I'm pretty sure that no one would have been upset about us missing out on IKR and Turner. At least that way we'd be $20 mil lighter on the payroll and there'd be some hope remaining that we could bring in a much needed bat if not via free agency then via trade. At the moment there's no hope of us bringing in someone like Martinez because we're over-stuffed at DH and are apparently at our internal cap limit.
This Chapman saga reminds me of when this management group first got here. They offered a deal to Encarnacion, he declined, and in a panic they overpaid Kendrys "Exit Velocity" Moralez. Edwin's market never materialized, he wanted to come back at a much smaller deal, but by then our budget was already spent.
Years later, and this group still manages to consistently misread the market and overspend on mediocrity (a couple of outliers, like Semien, and Gausman aside).
I don't think anyone would be upset about missing those players specifically, but people were already upset that the team was doing nothing while they were waiting out the Ohtani saga. They would be upset about doing
nothing with no regard to what the alternative to nothing is.
We all saw how he struggled down the stretch, but the guy also carried our offense for those first 2 months.
Consider that Turner also couldn't hit to save his life down the stretch. But Chapman is 30 and Turner is 39. Which of the two guys do you think has a better chance at bouncing back next season?
I mean we missed the playoffs for what, 21 straight years? Off course anything looks better by comparison nowadays, especially with the extra playoff slots being made available. But that's a damned low bar that you're setting.
I think you're in a small minority of Jays fans if you enjoyed the prior season.
1) The "first two months" isn't all of March and April. It's like 3 days at the end of March plus April. So he only carried hte offence for a month, then went in the tank, then sort of rebounded in July then fell off a cliff again. He might've carried the offence twice over the season but the rest of the time he was a big reason it was so terrible.
2) I never said I enjoyed last season. It was frustrating. But let's be realistic here: there wasn't a great fit on the market that would've solved those problems outside of Ohtani and Soto. The top free agent bats were Bellinger, who is a
MASSIVE risk to sign off of one good season after like 3 or 4 crappy ones and Chapman who we've just discussed the deficiencies of to death.
Would I have preferred Martinez to Turner? Absolutely. But that does not impact how I assess the situation around Chapman. Do I want them to make the playoffs and do something? Of course. But let's not kid ourselves into believing that there were perfect or even semi-ideal solutions to the team's problems waiting on the FA market. I mean people are talking up Soler as if he's not a full-time DH who is a 104 wRC+ guy since 2020. Yeah the power is sexy and a 25-30HR bat would be nice but he's also a guy who strikes out a lot and routinely produces an OPS below .800. Turner might be older and not have as much raw HR power but he has a far better overall track record than Soler does, came at basically teh same price but without being locked in for 3 years. Even if you swap Soler with Turner and don't sign Kiner-Falefa there's not enough money to do better at 3rd base than what the Jays are doing now. And you're still jammed up with DH spot candidates to the point that Martinez is a pipe dream.
The Jays came out of a mostly crappy FA market with sub-optimal solutions to their problems. But so have a lot of teams. Did the Jays fumble the bag a bit? Yeah. But it's not like they fell on their face and missed an ideal solution to most of their problems besides Ohtani. They made the same sort of kind-of-bad choices that a lot of teams did. The difference is that a team like the Giants that finished below 500 and is just trying to be relevant will look at Soler and Chapman as a lot better options than what they had whereas with the Jays the fact that they don't really fix what the team has had that's broken any more than other guys on the market diminishes their value.
