Article: Late Valentine’s Day Heartbreak for Blue Jays Fans: What Are We Without Vlad?

[Megan M]

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and the Jays failed to reach an agreement, and now we sit on what could be one of the biggest fumbles of the offseason. Blue Jays fans just got dumped and it hurts.

Love Lost: Vlad Might Walk
Remember that feeling when your high school crush moved away? Yeah, that’s what it’s like imagining Vladimir Guerrero Jr. suiting up in another jersey come 2026. The Jays have had years to lock down their franchise slugger, but here we are — no deal, no commitment, and a whole lot of uncertainty. Guerrero has made it clear he won’t negotiate midseason, meaning Toronto is now in a baseball situationship: stuck waiting, hoping, and maybe even dreading the inevitable.

Let's break down the very normal reactions, totally not overreactions.

Ross Atkins' Risky Gamble
So, what’s the Jays' front office thinking? Is Ross Atkins secretly hoping Guerrero has a mediocre season to drive down his price? Or, more dramatically, is he gearing up to ship him out at the deadline for a blockbuster trade? Either way, this is playing with fire. Guerrero, even in a “down” year, is still a major offensive force, and if he’s locked in and slugging, his price tag is only going up. Betting against one of your best players? Not exactly a Hallmark movie ending.

Bo Knows…and Bo Might Go
Here’s where it gets even juicier: Bo Bichette has openly stated that he wants to play alongside Guerrero long-term. No Guerrero, maybe no Bo. And if both leave? We’re talking about a franchise identity crisis. The Jays were supposed to be built around these two homegrown stars, and instead, they might be staring down the barrel of a painful rebuild.

Contender or Pretender?
If Toronto loses both Guerrero and Bichette, what’s left? A roster that suddenly looks more like a Wild Card hopeful than a serious World Series contender. The Jays have talent, sure, but cornerstone players don’t grow on trees. This team isn't built to win in three to five years. 

Fan Heartbreak Hits Twitter
The Jays might be holding off on a contract, but fans aren’t holding back. Let's just say Blue Jays fans may be taking their loyalty to arbitration. 

Oh, But There's Money for Juan Soto?
And let’s talk about the real elephant in the room: the Jays reportedly have no problem offering Juan Soto a blank check but can’t seem to find the funds for Guerrero? Make it make sense. Guerrero has been the face of the franchise for years, yet the front office is acting like he’s a temporary fling while they flirt with someone new. If that’s not cold, I don’t know what is.

The Clock is Ticking
With no deal in place, the Jays are running out of time to either lock in their star or pivot to a trade before they risk losing him for nothing. One thing’s for sure: this front office just sent fans into full panic mode, and with a full season of speculation ahead, unless they pull off a miracle, this offseason fumble might leave all of us in therapy.

Toronto, you had one job: don’t break our hearts. And yet, here we are.

View full article

[Eat My Shatkins]

I disagree with the ongoing and growing narrative that the Jays have messed the Vlad/Bo situation up.

Truth is these are good players but they are not superstars and they have been very inconsistent throughout their careers, and giving them the superstar level contracts they want in order to keep them here could end up being a far worse move long term than just letting them play out the string and see where the chips fall.

It's been a struggle for the FO to build a winning team around these two when they're young and relatively cheap, imagine trying to build around them when they are 30+ and carrying superstar price tags.

[Ryu In My House]

I really, really hope the Blue Jays consider trading Vladdy right now. If we can rob a franchise of 4 top prospects+, and maybe an okay option at 1B, it would make a lot of sense long term. I would honestly consider being really aggressive signing Bo long term now, too. If it's not too late. This whole scenario is s*****, but to start the season on such a sour note is brutal. If we get rid of the distraction, and load up, I could live with it. 

[Brownie19]

I'm sorry Megan, but this is a bunch of nonsense.  It looks like it's meant for Facebook to feed the clickbait casuals.

Why give a blank cheque to Soto, but not Vlad?  C'mon - that's obvious.

[Spanky99]

2 minutes ago, Brownie19 said:

I'm sorry Megan, but this is a bunch of nonsense.  It looks like it's meant for Facebook to feed the clickbait casuals.

Why give a blank cheque to Soto, but not Vlad?  C'mon - that's obvious.

This mirrored my thoughts on this article, no bueno amigo. 

[Omar]

Don't mind seeing Vladdy sign elsewhere but seeing him in a Red Sox uniform would really sting. 

[Brock Beauchamp]

5 hours ago, Spanky99 said:

This mirrored my thoughts on this article, no bueno amigo. 

5 hours ago, Brownie19 said:

I'm sorry Megan, but this is a bunch of nonsense.  It looks like it's meant for Facebook to feed the clickbait casuals.

Why give a blank cheque to Soto, but not Vlad?  C'mon - that's obvious.

Remember that we don't take a single approach to coverage. While I personally lean hard toward analytics, we also post pieces that are more opinion and less stats.

And Megan's pieces do really well with readers who aren't a bunch of basement-dwelling nerds like us.

