Building the Best Blue Jays Team for 2023

Earlier this week, the Blue Jays and Mariners made a fascinating trade. Toronto sent outfielder Teoscar Hernández, one of its best hitters, to Seattle for righthander Erik Swanson and minor-league lefthander Adam Macko.

Hernández is projected to earn $14.1 million in 2023 via arbitration, according to MLB Trade Rumors, before becoming a free agent after next season. Swanson, meanwhile, is under club control for three more years and will get an estimated $1.4 million in his first year of arbitration. The trade is certainly a cost-saving move for the Blue Jays, but that isn’t a bad thing in this case, so long as they use the roughly $12.7 million they are saving to improve other parts of their roster.

Toronto entered the 2022 season facing great expectations after it traded for third baseman Matt Chapman and signed starting pitchers Kevin Gausman and Yusei Kikuchi. Despite the team’s first-round playoff exit and some of its key players underperforming, the Blue Jays mostly lived up to the hype. They scored the second most runs per game (4.78) and tied for the third best record (92–70) in the American League during the regular season.

Still, they were not without their faults. Their lineup was too right-handed, which made it easier for opponents to game plan against them, and their pitching staff lacked the depth required to make a deep postseason run. These problems have not gone away with the trade of Hernández, whose absence makes them no less right-handed—his projected replacement in their lineup, per Roster Resource, is the veteran Whit Merrifield, another righty batter—and far less threatening. Hernández has hit 121 home runs in the 583 games he’s played over the last five years. That includes the 16 he smacked in 50 games the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. Across that five-year span, when you adjust what he did in ’20 to a full 162-game schedule, Hernández averaged 133 games played and 28 home runs per season. Swanson, who had a 1.68 ERA in 57 appearances in 2022, does improve the bullpen, but if you look at this as just a straight swap, Toronto is worse now than it was before the trade.

That’s why this move cannot be evaluated in a vacuum. The Blue Jays aren’t punting, not with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette under club control for three more seasons and not after trading for Chapman and signing Gausman, George Springer and José Berríos to long-term deals. Instead, this is the start of a string of deals that ideally will address their two main roster holes: lefty batters and pitching depth. Let’s take a look at how the Blue Jays can do that while staying under the first luxury tax threshold, which is $233 million for the upcoming season. In other words, let’s spend someone else’s money—well, in this case a corporation’s money because the Blue Jays are owned by Rogers Communications—to assemble the best team possible. For this exercise, I’ll be using MLB Trade Rumors for estimated salaries after arbitration, Spotrac’s market value calculations for current free agents and Roster Resource for payroll and luxury tax projections. Right now, Toronto’s estimated player payroll for 2023 is $176 million and luxury tax payroll is about $201 million, leaving it with roughly $32 million to play with.

The biggest issue for this team, especially after trading Hernández, is its lineup. Cavan Biggio is the only left-handed batter on the roster who could reasonably be expected to start, but he lost his job as the starting second baseman to Santiago Espinal, who enjoyed a breakout season and was named to the All-Star team. Two things working in Biggio’s favor are his positional flexibility and the new rule banning infield shifts, but as things stand, he’s likely to fill more of a utility role than be in the lineup every day, which leaves Toronto with an all right-handed lineup.

Entering the offseason, ’s Will Laws and Nick Selbe ranked the top 50 free agents, and only nine of them bat left-handed. Two of them, Anthony Rizzo (No. 19) and Joc Pederson (No. 23), are no longer available, leaving the Blue Jays with a limited pool of players to sign.

That means their top priority should be to sign either center fielder Brandon Nimmo (No. 10 on the SI 50) or left fielder Andrew Benintendi (No. 13), two of the best on-base options available. Either player would slot in nicely atop the lineup, ahead of Guerrero, Bichette and Chapman. Nimmo, who turns 30 in March, has the better track record, albeit with some injury concerns, while Benintendi, 28, is younger and might have the higher ceiling. Nimmo’s market value is $106 million for five years, an average annual value of $21.1 million, while Benintendi’s is $104.4 million for six years, an AAV of $17.3 million.

Let’s go with Nimmo, for two reasons:

1) He plays center field. This would slide Springer to right field, a less physically demanding position, which would hopefully help him avoid injuries as he ages.

2) Nimmo is the more consistent player. His adjusted OPS over the last five seasons is 134, meaning he’s been 34% better than the league average hitter, and only once in that span (2019) was his OPS+ below 130. In that “down year,” he still had a .375 on-base percentage and a 111 OPS+. Benintendi’s adjusted OPS over the last five years is 108, and even if you exclude his 25 OPS+ in the 14 games he played during the pandemic season, his best two years (123 OPS+ in ’18 and 120 OPS+ in ’22) are below Nimmo’s career mark (130 OPS+).