Feeling good about pitching, Jays still hunting lefty bat

TORONTO — It hasn’t been the splashiest off-season for the Toronto Blue Jays and GM Ross Atkins up to this point when compared league-wide, but as of today the rotation is better than the one they ended the 2022 season with, and so is the bullpen.

Thanks to the subtraction of highly productive right fielder Teoscar Hernandez and his 57 home runs over the past two seasons in order to improve that pen, the Jays have shifted their off-season hunt towards some more offensive punch.

With the way the roster is currently constructed, there’s a clear need for another left-handed hitting outfielder, one who can mix in with righties George Springer and Lourdes Gurriel Jr. on the corners.

Addressing the media Monday to talk about the Chris Bassitt signing, Atkins didn’t dance around their biggest need heading into the holidays.

“Offensive, ideally, left-handed complement to our team and the easiest way to probably think about playing time is in the outfield at this point,” Atkins said.

On the free-agent market, the most prominent name remaining is Michael Conforto, who the Jays have shown interest in in the past and could represent a bit of a bargain on a short-term deal as the soon-to-be 30-year-old corner outfielder tries to rebuild his value coming off both shoulder surgery and a down 2021 season – the last time he was seen on the field.

But the .257/.363/.492 slash line with 88 homers and a 129 wRC+ over the course of the 2017-19 campaigns shows the type of upside Conforto could bring to a lineup desperate for a real threat from the left side.

After letting a seven-run lead slip away in the postseason, run prevention has been the clear focus for Atkins and his front office up to this point.

It’s more of a quality over quantity approach but it’s hard to quibble with the work they’ve done, adding one of the most consistent starters on the market in Bassitt for $63 million over three years, trading for right-handed reliever Erik Swanson and his 1.68 ERA from a year ago, and then giving those arms an elite defensive centre fielder to play behind them in Kevin Kiermaier.

When you include shifting Springer to right field where he was a plus-5 Defensive Runs Saved the last time he played there extensively with the Houston Astros in 2019 — he was minus-4 in centre for the Jays in 2022 — the Jays have significantly upgraded their outfield defence.

Subtracting Hernandez from an offence that scored the fourth-most runs in baseball at 4.8 per game last season may work out just fine if they tighten up the 4.2 runs they allowed, which was good for just 13th-best in baseball.

But there’s a clear need — and the outfield platoon at-bats available — for an impact stick that hits from the left side.

“Now we’ll shift to offensive improvements and where those opportunities present themselves and we continue to think about raising our ceiling in that area,” Atkins mentioned Monday.

Numerous times Atkins talked about raising the ceiling, not the floor.

That means they’re still on the hunt for more than just depth as the calendar flips into the new year.

At this point, Atkins has held onto his trio of highly regarded catchers, saying Monday he’s comfortable to head into the season with the same group and finding ways to make it work.

That’s called trying to create some leverage in trade talks. Saying they can’t have three catchers on the roster would not be a smart ploy by a GM trying to maximize a valuable trade asset.

Don’t rule out the Jays’ roster improvements once again stretching into spring training, just as they did last March when they somewhat surprisingly traded for Matt Chapman when his market finally developed coming out of the lockout.

While the lefty bat is the top priority now, Atkins didn’t rule out more additions to the pitching staff, either, but he believes both the bullpen and the rotation they’ve built up are amongst the best in baseball.

“You could argue top five — we think it is,” Atkins said of the rotation. “Certainly not closed off to adding to our bullpen and raising that ceiling. We feel like we have one of the best bullpens in baseball at this point, certainly with the depth that we have its top five in our view.”

With more pitching, less offence, and some trade chips still to push into the centre, the 2023 roster picture is still hard to fully evaluate, but Atkins seems to be hoping he can make something fairly significant happen before opening day.

“We have the room to grow for sure, but we’re not thinking of anything as minor,” Atkins said, noting there are financial resources left even as the Jays are currently set to run a franchise-record payroll. “Anything we can do at this point when you are a 90-to-projected-above-90-plus-win team, the value of improving your team at that point is so significant that we will work hard to do that.”