There's plenty of space for everybody and their own flavor of fandom.

[John_Havok]

3 hours ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

Remember that we don't take a single approach to coverage. While I personally lean hard toward analytics, we also post pieces that are more opinion and less stats.

And Megan's pieces do really well with readers who aren't a bunch of basement-dwelling nerds like us.

There's plenty of space for everybody and their own flavor of fandom.

Sure, just move the articles out of the forum section. They already appear on the front landing page and have their own subheading. They don't need to be in the forum section too. 

 

[Stangstag]

This is a bit dramatic. Vlad isn’t gone yet lol.

[Stangstag]

5 hours ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

Remember that we don't take a single approach to coverage. While I personally lean hard toward analytics, we also post pieces that are more opinion and less stats.

And Megan's pieces do really well with readers who aren't a bunch of basement-dwelling nerds like us.

There's plenty of space for everybody and their own flavor of fandom.

Maaaaan you don’t need to be a basement dwelling SABR nerd to understand Vlad isn’t worth 500 million.

I appreciate these kinds of articles but this one is super dramatic. Its like we fed the Jays fecebook page comments into chat gpt and this is what came out.

[Brownie19]

4 hours ago, John_Havok said:

Sure, just move the articles out of the forum section. They already appear on the front landing page and have their own subheading. They don't need to be in the forum section too. 

 

Yeah - I'd support this.  I know he's trying to grow the site, but there's A LOT of articles.

[Brock Beauchamp]

16 hours ago, John_Havok said:

Sure, just move the articles out of the forum section. They already appear on the front landing page and have their own subheading. They don't need to be in the forum section too. 

 

12 hours ago, Brownie19 said:

Yeah - I'd support this.  I know he's trying to grow the site, but there's A LOT of articles.

Are there really that many, though? We're averaging maybe 1.5 articles a day, which is half what most of our other sites publish and about 20% of what Twins Daily publishes.

But ultimately, we will move the articles into their own forum. That's the goal in the long-term (maybe even mid-term) but we've found that if we move the articles to their own forum right away, no one comments on them. And if there are no comments, it's much harder to draw in new users.

[Laika]

let Brock cook 

[BTS]

I really hate the argument that if they were willing to offer Soto 700M then why not Vlad 500M (or whatever). There are a number of reasons why an organization might be willing to pay huge for Soto but not commit 500M (or even 400M) to Vlad. To be outraged over this one has to find it implausible that that the team sees a lot of daylight between the projections for both players going forward. In reality, sound projections might actually see like 20+ WAR separating them over the life of the contract. 

[BTS]

Regarding the placement of the articles, I don't see the issue as long as the articles are clearly identified in the thread title (which they are). 

There are currently 243 replies to Tuesday's Vlad article, when there might not have even been 10 if it wasn't added to the forum. 

[Brownie19]

4 hours ago, BTS said:

There are currently 243 replies to Tuesday's Vlad article, when there might not have even been 10 if it wasn't added to the forum. 

I'm not sure that's true.  If that article didn't exist, we would have had the same conversation in one of the other Vlad related threads (Baerga - Vladdy Signing an Extension, Wait Will Soon Be Over, etc.).  

Now if moving our conversations to the 'articles' helps the board, then OK - I can get on board with that.  But to date, there have been like 70 articles posted and like 48 of them have less than 5 replies.

Personally (and I mean this with no disrespect to the writers), most of them seem written towards casuals.  I assume that's by design and likely a requirement if you're going to be pumping out several articles a day (across many different platforms, for many different teams).  That said, a few have caught my attention and at times, they have created new conversation.

I had no idea how many articles would be published.  It's WAYYY more than I thought, but that's probably just my ignorance.  If this is what's best for the website, than carry on.

 

[Stangstag]

I think we may just have to accept that "growing the board" means having way more people that agree with this type of article compared to the old board. Which in turn might end up with the old users deciding to create their own board again lol.

[Spanky99]

On 2/19/2025 at 2:49 PM, Brock Beauchamp said:

Remember that we don't take a single approach to coverage. While I personally lean hard toward analytics, we also post pieces that are more opinion and less stats.

And Megan's pieces do really well with readers who aren't a bunch of basement-dwelling nerds like us.

There's plenty of space for everybody and their own flavor of fandom.

That's fair, I've liked Megan's articles in the past, but I should be able to opine this article is terrible, I can break it down, but the synopsis of "Toronto, you had one job: don’t break our hearts. And yet, here we are." Is ludicrous, period. 

Lets just drop 13/585M, just cause of our emotions. Please... the fWAR he's accrued at 1B with bad base running decisions and defense do not warrant his asking price. Toronto knew he wanted 10/400 in November and was waiting on both Alonso's contract and Soto's, if his number jumped that high, you pass and match his best offer in FA at worst. You have a ball team as seen fit to run. It's that simple.

[Spanky99]

1 hour ago, Spanky99 said:

That's fair, I've liked Megan's articles in the past, but I should be able to opine this article is terrible, I can break it down, but the synopsis of "Toronto, you had one job: don’t break our hearts. And yet, here we are." Is ludicrous, period. 

