The Blue Jays have finally handed out a long-term contract!

Mark Shapiro will be sticking around as the organization’s President and CEO for five more years, the same term that he originally signed back in 2015.

Back in November, Ken Rosenthal casually mentioned in a news and notes post that the Blue Jays and Shapiro were close on a new deal, so this obviously comes as no surprise. The organization has grinded through the long and painful part of Shapiro’s plan and the team seems poised to move into a period of competitiveness, so moving on now would have been pretty shocking.

Shapiro has done a lot of good for the organization since coming in as the controversial replacement for Paul Beeston, such as modernizing the analytics and high-performance departments and building a state-of-the-art facility in Dunedin for the team to use during spring training and for player development.

Of course, to the casual observer, none of that matters more than winning, so there will inevitably be skeptics of Shapiro’s work until the team actually breaks out and becomes a contender.