Oilers Takeaways: Battling for a job, Philp has another standout game

Philp had another standout game Saturday in a 5-4 Oilers win over the Seattle Kraken, scoring a nifty goal in tight and winning nine of the 11 faceoffs he took.

TORONTO — Set aside for a moment the obvious questions before the Toronto Blue Jays about their leadership structure and the futures of franchise cornerstones Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette. The most immediate matter, fundamental to their chances of a return to success, both short- and long-term, is examining their capacity to be a learning organization, one capable of not only following industry trends, but also of driving them.

Right now, they don’t appear to be the latter and it’s among the primary reasons a window of opportunity the envy of much of baseball heading into the 2021 season is facing a jarringly fast closure, without a single post-season win to show for it.

Now, baseball is difficult and random and gruelling and cruel, but the Blue Jays are well beyond that’s-the-game-it-happens territory. As the quick-glance chart below using WAR as calculated by FanGraphs demonstrates, the Blue Jays roster has declined in each facet of the game over the past four years, in ways that exceed reasonable variance, with the farm system going from upper third to bottom third in the majors over the same span.

At the beginning of this trying season, capped by Sunday’s 3-1 loss to the Miami Marlins, FanGraphs projected the Blue Jays at 83-84 wins. They finished with 74, 12 games back of Kansas City and Detroit for the final wild cards. 

Their roster changed dramatically during the season, especially at the trade deadline, injuries helped decimate the bullpen and several players struggled, particularly early on, so there are ways to explain away the gap. 

But if the Blue Jays are going to really learn from this — the way they were supposed to learn from the one-game-short heartbreak of 2021, the devil-is-in-the-details collapse of the 2022 wild-card series, the Jose-Berrios-pulled-early debacle last post-season — they must honestly assess whether they maximized the players they had. 

Did they?

“I feel like there have been a lot of individual successes and then some areas where we could have done a little bit better, whether that’s a guy in the bullpen or Spencer Horwitz, Ernie Clement, whatever,” replied manager John Schneider, who gamely answered for his team’s shortcomings every day after he was essentially left to be the organization’s sole public spokesman. “There are always ways in our line of work to do things better. And then it comes down to the player and the coaches being on the same page to execute it. There have been some individual things that have been good, but I think that there is a lot of room to expedite that process here.”

A healthy and adaptable learning organization finds ways to do precisely that. The sake of the 2025 Blue Jays season depends on it.

***

Stuck at 199 hits, in what was likely his final trip to the plate this season, Guerrero had good reason to chase the down-and-away, 3-2 fastball Lake Bachar threw him in the eighth inning Sunday. Instead, he watched it all the way into the glove and took his base, was replaced by Nathan Lukes and ran off the field to a loud ovation from the crowd of 31,668 disappointed that he was forced to keep his bat on his shoulder.

Even with the 200-hit milestone on the line, taking the pitch “was easy for me,” said Guerrero, speaking through interpreter Hector Lebron. “I’m not just going to strike out trying to get a hit knowing that I can get a walk. So it was easy for me. Obviously, they didn’t want to pitch to me. That was fine. Go ahead and move forward. I’m OK with that.”

The plate appearance, and the mindset behind it, is demonstrative of Guerrero’s growth this season. He faced down the doubts about him that resurfaced during a cold April and continued through a low-slug May before he hammered opponents through the season’s final four months, in a lineup where he was often an island. 

During an interview earlier this week, Schneider mentioned the need for the Blue Jays to get better at helping players make in-season adjustments, like Guerrero did, next season.

Pivotal to getting more from the roster is “not being reactionary to results,” explained Schneider, but “being proactive both as players and staff to see what is best for that player. And then when you’re convicted and you have buy-in, you can say, OK, this worked or this didn’t work. That’s an area where we can continue to move forward, myself included, but it really takes everyone, and you look at, overall, how proactive guys were in trying to make changes.”

Changes, of course, aren’t made lightly in the majors. Players get to the game’s highest levels by doing things a certain way. A down month isn’t necessarily reason to suddenly undergo a makeover. 

Sometimes, though, it is.

The Blue Jays preached patience as they went 15-16 in March/April and again during a 12-13 May. A tipping point came in the middle of June, after they took two of three from Cleveland at home and were 35-36 when a seven-game losing streak hit. 

They never recovered and their bullpen, which had just gotten Chad Green back but was missing the injured Jordan Romano and Yimi Garcia, with Erik Swanson at triple-A and Tim Mayza on the verge of being released, was irreparably broken. Just before the all-star break, the Blue Jays put Kevin Kiermaier on waivers, a signal to other clubs they planned to sell.

