Ross Atkins Speaks About the Offseason

I think there’s some interesting names that are on the market, in trade and free agency, that are obviously significant pieces to different teams’ equations. I think that once one of these — whether it’s Stanton or J.D. Martinez on the offensive side, or Jake Arrieta on the pitching side — typically those types of impact players well tend to set the market and set the pace. That’s one theory. I think there are a lot of different angles and ways to think about it, but mostly, what I’ve experienced in the last five to ten years is that more teams now value players in a similar way. So, I think that’s good for baseball, because that allows then more trade discussion. I think what that then creates is more patience in free agency — to understand what’s available to you throughout trade, throughout free agency, and to make sure you have a picture of the entire market. That also creates opportunities for teams to identify talents that they know they want, and to be more aggressive and assertive on. We just haven’t seen that this year.

I kind of knew going in that if we weren’t healthy it was going to be hard for us, because we didn’t have a Triple-A team that we could say, “OK, you know what, if we don’t have Josh Donaldson for a month…”. We tried to account for that. The one thing — it’s hard to talk about regret, mistake, as a front office executive, because you oftentimes have to talk about a player if you do that. And that’s not an area — I have too much respect for players that fail at the big leagues and are below average major league players. I have so much respect for them that it’s a difficult area to go into. But I could go back at certain decisions, and there are times where I’d say, “I probably didn’t place enough value on Position X,” “I probably didn’t place enough value on how we would offset that injury.” Again, resources are finite, you can’t do it all. But there have been times where I’ve said, “OK, there was an opportunity to potentially protect for an injury there better, how could we have done that?” We have to think that way. We have to constantly think that way, and we always are. How we are going to deal with injury is focus on prevention, and then how we account for it if it happens — it’s what you can control, right? Because it’s inevitable.

We’ve got to protect our middle infield. Devon Travis is a player who is remarkable when he’s on the field, and we hope that he is, but we’re not going to plan on him playing 160 games. We’re not going to plan on Troy Tulowitzki playing 160 games. So, who’s going to play the 80 to 160 games between those two positions, and what’s the best possible fit to create depth and versatility? Ideally that person is left-handed and can also play the outfield. Not easy to get. Ideally he’s a switch hitter and he steals 40 bags a year — right? That’s first and foremost, and to the extent that we can protect our infield, that’s the priority. And then secondarily would be complementing our pitching in some significant way. How do you define significant? That could be a guy that’s a fourth- fifth-calibre starter, or an elite reliever, or some hybrid of those two. And then we will look — we feel we have good depth in our outfield, and Teoscar Hernández is a really exciting young player, but we feel we can complement Ezequiel Carrera and Steve Pearce and Teoscar Hernandez a little bit better, and not just rely on a player that had a good month or month-and-a-half of Major League Baseball performance.

I was speaking idealistically to paint a picture, and it’s not really that realistic just to go out and say, “this is the type of player we want,” and go out and get him. But some version of that could be in two players, could be in three players. Or it could be taking the risk, or gamble, on — whether that’s internal or someone that we value more than another team, and putting them in a different position, to find out if there is upside — to find out just how big those error bars can be, by taking some risk. Having said that, we need to win, and we need to find a way to protect that depth. Richie Ureña can be a part of that, Lourdes Gurriel can be a part of that, and there are other players that may or may not be available that might be a part of that. And there’s also free agents that could be that solution for us. But again, the silver bullet and the ideal is one thing, and what’s realistic is another. But for the purposes of painting a picture, we need to somehow come close to that to the best of our ability, and, like I said, that may be in a hybrid-type scenario.

I feel a personal responsibility, Mark feels a personal responsibility — and it doesn’t stop there. Ben Cherington, Tony LaCava, Gil Kim, Andrew Tinnish, Joe Sheehan, Mike Murov, John Gibbons — feel a personal responsibility to put a winning product on this field for the fans of Toronto and for the country of Canada. I secondarily feel an immense amount of responsibility to Russ Martin, and Josh Donaldson, and J.A. Happ, and Marco Estrada, who wake up every day — and Troy Tulowitzki — thinking about one thing, and it’s winning. When we don’t, I feel personally that we’ve let them down. So I feel every day thinking about how we are going to have the best possible team we can have, given the resources that we do.

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I personally don’t feel that you should ever be in a “rebuild mode” in this market, and this environment. There might be soft resets based on circumstance — based on where you are as a team. It’s managing risk and mitigating risk, and understanding that there are times where you should be more opportunistic, but personally I don’t buy into the strategy that we’re not going to be a good team for five and six years.

You have to win on every front of player development, scouting, high performance, culture, environment, major league development, major league advance scouting, professional scouting, international scouting. If you are elite in all of those areas, then you can have a remarkable turnaround where you don’t need the five and six year lulls. But there’s no team in professional sports that doesn’t have a lull. It’s a part of it. I just don’t buy into the strategy that, hey, let’s pick higher, and let’s just not be a good team for a significant period of time.

I did talk about the potential of a down year or two. There may be a time — I hope not, I hope not, I really do — but there may be a time, like I said, every professional sports team goes through it, where this might not be the time. We just experienced it at the trade deadline. We didn’t trade Vladimir Guerrero and Bo Bichette for Player X at the deadline, whoever that may or may not have been. We didn’t triple down. That’s a part of that theory and that strategy, that this may not be the best time to put a significant amount of your cards — putting all of your cards on the table really doesn’t ever fare well — but putting a significant amount of your cards at a time where you feel that this is the time to really push and really make sure. You can’t do that every year. You run out of assets and resources. So, it’s a spectrum. I guess that the point I was trying to make is that I don’t think that the Toronto Blue Jays, or that professional baseball teams, have to take the five to ten year lulls to be sustainable, contending teams. I think if you have the right environment and culture there’s going to be down years, but fans can always remain excited, free agents can always be interested, young players coming up in our system and acquired talent that’s already there can believe that, because of our culture, because of our environment, we can overcome any win projection that other objective measures have on us.