The St. Louis Cardinals are in town today, and yesterday’s rain is passed so we should have a baseball game to watch. Prospect Quinn Mathews will take the mound for the red birds, while Max Scherzer makes his debut representing the blue ones.
Cardinals Lineup:
- Victor Scott II, LF
- Alec Burleson, 1B
- Lars Nootbaar, CF
- Nolan Gorman, 2B
- Pedro Pages, C
- Thomas Saggese, 3B
- JJ Wetherholt, DH
- Jose Fermin, SS
- Nathan Church, RF
Blue Jays Lineup:
- Bo Bichette, SS
- Andres Gimenez, 2B
- Vladimir Guerrero jr., DH
- Alejandro Kirk, C
- Will Wagner, 1B
- Ernie Clement, 3B
- Joey Loperfido, CF
- Davis Schneider, LF
- Nathan Lukes, RF
The Jays roll out most of their likely opening day lineup, minus Anthony Santander and George Springer. Bowden Francis should follow Scherzer, the latter having been bumped back by yesterday’s rain-out.
The Cards have sent a mix of their regular players and top prospects (Mathews is probably their best, and Wetherholt was last year’s #7 overall selection in the draft). Should be a fun first few innings.
There’s nothing much in terms of Jays news. I don’t really want to spend even more time litigating the Vlad contract situation, but Fangraphs’ Dan Szymborski has a piece using his ZiPS projection system to estimate what a fair contract would look like, and I think it merits a brief discussion. Essentially, the system is skeptical of Vlad being worth $350m plus right now, given his up and down performance, but another year like 2024 would do a lot to stabilize his value and would have him in line for ~$500m over the remainder of his career. My takeaways are:
- The Jays’ reported offer of $340m back in December wasn’t unreasonable, although the Juan Soto deal soon afterwards (which ZiPS thinks was an overpay, probably by something like $65m depending on the handling of Soto’s opt out) might point to the very top of the market being a little different.
- The $585m that David Ortiz floated, which may or may not relate to what GuerreroSu’s camp was actually asking for, is clearly too much even if you believe that 2024 was the real Vlad.
- We don’t have any solid info on what the sides’ final offers actually looked like, but I think you could reasonably argue any number between the low $300s million and $500 million. So it’s possible that both sides are operating in good faith and are still tens of millions apart. Vlad’s a high variance player, and that makes the plausible range of values wider than it typically would be.
The article also points out that nobody who projects to perform even close to Vlad offensively is up for free agency in the next two winters (though if Kyle Tucker repeats last year’s breakout season he’d probably be right there). So scarcity might get Vlad a premium. Anyway, we’ll see all this play out in December, and between now and then there’s a season of baseball to play.
To that end, Go Jays Go!