Olney: Blue Jays 'a million miles away' from becoming sellers

The Toronto Blue Jays had their five-game winning streak snapped after a loss to the Philadelphia Phillies on Tuesday night, but remain in the thick of a crowded American League wild card race with six teams all separated by two wins or less.

Still, questions remain on what the next few months will look like for the team with a handful of expiring deals on the roster as Bo Bichette, Chris Bassitt, Erik Swanson, and Max Scherzer are set for free agency at the end of this season.

With all of the uncertainty surrounding the team over next few seasons, it remains to be seen if the Blue Jays will look to acquire talent before the deadline for an all-in playoff push or begin selling off important pieces of the roster to recoup assets to build around Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

Buster Olney of ESPN joined TSN 1050’s First Up on Wednesday morning, and quickly dispelled any notion that Toronto is looking an in-season retool at this point of the year.    

“They’re a million miles away from being sellers at this point,” he said. “They actually, to me…you can look ahead and say there’s a real path for them to make the playoffs and they will play this out and they won’t be sellers before the deadline.”

“After they spent all that money on Vladimir Guerrero Jr., after the push this year to try to get better and to have this pitching staff, I think their odds to make the playoffs would have to go down to, like, one percent before they would actually become sellers, and they’re not close to that.”

Per Fangraphs, the Blue Jays currently hold a 40.3 per cent chance to make the postseason this year, the seventh-highest mark in the American League.

Six playoff spots are up for grabs in the junior circuit – the three division winners and three wild card spots – with Toronto trailing the Cleveland Guardians by just 2.5 per cent according to Fangraphs’ projection model.

“As it stands right now, it’s much more likely they’re going to hang onto their guys and make a push,” Olney added.

“Given how they’ve handled things over the last year, I do think that…once you get into the bed with the $500 million and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., you’re not going to pull up stakes and wave the white flag at the end of July unless you completely collapse between now and then.”

While Olney believes the Blue Jays have no imminent plans to start selling off pieces, the team would be risking losing Bichette in free agency.

The two-time All-Star came up through the Blue Jays’ system alongside Guerrero, with the pair both making their big-league debuts in 2019.

Bichette was limited to just 81 games last season while dealing with a calf injury, but struggled to the tune of a .225/.277/.322 slash line with just four home runs, posting a negative WAR for the first time in his career.

While Toronto locked up Guerrero long term with a 14-year/$500 million contract earlier this spring, Bichette appears likely to hit the market this winter where all 30 teams will get the opportunity to bid on the Blue Jays’ homegrown star.

“The reasonable path for the Blue Jays on Bichette is to essentially look at his situation like they hold a one-year option on him,” said Olney. “If you put him out on the trade market this summer…he’s not going to generate a lot of return.”

“What’s more likely for the Jays in this current situation is, ‘Hey, we can give him a qualifying offer when he becomes a free agent at year’s end'. It might behoove him to accept the qualifying offer, and if he signs someplace else, great, you get draft pick compensation.

The qualifying offer, a practice implemented by Major League Baseball in 2012, allows teams to offer a one-year deal to their impending free agents. If the offer is declined and the player leaves in free agency, the team would receive compensatory draft capital.

The salary on the one-year contract is determined by the mean of the league’s 125 highest-paid players, with last year’s qualifying offer being valued at $21.05 million.

Of the 144 players to have been given a qualifying offer by their respective front offices, only 14 have accepted the deal.

The Blue Jays most recently gave an offer to Matt Chapman before he signed a contract in free agency with the San Francisco Giants ahead of the 2024 season. They received the 136th overall pick in the draft as a result, selecting outfielder Nick Mitchell who was later sent to the Guardians in the trade for Andres Gimenez this past offseason.

“If he winds up accepting the qualifying offer, then what you can do at that point is that Bo Bichette [comes] back in 2026 and rebuild his value at age 28. That’s not an unreasonable path and there’s not a lot of risk in that for the Jays.

“It makes sense to me that they look at that qualifying offer situation as a club option.”