Marcus Stroman has a chip on his shoulder and he wears it proudly; a self-righteous struggle against perceived inferiority is his ethos. At the end of a slow offseason where the creeping power imbalance between players and owners has been the most interesting topic, it should be no surprise that Stroman is rocking the boat, actively trying to control his environment and his destiny.
Marcus made no fewer than five waves in the first two days of spring training coverage: he expressed frustration that Toronto has not offered him a long-term extension, opined that Vlad Jr. should make the team out of camp, decried the lack of veteran presence on the Blue Jays, publicly pitched for Carlos Gomez to join Toronto's roster, and drew ire on Twitter by sending a pleasantry to the peace-bonded Roberto Osuna.
And, while it didn't really make a wave, he also expressed via tweet that Aaron Nola's extension failed to value the Phillie Ace properly.
Baseball is not a sport that celebrates individualism and eccentricity, despite what the league wants you to believe with cute little promotions like the Players Weekend. Baseball is a sport where having strong opinions about your own training and development can get you traded. This is a sport where celebrating too emphatically can get you beaned or punched in the face. In baseball, boat-rockers tend to get silenced, sent down, or shipped out.
A subset of Blue Jays fans demonstrably agree that players should talk less and just play the game. I won't provide any links or screenshots but if you peruse Twitter, message boards, and comments sections from this weekend you'll see a large number of people posting that the team should just remove the distraction and trade Stroman.
But Marcus Stroman does not care how he is supposed to be. If I were to incorporate an interview with Marcus into this article, I imagine a quote similar to the following would fit here: "At five foot seven, I'm not even supposed to be a major league starting pitcher. I didn't get where I am in life by placing a lot of importance on other people's expectations. I'll continue to be me."
Importantly, Stroman is also right about a lot of what he said.
Of course Vlad Jr. should be on the team from day one. The fact that he won't be is an annoying byproduct of the current CBA and, some might say, the unethical decisions of management. The Blue Jays leadership may be angry that Marcus stated an opinion about Vladdy, but the fact that he did should endear him to fans, not provide fuel for "trade him" statements.
That the team should have taken advantage of a depressed market and bought more veteran talent is a reasonable opinion that lots of fans (of nearly every team) would share. Even if competing is a 2019 pipe dream for Toronto, pipe dreams sometimes happen, and we saw many veterans on expiring contracts return nice enough trade pieces at the 2018 deadline for Toronto and other teams.
A long-term extension for Stroman could also make an awful lot of sense. Severino and Nola just provided templates for what a deal might look like. While Stroman isn't quite as good as those two, it wouldn't be that hard to tweak the dollar amounts and imagine some type of four year deal that covers two of Stroman's would-be free agent years.
The current free agency climate, which must terrify players, might make this an opportune time for teams to buy some of their talented players' free agent years through extensions. From the team's perspective this also could be a good time to seek a deal with Stroman. His 2018 production was depressed, looking at ERA and innings pitched, yet his talent remained the same according to indicators like his velocity, groundball rate, FIP, and now his 2019 projections.
The fact that Stroman has taken to Toronto should also matter to some extent for a team that will always be one of the least attractive free agent destinations for players. A talented young player likes the city and wants to stay with the team long-term, so extension talk should plainly not be controversial.
Being outspoken presents the opportunity to be both wrong and right though, and there are some obvious flaws in the list of opinions Marcus shared.
Marcus' short-list of veterans currently on the roster was dishonestly short (if we include David Phelps twelve players on the projected 25 man roster have four years of service time or more; Stroman sits at 4.148 right now). Stroman's less experienced teammates like Borucki, Gurriel, and McKinney probably don't love the implication that they should be bumped from the roster for the sake of experience. Carlos Gomez is just a bad player at this point in his career - he was replacement level or worse in 2016 and 2018, and he projects to be so this season.
Public engagement with Roberto Osuna is, at the very least, a bad PR move by Stroman.
Marcus is always going to be outspoken. Sometimes he will offer misguided statements, but sometimes he'll adventure valid points publicly that other players shy away from. There is a brash confidence to everything Stroman does and that part of his persona has clearly served him well to this point in his life. To ask him to be less authentic, or to label him a distraction and wish that Toronto would send him elsewhere, strikes me as both woefully boring and beholden to some of the worst social pillars of institutional baseball.
Six years ago the Diamondbacks decided to let Trevor Bauer be someone else's problem for personality reasons. In 2018 Bauer, who continues to have an abrasive personality, was arguably the best pitcher in the American League. I wonder if Arizona ever wants that one back?
Obviously the merits of an extension would depend on the years and dollars, which we could only guess at. Stroman's tweeted opinion about Nola's extension would indicate that his expectations might be higher than what the team thinks his market value should be. Similarly, the merits of a trade would depend entirely on the return and we have nary a rumour on the trade front.
Nonetheless, a long-term extension for Stroman should be a legitimate goal for the Blue Jays. I won't even say that it should be "in spite of" his propensity to make controversial comments, because Marcus' outspoken nature is an extension of what drives him, and his motivational factors have clearly worked historically and should not be frowned upon going forward.
Maybe Stroman should just keep rocking the boat until all the haters fall out.
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