Maybe the fans don’t deserve this treatment (except the idiots who tracked Ohtani’s “flight”) but the front office deserves every single ounce of this pain.
Atkins and Shapiro are basically the kind of guy who neglects his own family to try to chase down an unattainable supermodel. Sign your own players. Draft and develop effectively. Sign mid tier free agents who will help fill gaps. Instead, we get off seasons full of moon shots that allow the team to be used as leverage by players who never intend to sign here. Getting publicly rejected over and over only further damages the brand.
It’s amazing that Atkins and Shapiro think that they can insinuate that they don’t want to pay Guerrero like Soto because he isn’t Soto and yet demand a return on a trade that would be equal to the Soto deal. Do they really think that other GMs are idiots? Shapiro has regularly balked at showing any real love to Guerrero publicly. Blair and Barker regularly question if the front office really wants him at all. They have essentially walked him to free agency…why on earth would Guerrero sign any deal at this point? He knows that in a few months teams will be throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at him.
The Jays have squandered his arb years by putting scrubs like Belt, Turner, Varsho, and Schneider behind him. They needed to load up in the last three years of team control. That was the window. Instead we got run prevention on a team whose core players simply don’t fit that philosophy. They needed to build around the core’s strengths.
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