evening.