More Intriguing Stuff On The Jays’ Pursuit of Christian Yelich

I missed this stuff this morning, but I think it’s definitely worth your consideration:

Also:

I’m with BVH here in that this is precisely what you want to hear if you’re a fan of the Jays. The Jays may not exactly be a free-spending club, but their payroll is very healthy, and they damn well should be using whatever financial muscle they can afford to push around clubs trying to go cheap. This idea obviously wasn’t quite the same as the Drew Hutchison-Francisco Liriano deal, but the principle is similar: using another team’s desire for salary relief to make a favourable deal for themselves.

It’s a shame it didn’t work — to have acquired Yelich without giving up Vlad and Bo just because the Jays were willing to take on a bunch of salary in the form of someone like Martin Prado or Starlin Castro, either of whom would have had utility to the club anyway, would have been a serious coup — but given that the Marlins did so poorly, and looked such utter fucking shitheads, in essentially giving away Giancarlo Stanton for salary relief, one can understand why they didn’t. Miami actually did well in this one, unfortunately.

Gah!

And then, of course, we have the Morales thing. For those who don’t remember, last night Blair tweeted that he’d heard the Jays would be willing to deal Bo Bichette in the event that a team would take Kendrys Morales with him. I didn’t ever think that was about the Marlins, seeing as they’re clearly not looking to take money back.

Thing is, it, uh, didn’t really make any damn sense for the Jays to be doing that with any other club, either.

And I think what Mish is telling us about what the Jays were trying to do here suggests that we shouldn’t worry about it too much. The Jays wanting to get Morales off the books badly enough to be offering Bichette to anybody? Seems like the opposite might be true: they’d take money back to avoid losing a potential future cornerstone like that.

We obviously don’t know for sure what the Jays are really thinking — on this or any number of other things (like, was the availability Yelich a unique circumstance, or are the Jays still looking to add another outfielder? Is Kevin Pillar’s place on the roster safe?) — but it sure sounds OK to me. On this one, at least.