The Blue Jays held a press conference yesterday to publicly discuss their mega-trade to obtain, among others, Jose Reyes, their controversial signing of Melky Cabrera and the hiring of John Gibbons as manager. Meanwhile, the Royals announced they had inked Jeremy Guthrie to a three-year, $25 million contract.
On the surface the two major baseball stories of the day have little in common. But let’s see if I can connect the dots to R.A. Dickey or — more rightfully — why the Mets have to seriously consider trading the NL Cy Young winner, as painful as that might be.
First, let’s take the Blue Jays, currently the most go-for-it team in the AL. They sensed vulnerability in the AL East with, among other items, the Yankees hoarding pennies and the Red Sox trying to regain their bearings after a 2012 combustion.
In response, the Jays have added eight major leaguers since the season ended: Giving a three-year contract to essentially a backup infielder (Maicer Izturis), a two-year contract to a drug cheat (Cabrera), trading their manager, John Farrell, to Boston for Mike Aviles and then dealing Aviles and Yan Gomes to Cleveland for reliever Esmil Rogers, and also swapping seven young pieces to the Marlins for Reyes, Josh Johnson, Mark Buehrle, Emilio Bonifacio and John Buck. That latter deal added $146.5 million to Toronto’s future payrolls and you can think of that as a poker stake moving the Blue Jays all in.
Yet, they are still looking for a top-of-the-rotation starter.
No one would confuse Guthrie with the members of that genre. In the 3 1⁄2 years he spent with Baltimore and Colorado before being traded to Kansas City last July 20, the righty was 33-57 with a 4.64 ERA. Desperate for starting pitching, the Royals overlooked the big sample — Guthrie has the worst winning percentage (.417) among active pitchers with at least 175 starts — to hope his 14 starts for them (5-3, 3.16 ERA) were representative of what he is going to be in his age 34-to-36 seasons.
The Royals similarly threw a Hail Mary in acquiring Ervin Santana from the Angels after the righty produced the majors’ fifth-worst ERA (5.16) among 88 qualifiers. In fact, at this moment, KC has four of the 11-worst ERAs from last season in its rotation: Luke Hochevar (5.73, second worst), Santana, Bruce Chen (5.07, sixth) and Guthrie (4.76, 11th), though Hochevar could be a non-tender candidate. Still, after doing quite a bit of work to try to make inroads toward the top of the AL Central, the Royals sure look as if they need a top-of-the-rotation starter, too.
So let’s do a little summing up here: The early free-agent signings are honoring the worst fears of many organizations, that the flood of money in the game is going to mean longer, more expensive contracts than in recent offseasons — just check out what far-from-sure-things Izturis, Cabrera and Guthrie received in multi-year deals. That has led to many executives telling me they plan to investigate the trade market even more thoroughly to see if better bargains can be found there, especially when it comes to starting pitching.
In the Blue Jays and Royals you have motivated clubs, with deep farm systems, who have each indicated their next big move will be to trade for a front-of-the-rotation-type starter. And they are not the only teams that could use someone like, yep, Dickey. The Dodgers, Padres, Yankees, Red Sox, Twins, Angels, Rangers and Brewers also are looking at that commodity.
Dickey is due $5 million next year — a price any team could afford — but what was interesting was how many outside executives suggested the Mets could expect even more back if they gave a window to an interested team to work out an extension.
Jeff Wilpon told reporters yesterday it is still the Mets’ hope to extend both David Wright and Dickey. However, as I reported from the General Managers Meetings, the Mets were not talking to other teams about Wright, but were about Dickey. And it is conceivable, since the knuckleballer does not appear to be asking for top-of-the-market dollars, he would be amenable to doing an extension if traded to a place he favors.
There also was something else from the GM Meetings — it was hard to miss how much time Mets and Blue Jays executives spent together. Also, keep in mind one of the keys to facilitating the Marlins-Blue Jays deal was new Miami manager Mike Redmond had just spent two years managing in the Toronto system so he was familiar with the talent. Influential Mets executive J.P. Ricciardi was the Blue Jays’ GM from 2001-2009 and, for example, drafted Jake Marsinick, a key player who just went from Toronto to Miami.
The recent influx of talent plus a strong system leaves Toronto with, among other things, two power-hitting young catchers in Travis d’Arnaud and J.P. Arencibia (drafted by Ricciardi), two athletic center fielders in Rajai Davis and Anthony Gose, and two high-end pitching prospects who just completed Low-A, Noah Syndergaard and Aaron Sanchez.
Several executives I spoke to said they could not imagine Toronto giving up a player from each of those subsets for Dickey in just 2013, but believe it would be more open-minded to doing so if Dickey were willing to do an extension. The Mets could use the catcher and center fielder now, and hope the high-end young starter eventually joins Matt Harvey and Zack Wheeler in a powerful rotation.
But this is just me imagining what a trade could look like. The key element — the one that is obvious, not imagination — is the current state of the free-agent market and/or the hunger to compete next year by many teams such as the Jays and Royals could create a market for Dickey that the Mets, at the very least, must explore thoroughly.
joel.sherman@nypost.com