Guerrero Jr.’s contract could become daily headache for Blue Jays

It never used to be about clicks. Usually, you’d know if you’d hit a story out of the ballpark because your competitors were forced to follow it up the next day.

Or if you pissed off the player.

Or the manager, as I discovered early on in my writing career when I turned a “Yeah, why not, St. Louis is a great baseball city,” comment from Tim Raines into an article: “Raines open to Cards.” Easy, easy column. Easy.

“You dumb ass,” Buck Rodgers, then-Montreal Expos manager, greeted me the next day. “Couldn’t you at least have (expletive) waited until we got to (expletive) New York?”

This past weekend was a bit of a primer for all of us, a bit of a peak ahead. Vladimir Guerrero, Jr., likes a social media post about the New York Yankees, then gives an interview to the enterprising Jon Heyman of the New York Post in which he affirms that, yes indeed, all 30 teams will be able to bid for his services as a free agent. What happened to Guerrero’s oft-mentioned previous statement that he would never sign with the Yankees because (as Heyman unearthed) he was still bitter over the fact he was once ordered off the field at Yankee Stadium as a child and because the Yankees elected to not sign his father, Hall of Famer Vladimir Guerrero, Sr., in favour of Gary Sheffield?

“It’s in the past,” Guerrero told Heyman through interpreter Hector Lebron. That would be, one suspects, the same answer he gives whenever he’s asked these questions again.

Now, this wasn’t a play me or trade me ultimatum or even a come-hither batting of the eyelashes. Just honest people doing honest work on all sides.

And listen, I’ve been clear: I cannot believe that this front office let this situation get away from them. I can see where they would get all knotted up trying to figure out who the real Guerrero is and maybe even a little scared knowing they would be establishing an industry standard for first basemen. And I still believe that if president and chief executive officer Mark Shapiro really wanted a deal with Guerrero it could have been done and dusted two or three years ago.

But litigating the past is a time-suck. It is what it is and we are where we are and I still don’t think it’s out of the question that the Blue Jays sign Guerrero in the off-season once the market is set by the Yankees or New York Mets or Washington Nationals or someone else. The question now is how does this get handled because Guerrero is going to get asked THE QUESTION every first day of every road series and during the All-Star Game and then it will be the manager and his teammates and — holy hell — just wait until it gets to September and he’s still here.

Covering the Montreal Expos for a decade has made me a bit of an expert on this. It’s no longer dreading picking up an out-of-town newspaper — “I’d be Vlad to be a Met!” — but rather the churn of social media. A random ‘like’ here. A “Sure, I’ve always thought Milwaukee is cool,” there. A “Big Papi is my guy,” here. You get it.

This, like trying to figure out what to do when ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ is played 81 times at the Rogers Centre (I have thoughts) is going to be new territory for Blue Jays fans, with bitterness and anger serving as a jumping-off point.

Blue Jays fans have invested a lot in this kid.

Roy Halladay’s time here ran out here, and besides he indicated he wasn’t going to re-sign. Josh Donaldson, Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion just kind of aged away. Besides, Guerrero and Bo Bichette were on the horizon! Carlos Delgado was let loose as a free agent without compensation because the Blue Jays didn’t want to risk extending a qualifying offer in case he took it and ended up chewing up a quarter of what was a then-limited payroll. It was also clear he did not get along with the front office, which in hindsight never appreciated what they had. But the biggest drama in that instance was created by Delgado refusing to waive a no-trade clause.

This is different. Payroll is no longer the issue it once was. There is no sense that Guerrero is tired of Toronto — far from it — and unlike post-2016 there hasn’t been any post-season joy in these parts. Neither is there another Guerrero or Bichette in the system. Rather, there is a sense that a window of opportunity is closing after never being opened as far as expected.

Look. Having a whole bunch of folks playing (or managing or CEOing) for their next contract can certainly be a motivator. Baseball, after all, is the most individual team sport. But know what else is unique about baseball? We do it every day. We hang around the batting cage and the press box and the dugout and in the clubhouse. Every. Single. Day. Small becomes big in the push of a ‘like’ button these days. It’s going to be Mitch Marner times 10 — and God forbid the team or Guerrero gets off to a poor start or falls out of the race as early as it did in 2024.

Maybe we need to take our cue from George Springer, who said last week when asked about Guerrero and free agency in general: “The most important thing, is just to be where your feet are.”

Sure-footedness? Seems like a good place to start. We all have a vested interest in keeping the bad stuff away as long as possible, no?