By: Scott Mitchell
TORONTO — When we’re sitting here three years from now dissecting the Vladdy and Bo discount era and all the opportunity to build a championship roster that came along with it, the investments made on the pitching side by the Toronto Blue Jays front office are going to be a major storyline.
Did they identify the right starting pitchers on the free-agent market?
Were they able to uncover arms that become assets via trades?
And, ultimately, were those pitchers able to stay healthy and perform up to — or even exceed — expectations?
The core of position players currently in place gives them a baseline to start from each year.
How they piece the pitching together from season to season, however, is going to be the deciding factor between really good teams that are postseason contenders, and legitimate World Series threats.
With that in mind, the Mark Shapiro/Ross Atkins regime is now nearly eight years old and, looking back, it’s been a bit of a wild ride with their pitching acquisitions over the years.
From short-term swings and misses like Jaime Garcia and Tanner Roark, to blockbuster trades and lucrative extensions, to three different $20-plus-million per year long-term free-agent deals, the rotations Atkins & Co. have put together over the years have been a mixed bag of both acquisition cost and performance.
Since the Jays started contending again in 2020, the club’s starting pitchers have finished 17th (4.55 ERA in 2020), sixth (3.79 ERA in 2021) and 18th (3.98 ERA in 2022) in rotation ERA over the past three seasons.
In an effort to evaluate the rotation arms the Jays have acquired in either trades or free-agent signings, I went back and pulled every single starter from the time this front office took over at the end of the 2015 season and came up with 27 different names that qualified.
Here are the rules to make a pitcher eligible for this list. Pretty simple: They must have been traded for or signed to a big-league contract by the Shapiro/Atkins regime, and re-signings — specifically JA Happ and Marco Estrada in the very first year of their tenure — do not count.
When all of the information is laid out, acquiring pitching looks a lot like professional gambling: A 55 per cent hit rate still wins you money, but it’s really close to a 50/50 proposition more than anything else.
Once acquisition cost and context were factored in, each of the 27 pitchers were assigned one of four tags: Win, loss, draw or jury still out.
Here’s the final tally, and a look at all 27 of the starters that have been acquired to help out the Jays rotation since 2016.
WINS: 8
LOSSES: 9
DRAWS: 6
JURY STILL OUT: 4