Good morning. The Toronto Blue Jays are one win from a division title and a ticket to the American League championships. Today, we speak with play-by-play broadcaster Dan Shulman about how the team’s business strategy helps it compete from north of the border.
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In the news
Government: Ottawa is making a permanent shift to tabling budgets in the fall instead of spring.
Trade: A high-profile Democrat governor has called on U.S. President Donald Trump not to bully Prime Minister Mark Carney in this morning’s meeting.
Energy: Cenovus is being urged to hike its bid for MEG Energy.
On our radar
- Canada reports its trade balance for August. Economists expect the deficit to deepen as imports continue to outpace exports.
- Trump and Carney meet in the Oval Office at around 11:30 a.m. ET.
Trey Yesavage warms up before taking the mound on Sunday.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
In focus
Built for this
Hours before his record-setting performance against the New York Yankees on Sunday, Trey Yesavage told reporters he was “built for this.”
And he was. The 22-year-old struck out 11 batters – the most in Blue Jays postseason history – in a start that punctuated a meteoric rise through the team’s system. But behind him stood a player-development operation rebuilt over years and anchored by a US$100-million complex in Dunedin, Fla., where the Jays have fused analytics, health science and technology into a single program designed to produce major-league contributors faster and more reliably than before.
The infrastructure economy
The first step toward building an asset like Yesavage is drafting a 6-foot-4 right-hander whose sinker breaks bats and personal belief systems. But it helps to have a facility erected to refine every inch of its flight path. Completed in 2021, Toronto’s Dunedin headquarters turned what Jays broadcaster Dan Shulman calls an “antiquated complex” into a modern base referred to as “the lab” within the organization.
“It’s recovery rooms, sleep quarters, analytics, everything in one place,” Shulman said in an interview from New York, where the Jays could win the division series with another win tonight. “They’ve thought of everything.”
Yesavage, drafted 20th overall just last year, signed that July for a US$4.18-million bonus and now earns a base salary of about US$766,800. His rapid rise – from rookie camp to the postseason in barely a year – has made him a powerful weapon, a potential marketing asset, and a developmental success story.
For the Blue Jays, investing in the future – in technology and in their young assets – has become a defining part of their identity, and a way to offset the challenges of being north of the border. “It’s always a bit harder to attract players to Canada,” Shulman said.
The organization treats its Dunedin base as both a development hub and a recruiting tool, flying in free agents to tour its campus of nutrition and recovery centres, analytics suites and live-data fields that mirror major-league conditions.
“They want to make their players and their players’ families as content and comfortable as possible,” Shulman said. “It’s in their best interest to make people feel that this is the best place to be.”
Jose Berrios stretches in the Blue Jays' Player Development Complex.Jonathan Dyer/Reuters
The Jays’ development facility places the team at or near the top of a small group of big-market clubs – including the Dodgers, Astros, Yankees and Cubs – with new player-development hubs that could pass for biotech research labs.
“Every major-league team now runs its own version of a research department,” Shulman said. “But not every bank or law firm is the same.”
Not every owner, in other words, is opening their wallets or seeking financing to compete in baseball’s new arms race.
As a result, the investment gap has become so pronounced that league officials reportedly floated the idea of a cap on spending on technology and player development – a proposal that would appease smaller-market owners but frustrate clubs that have bet heavily on development infrastructure.
‘You can’t have 26 CEOs’
If Moneyball was about exploiting market inefficiencies, the pioneering new age of player development might be more akin to creating new markets altogether – investing in the infrastructure that makes talent reproducible.
That isn’t to say the team expects every draft pick will be a success – not every new hire becomes destined for the corner office, after all. But every player who joins the team gets access to leading technology and information. In economic terms, it’s the kind of investment that enhances an organization’s productivity.
For the Jays, whose lineup isn’t as top-heavy as the home run-happy, strikeout-prone Yankees, that has translated to a higher floor, Shulman said – a lineup filled with contributors like Davis Schneider and Ernie Clement whose strengths fit together rather than overlap.
“You can’t have 26 CEOs,” he said. “Everybody’s got to have their role, embrace their role and be the best they can at it.”
Still, the system depends as much on identifying talent as developing it. “It starts with your international scouting, your high-school scouting, your college scouting,” he said. “You can have the best complex in the world, but if you don’t draft the right player, it doesn’t matter. It’s a two-step process – first the acquisition of the talent, then the development of the talent.”
And then, with luck, a pitcher built for more games this fall.
Charted
‘Unsustainable’
With the federal government’s budget less than a month away, the parliamentary budget officer is warning that Ottawa’s fiscal standing is deteriorating to an alarming degree — and that the country’s public finances will be unsustainable without changes.
The PBO is projecting the federal deficit will balloon this fiscal year, and it has downgraded its outlook for the Canadian economy, which is weakening under the weight of prohibitive U.S. tariffs.
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Morning update
Global stocks regained some stability as political upheaval in France, Japan and the U.S. weighed on markets, but did not offset underlying investor optimism over a possible boost from lower U.S. interest rates.
Wall Street futures were little changed and TSX futures pointed lower following fresh record closes yesterday for Canada’s main stock market as well as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq.
Overseas, the pan-European STOXX 600 was up 0.13 per cent in morning trading. Britain’s FTSE 100 rose 0.1 per cent, Germany’s DAX climbed 0.15 per cent and France’s CAC 40 advanced 0.28 per cent.
In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei inched higher to a fresh record close after yesterday’s 4.75 per cent jump. while there was no trading in Hong Kong for a holiday.
The Canadian dollar traded at 71.67 U.S. cents.