Among the many bright spots on the 2020 Blue Jays, Tesocar Hernandez’s breakout season was arguably the biggest.

Heading into the COVID-shortened 2020 campaign, you would have likely expected somebody like Vlad Jr. or Bo Bichette or Nate Pearson to be the team’s young breakout star. Instead, it was Hernandez.

On Thursday, Hernandez’s excellent season was rewarded as he was given an American League Silver Slugger Award. Hernandez joined Eloy Jimenez and Mike Trout as the AL’s Silver Sluggers for the outfield.

The award is really no surprise at all as Hernandez was one of the best hitters in the league this season. He smashed 16 homers, drove in 34 runs, and slashed a .289/.340/.579 line. Had Hernandez not gotten injured late in the season, he could have feasibly found himself in the discussion for AL Most Valuable Player.

Though it was only a 60-game sprint of a season and results sort of have to be taken with a grain of salt, it looks like Hernandez has become a key part of the Blue Jays’ future. Over his past 162 games (136 of which have come since making a major adjustment during a stint with Triple-A Buffalo), Hernandez has a .833 OPS with 42 home runs, which suggests he’s figured out how to be a legitimate slugger at the Major League level.

For Ross Atkins, the sequence of deals that went into acquiring Hernandez represents his best work since becoming the general manager of the Blue Jays.

Fair or not, fans have pretty commonly maligned Atkins’ work at the trade table. The obvious ones that get a lot of heat are the J.A. Happ deal, which resulted in Billy McKinney and Brandon Drury, both of whom are bad, the Josh Donaldson deal, which resulted in much less than hoped, and the Aaron Sanchez for Derek Fisher deal, mostly because Fisher can’t seem to catch a ball.

There are also good trades sprinkled in there, like getting Randal Grichuk for Conner Greene and J.B. Woodman and getting Jacob Waguespack for Aaron Loup and getting Thomas Hatch for David Phelps. But after living through the excitement of the Alex Anthopolous Wheel and Deal days, these are pretty vanilla and not worth writing home about.

The Hernandez story gives Atkins a clear-cut win. He traded away a struggling pitcher and ended up with a Silver Slugger-winning outfielder and got himself a wild-card game “W” in the middle.

Back in 2016, the Blue Jays needed a veteran starting pitcher because of Aaron Sanchez’s team-imposed innings limit. Atkins dealt Drew Hutchison, who had been the team’s opening day starter in 2015 (!!!), to the Pirates in exchange for Francisco Liriano and prospects Harold Ramirez and Reese McGuire.

Liriano was excellent for the Blue Jays down the stretch and might have actually been the difference between them going on a playoff run and not. He posted a 2.92 ERA for the team across 10 appearances in the regular season and then came into the wild-card game in the 10th inning in relief of Roberto Osuna and picked up five huge outs.

Liriano ended up with the “W” in that game after Edwin Encarnacion hit his walk-off.

The following year, Liriano was again dealt to a contender. This time, it was the Blue Jays who sent him to Houston in exchange for Nori Aoki and Hernandez. Liriano tossed two-and-one-third innings for the Astros in the playoffs and has a World Series ring to show for it.

Now, after an up-and-down couple of years, Hernandez looks like a legitimate star for the Blue Jays. Getting that for Drew Hutchison is pretty tidy work.

Is there a big, overarching conclusion to draw here? No, not really. This is mostly just a funny sequence of deals to look back on now in hindsight.

But I do think that the Hernandez Story represents some positive things for the Blue Jays. It shows their ability to identify talent and their ability to develop that talent. Let’s hope that we see can see more Hutchison-for-Liriano-for-Hernandez situations and fewer Derek Fisher and Brandon Drury experiments moving forward.