Vladimir Guerrero Jr. capped the worst season of his career by saying that his new half-a-billion-dollar contract was for work he'd done as a Blue Jay, not for what he was supposed to do.Stacy Revere/Getty Images
It wasn’t until Wednesday that one realized we’d missed one of the great rites of fall last year – the annual scourging of Jays’ GM Ross Atkins.
The baseball team was too good last year to do a proper flogging. Thankfully, normal service has now resumed. Time for the man in charge to channel his inner Liberal prime minister.
As a cost-control measure, Atkins does the scourging himself. Now that the team has its World Series cover, there’s no need for fans to help any more.
“Most importantly, [I] would like to acknowledge the accountability, the responsibility that I have,” Atkins began. “Very disappointed that we’re sitting here today.”
A few minutes later: “As much as we talk about run scoring, run prevention, defence, base running, there’s one person to look at for the reasons for [losing], and that’s me. I’m sorry we’re here today.”
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Did Atkins kill someone that we don’t know about? By accident, of course. Maybe a hitchhiker who was standing too far into the middle of a dark road? That is the level of personal angst he brings to these after-season (as opposed to postseason) pressers.
Between apologies, Atkins also managed to squeeze in some of the management woo woo that must make the Jays the safest emotional space in Canadian business.
Here he is on his conversations with 2026 no-show Vlad Guerrero: “We’re in the fight with him. Trying to download what he feels in the most authentic way, and what he thinks is the core opportunity. Our goal is for him to feel our support.”
No wonder Guerrero climbed down so cringingly from his remarks on who’s paying him for what. It was either that or spend three days on a healing retreat with Atkins. Just him and GM passing the talking stick back and forth. Under those circumstances, I’d confess to the Lindbergh kidnapping.
Toronto Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins, right, and president and CEO Mark Shapiro, seen here in better times, during last year's World Series.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
The truth that cannot be spoken in public is that this isn’t Atkins’s fault. Not this time. It’s a lot of people’s, but mostly it’s Guerrero’s.
It’d be easier to sympathize with Atkins if he’d come out and said, “I dug up a 30-year-old rookie of the year candidate in Japan, stole what turned out to be the best starter on the market from the Dodgers, concocted one of the best closer combos in baseball, and this is on me? I think you have me confused with the guy who bats third most days.”
But why change the script now? It’s 11 seasons since Atkins and Mark Shapiro took over. They have a nice routine going when things don’t turn out how they’d hoped (10 for 11 on that score).
Atkins comes out first and absorbs the blame (though that never translates into any sort of corrective action). After his deputy dulls the media’s bloodlust, Shapiro emerges to wax moonily about the beauty of baseball, and in particular, Canadian baseball.
He was at it again on Wednesday, speaking about all the kids he sees playing catch in the park when he’s out walking his dog.
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“It’s never lost on me that I wasn’t seeing that five years ago, six years ago, seven, eight, nine years ago,” Shapiro said. “Never would have happened in September.”
Never? I believe Shapiro when he says he’s noticing it more, but I’m having trouble with the idea that kids in this city didn’t know how baseball gloves worked until the Shapiro-led Jays introduced them to the game. Like Prometheus arriving from Cleveland with fire.
There is even talk that before the beginning of recorded history in 2016, the Jays may have occasionally excited the attention of local youth.
Generally speaking, if anyone’s looking to take a run at these two, I’m bodysurfing to the head of the line, but whatever went wrong this year, it was nothing to do with them. They took a club that created one of the great feel-good moments in the city’s modern history, and made it substantially better. Sadly, the guy they had no choice but to extend at great length is in the process of transforming into a jumbo pumpkin. That will be Shapiro’s fault, since he did sign the deal, but it’s hard to blame him for it. That’s just how sports works.
Atkins, seen here in an April media availability, improved last year's team, only to see it falter and miss the playoffs, Cathal Kelly writes.Jon Blacker/The Canadian Press
In a different baseball milieu, this might be an existential moment for management. But not in Toronto. Nothing’s changing here.
If you had to describe the tone of Wednesday’s obit, the word you’d use is confidence. Not the sort where anyone believes this team will win next year. It was instead the confidence of a business that finally understands its customers.
On every level that matters when you’re in Shapiro’s position, the Jays had a fantastic season. The room was sold out most nights. The broadcast is heavily subscribed. The giveaways are so popular that explaining why some people who line up for them go away unhappy was the closest Shapiro got to sweating an answer.
Other big markets maintain a win-now-or-else attitude. Based on the way the team was received during the final weekend of the year, the Jays operate in more of a win-if-you-feel-up-to-it situation. How long before anybody on top would be fired if things keep going wrong? Three years? Five? That’s forever in sports.
All they have to do is keep telling people it’s possible. They wouldn’t buy it in New York or L.A., but Toronto is highly susceptible to the sort of marketing that defies reality.
When things go wrong, say how sorry you are for disappointing such wonderful, knowledgeable people. And so attractive! That sort of shampooing makes Toronto squirm with pleasure. Works almost every time.
It felt on Wednesday that more than a decade after they took up residence here, Atkins and Shapiro were only just arriving. The baseball still goes wrong much more often than it goes right. But the pitch? The pair have finally located the city’s strike zone.