Ahead of the July 30 trade deadline, they made eight trades in five days, the busiest stretch of dealing in franchise history. 

“We just really never got to playing our highest level of baseball — ever — this year,” said Kevin Gausman, who struggled early himself due to a shoulder issue in the spring. “That’s obviously a huge issue. Losing nine guys is always tough, especially when two of the guys that we lost were the longest-tenured guys on the team in Tim and Danny (Jansen). That’s tough to replace those, especially a catcher. He’s one of the leaders of the team and he’s gone.”

The fallout was such that Schneider met with the club’s veteran players to assure them that the sell-off was a circumstantial one, that the Blue Jays weren’t heading into a full rebuild.

“He explained to us where we are, where we can be and that’s the plan, they’re going to reinforce our team,” said ace Jose Berrios. “They know they have a bunch of guys that can do great work out there and compete, trying to win a World Series. Hopefully, they can figure out (what’s needed) and do their work this off-season.”

***

Schneider’s meeting with the players was important as organization-wide trust is essential. Even though GM Ross Atkins met with certain players before the sell-off to let them know where things stood, some weren’t sure what to think as the trades started coming down. 

While the competitor in him didn’t like what was happening, Berrios wasn’t surprised. “I understand this game on the business side and where we are at, they chose the right decision for the team,” he said.

Still, the follow-through on what comes next really matters, since “any organization, any company, any business, they’re only going to work if everybody’s on the same page and everybody’s pulling towards the same goal,” said Gausman. “I don’t know if we can say that’s true, or if it’s been true, but I know the people that are in charge of that want to make that true.”

Gausman felt the Blue Jays had a strong spring — his shoulder issue aside — and went into the season with high hopes. He used the word “disappointment” to describe the season and planned to spend some time in the coming weeks assessing what went wrong for both him and the team.

“We’ve got to make a change, and I think the organization as a whole is doing the same thing like I am, I think they’re going to take a little time and re-evaluate and kind of look at themselves in the mirror, too, and make adjustments that need to be made,” he said. “Whether that’s personnel or players or scouting, I don’t know. That’s not my job. My job is to pitch every five days, to be honest. I worry about those things, but I don’t, because my job is to get guys out. Time will tell.”

***

The necessary learning isn’t only about maximizing the roster or making changes.

The Blue Jays had a spectacular off-season heading into the 2021 season — adding George Springer, Marcus Semien and Steven Matz while re-signing Robbie Ray, who rebounded from a dreadful pandemic season to win the AL Cy Young Award, while acquiring Jose Berrios at the deadline. The following winter, they replaced Ray with Gausman, signed Yusei Kikuchi and Yimi Garcia and traded for Matt Chapman. Leading into 2023, they signed Chris Bassitt and Kevin Kiermaier and traded for Daulton Varsho and Erik Swanson at the expense of Lourdes Gurriel Jr., top catching prospect Gabriel Moreno and, most pivotally for the lineup, Teoscar Hernandez. 

Their last off-season was highlighted by who they didn’t get, the infamous pursuit of Shohei Ohtani making it difficult to separate the gap in ambition between offering up $700 million for a historic player and the eventual haul of Kiermaier, Isiah-Kiner Falafa and Justin Turner.

Truth is, the Blue Jays were always playing for second in the race for Ohtani, as all his suitors jockeyed to be his top choice if the Los Angeles Dodgers stumbled. They didn’t stumble and there were no alternatives at that level for the Blue Jays to turn to.

This winter, there will be a similar song and dance with Juan Soto, who seems to have found an ideal match with the New York Yankees, hitting in front of Aaron Judge, but will no doubt be linked to multiple suitors that super-agent Scott Boras will try to play off each other.

The Blue Jays won’t have playing with Judge as a carrot to offer Soto, but if they extend Guerrero before the free-agent market opens, they can pitch the superstar slugger on a decade with the all-star first baseman, his good friend. Maybe that tempts him, other teams blink at exceeding the $500 million, perhaps even $600 million as some project, it’s going to take and all the pieces fall into place. 

Or maybe the Blue Jays are left playing for second again, the Yankees don’t stumble, a special payroll allocation for a unique opportunity can’t simply be redistributed to other areas of the market, and any ensuing additions are unfairly marked by the contrast.

Whatever the case, the club’s trade deadline haul alone won’t be enough to turn fortunes next year. The Blue Jays certainly have more currency to work with than beforehand, but the infusion of talent didn’t restock the major-league shelves or give them the ability to trade for top win-now talent.

