It was one of the great flexes of Vlad Guerrero Jr.’s young and still improving career.
Not the 48 home run season in 2021, though that was wildly impressive.
Not the near win in the Home Run Derby two years earlier, though that was his coming out party beyond Toronto.
And not his regular fireworks displays during batting practice, although watching Guerrero hit bomb after bomb over the wall is a spectacle.
No, Guerrero’s most significant flex may have came on Feb. 20 last year, not long after he arrived in Dunedin for Blue Jays spring training. When asked why he attended an arbitration hearing the Jays had dictated by trying to save $1 million or so, Guerrero swung and did not miss.
“If I don’t go, I lose,” Guerrero said with a smile.
He probably wasn’t wrong, either.. Vlad went to the hearing in Arizona, the Jays likely toned down their argument against him and the player won. And from that moment forward, Guerrero has held most of the cards and now the Jays are in serious danger of going bust with their one bonafide home-grown star.
Truthfully, the 25-year-old Guerrero hasn’t stopped flexing since. By baseball business standards, he’s wise. He clearly grasps leverage. He clearly understands timing. And he’s clearly aware that given the current financial bonanza in the free agent world the days there is little incentive to sign an extension with the Jays now.
Add to the fact the perceived indifference in Toronto management and you better believe Guerrero isn’t going to settle for a middle of the road extension at this point.
So here we are, a calendar flipped to a new year and less than two weeks away from the next arbitration deadline and the next possible flashpoint. Understanding negotiations aren’t shared publicly, there is no sign of the ongoing impasse being avoided.
Worse (for the Jays and their fans, anyway) Guerrero has since made it clear he isn’t shy about walking all the way to free agency. Doing so publicly set the tone from the Vlad camp, much as the Jays made their agenda clear a year ago when they were willing to take him to an Arizona hearing room to let them know what they really thought.
After a stellar 2024 campaign in which he flashed form much closer to that 2021 sensation, Guerrero knows he holds the cards and isn’t shy about playing some of them face up.
In that revealing Spanish-language interview on the Abriendo El Podcast, Guerrero dropped a bombshell that could sculpt not just the immediate future of the team, but for years to come.
“What they offered me is not even close to what I’m looking for,” Guerrero said in Spanish.
The reports suggest that the Jays have offered $340 million and Guerrero’s response has loosely been: Get back to me when you have $100 million more on the table and we can start to talk.
Guerrero took it a step further by setting a deadline on even talking extension. That would be the start of spring training, which is now a little more than a month away.
The Guerrero mess — which is the only way to view it at this point — has not gone unnoticed around the baseball world. Put in the bluntest way possible, why would a free agent with multiple suitors want to go to a team unwilling and/or unable to sign a superstar player that any player would want to have on his team?
It’s not a reach to suggest that massively misplaying the Guerrero situation over the past two years has the potential to ruin the fortunes of not just this season, but well beyond.
It’s completely baffling to surmise exactly what the Jays strategy has been with Guerrero and why they have let it get to the point where the most likely scenario seems to be allowing him to walk into free agency in 11 months.
Maybe the Jays don’t see him as the franchise type player that he was long purported to be and don’t see the value in a long-term deal. Letting walk for next to nothing is lunacy, of course, though a trade is always a possibility.
Perhaps the Jays have misplayed the Guerrero game from the start, eschewing opportunities to lock him up on a multi-year deal because they believed he wouldn’t want to go anywhere else.
Perhaps they were scared off by the uneven 2023 season in which Guerrero battled injuries and poor form and decided to wait to see what unfolded in 2024. Of course, that gamble blew up when Guerrero’s bat caught fire and he looked stronger and more fit than he ever has.
And how about this? Maybe Guerrero’s plan all along was to test free agency, go to a team that truly wanted him and to one with legitimate aspirations of winning a World Series.
Not that crying poor was ever a strategy, but the money that Jays have reportedly thrown around in failed bids to land Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto in successive off seasons, is not lost on Guerrero and his people. Another big season won’t get him to the stratosphere of that pair, but unless the Jays come up big in the next month, the all star first baseman is more than willing to find out.
Weary of talking and hearing about the Vlad Guerrero Jr. saga? Settle in as It’s only just beginning thanks to a series of misplays by the Blue Jays front office.