Sportsnet Is Trying to Make a Bo Bichette Controversy

I’ll be honest. I don’t think I have ever read any of David Singh’s work. Based on what people are saying on Twitter tonight, I’m sure he is fine at his job. Maybe even more than fine! He might even be a great writer! But not tonight.

Singh, a features writer for Sportsnet, contacted Bo Bichette to get some clarification on his tweet from the other night about his murky status.

The not so subtle tweet was obviously written about Bichette still playing in AAA, despite producing a solid 114 wRC+ at the level this season, along with what one assumes is good defense and base running, though we’ll leave that to the scouts to decide. It was something one would expect from Marcus Stroman, who has been famous for his random quotation tweets over his Jays career that seems to mirror his on the field and off the field storylines. But coming from Bichette, who has generally just been a happy prospect that everybody can love together, it was a little weird.

Did it really need a follow-up story, though? Probably not. Anybody who has been following the Blue Jays this season has been watching both Freddy Galvis and Eric Sogard play way above what we were expecting of them coming into 2019. With both of them still on the roster and both of them still playing well, there just isn’t room for Bichette on the team, especially with Cavan Biggio and Vlad Jr. needing at-bats. The team isn’t going to send either of those two young players down to AAA, and until Sogard and/or Galvis are dealt before the trading deadline, Bichette just can’t get every day playing time in Toronto.

Singh asked Bichette to expand on his tweet, and although you can read the story linked above for yourself, the gist of Bichette’s response was that going into 2019, he was given a set of goals to perform in order for him to be called up. Bichette feels he has reached those goals, so he wants to be called up. He says that maybe he hasn’t been called up because there are new goals that have been set for him, but he hasn’t been told of those. Of course, that’s not true. There aren’t new goals. It’s just the playing time thing! It has never not been about the playing time issue! Within two weeks, Bichette will be in Toronto playing major league games, he just can’t do it right now because there isn’t room!

Singh even mentioned the playing time problem in the story, but didn’t appear to raise it to Bichette as a follow up when Bichette went on about this supposed conspiracy to keep him out of Toronto.

Ok, great! So Singh sees it as a problem, but then why isn’t it being addressed in the interview? If Singh wasn’t going to raise pertinent follow-up questions as a result of the answers being given, then why was he even writing this story aside from just getting clicks? What makes it even worse is that Singh teased out the story on Twitter with the money-quote from Bichette about an hour before the story was published, a clear move to try to drum up some controversy and get people talking about something nobody was talking about in time for the story to make some impact.

I’ve penned my fair share of crappy articles that have had no business being written in my time blogging about the Blue Jays, so I’m not one to throw stones in glass houses, but come on, this is for Sportsnet! Now Jeff Blair is going to be yelling about this on the radio tomorrow, Jamie Campbell is going to have to talk about it at some point on TV, and Buck Martinez and Pat Tabler are going to mention it in passing while bemoaning the current state of baseball on the broadcast this week.

We’re all aware that Bichette is good, deserves to be in the majors, and will be in two weeks. Why are we creating controversy when there is none?