Perhaps top hitting prospect Orelvis Martinez, who missed an opportunity to establish himself this season due to an 80-game PED suspension, is ready, or outfielder Alan Roden or shortstop Josh Kasevich, both of whom impressed at triple-A Buffalo, emerge faster than expected, but hoping for nothing but best-case scenarios is what led to 2024.

Hope, then, isn’t a good plan with Guerrero, Bichette, Bassitt and Chad Green among the players eligible for free agency after 2025, with Gausman, Springer, Varsho and Alejandro Kirk all up after 2026.

“You’ve got to really look yourself in the mirror and be honest,” said Gausman. “We’ve got to get better and the time is now if we want to do it with this group. If it’s not next year, then are we still going to be here the year after? … Obviously, we need a couple more players, no doubt about that. We’ll see what happens.”

Addressing the bullpen is one clear and obvious need. But just as pressing is adding the impact to the lineup the Blue Jays have been missing ever since trading Hernandez and Gurriel in the same off-season.

“I always say we don’t have a perfect world, but obviously trying to get like the team we had in 2021,” Berrios said of what would help. “(Before) ’22, ’23 and ’24, we’ve changed people every year in the lineup. Having a great and solid lineup is going to help our pitching staff. We don’t have a perfect world. So we’ll see what they’re going to do.”

Did the 2021 offence, which averaged 5.22 runs a game, make it easier on the pitching staff?

“For sure,” said Berrios. “With that kind of run support, you can win a lot of games.”

The Blue Jays scored 671 runs this season, 23^rd in the majors.

***

There was no shortage of learning for Bowden Francis, Spencer Horwitz, Leo Jimenez, Ernie Clement, Davis Schneider, Addison Barger, Joey Loperfido, Will Wagner, Steward Berroa, Luis De Los Santos, Jonatan Clase, Brendon Little and Ryan Burr, among others, who either debuted in the majors, returned to the majors or spent their first full season in the majors. 

As the Blue Jays went from old to young, from win-now to partial-reset in a near-instant at the deadline, the veterans in the clubhouse no longer had to only worry about their own performance, but also help set and guide expectations for how things are done.

“One, you have to play the game hard,” George Springer said in describing what that looks like. “Mistakes are going to happen. You’re not always going to get results. There are going to be times where you feel good, there are going to be times where you don’t, there will be times where you do everything right and still fail. But for me, for a lot of guys, it was about preparing the right way, having a plan. You’re not always going to execute — that gets lost on a lot of people. This game is hard and you can have the right plan, you can do everything right and you’re still going to fail. 

“Guys are learning to deal with that,” he continued. “Guys are learning to play every day, learning to get through the bumps and the bruises and to know the difference between being sore and just being tired or being hurt, or whatever the case. My job is to help with that.”

Springer is also accountable for his part in the Blue Jays getting to this point.

“I’ll never back away from it, I fell short of every expectation that I set for myself, individually,” he said of a season in which he batted .220/.303/.371 with 19 homers and 56 RBIs. “The good news is I was able to figure some stuff out and learn I can get through it. It’s not the way that I know that the fans would want me to play, my teammates would want me to play. I believe that this is one of those odd years. But I was able to learn some things about myself and I can take a lot of pride with that. I was able to help a lot of guys in here, which, again, obviously, we want to be in a much different position, but there’s always a silver lining. There are a lot of guys that have gotten a lot of good experience and a lot of firsts out of the way, a lot of heart-raising moments out of the way and we’ll be better off for it as a team next year.”

Only if the right lessons are learned.

***

All of which, finally, brings us to the obvious questions facing the Blue Jays. President and CEO Mark Shapiro’s contract expires at the end of the 2025 season, as does that of John Schneider. Ross Atkins is up after 2026. There’s no official word on their fates but the signs of a return for all three are there, each doing the type of 2025 groundwork an organization intent on change isn’t likely to have them do. 

The long-term fates of Guerrero and Bichette will play out in the coming weeks, too, a push to extend the former likely to be stronger than for the latter. 

In both cases, it will be complicated, Bichette given his down, injury-marred year, Guerrero given how Soto might reset the market. No matter what happens, this winter is a definitive turning point for the franchise, because the Blue Jays have enough resources to avoid constant build-up, tear-down cycles and sustain winning, but not without better drafting and player development, without better in-game execution, without extracting more from their roster. 

Over the last four years, the industry has adjusted to them and around them. The lessons were hard in 2024. Their capacity for applying those learnings is the first of many things that have to get better for 2025 to have a happier ending.

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