Lets just drop 13/585M, just cause of our emotions. Please... the fWAR he's accrued at 1B with bad base running decisions and defense do not warrant his asking price. Toronto knew he wanted 10/400 in November and was waiting on both Alonso's contract and Soto's, if his number jumped that high, you pass and match his best offer in FA at worst. You have a ball team as seen fit to run. It's that simple.

See Brock, you'll see the unhinged behaviour by, iloverossatkins
vladdywagon, ie deanmike is cray, cray...

[Brock Beauchamp]

10 hours ago, Spanky99 said:

That's fair, I've liked Megan's articles in the past, but I should be able to opine this article is terrible, I can break it down, but the synopsis of "Toronto, you had one job: don’t break our hearts. And yet, here we are." Is ludicrous, period. 

Lets just drop 13/585M, just cause of our emotions. Please... the fWAR he's accrued at 1B with bad base running decisions and defense do not warrant his asking price. Toronto knew he wanted 10/400 in November and was waiting on both Alonso's contract and Soto's, if his number jumped that high, you pass and match his best offer in FA at worst. You have a ball team as seen fit to run. It's that simple.

That's entirely fair, obviously criticism is welcome. Personally, while I may not have put it quite as hyperbolically as Megan, I agree that not getting a deal done with Vlad is a massive fail by the front office. Whether that deal happened two days or two years ago, I don't really care. At the end of the day, the job was not done and someone has to be the fall guy for it.

And I'm fully aware and accept Vlad's flaws. I don't think he's going to be a player who ages gracefully. Still I believe he should retire in a Jays jersey, wearing only a Jays jersey for his career.

[John_Havok]

23 hours ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

Are there really that many, though? We're averaging maybe 1.5 articles a day, which is half what most of our other sites publish and about 20% of what Twins Daily publishes.

But ultimately, we will move the articles into their own forum. That's the goal in the long-term (maybe even mid-term) but we've found that if we move the articles to their own forum right away, no one comments on them. And if there are no comments, it's much harder to draw in new users.

Understandable.

Quality over quantity though. I understand an open policy where people can write what they wish. 

But some of these articles are nothing more than "random thought popped in my head so let's write an article" when they really should be just a comment on a forum topic. 

I get the balancing act, but some articles don't get comments because they're just not worthy of receiving them.

[Brock Beauchamp]

14 minutes ago, John_Havok said:

Understandable.

Quality over quantity though. I understand an open policy where people can write what they wish. 

But some of these articles are nothing more than "random thought popped in my head so let's write an article" when they really should be just a comment on a forum topic. 

I get the balancing act, but some articles don't get comments because they're just not worthy of receiving them.

It's also a growing process. A lot of these writers are new and have a lot to learn. The only way to effectively learn the craft is repetition. Some of the early pieces aren't going to be great. It's part of the process, just bear with us.

You've all been quite patient with me and our group. When we launched Brewer Fanatic, oh lord... man, did I catch hell from that community. It was relentless. "You don't know what you're doing", "you're not a Brewers fan" (I am), it was non-stop.

By Brewer Fanatic's third season, it was widely regarded as the best and most sabr-heavy Brewers site on the internet.

We're gonna have our bumps along the way. We're gonna stumble and not be perfect. But many of these writers, largely under Davy Andrews' tutelage, are going to grow and become really good analysts. We're just not there on day one.

With that said, I want to give a shout out to @sackydude, @Condor13, and @LetTheBallFly. Their minor-league coverage has exceeded all of my expectations, they're killing it from day one.

[Stangstag]

1 hour ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

That's entirely fair, obviously criticism is welcome. Personally, while I may not have put it quite as hyperbolically as Megan, I agree that not getting a deal done with Vlad is a massive fail by the front office. Whether that deal happened two days or two years ago, I don't really care. At the end of the day, the job was not done and someone has to be the fall guy for it.

And I'm fully aware and accept Vlad's flaws. I don't think he's going to be a player who ages gracefully. Still I believe he should retire in a Jays jersey, wearing only a Jays jersey for his career.

Emotional thinking. Im glad the front office has more restraint.

[Jimcanuck]

I can't be the only one that thinks Vlad, after signing a mega deal, loses all interest in physical fitness and becomes a bloated 350 lb blob in a relatively short period of time.

[Brock Beauchamp]

10 minutes ago, Stangstag said:

Emotional thinking. Im glad the front office has more restraint.

It's a spectator sport that involves fans and increasing competition for their eyeballs and their willingness to invest their personal emotion into the product. Ignoring the human element is a bad long-term plan and perhaps one of the biggest flaws of the early sabr movement.

Though it's entirely reasonable to not believe Vladdy is worth an overpay. I happen to disagree.

[Jimcanuck]

4 minutes ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

It's a spectator sport that involves fans and increasing competition for their eyeballs and their willingness to invest their personal emotion into the product. Ignoring the human element is a bad long-term plan and perhaps one of the biggest flaws of the early sabr movement.

Though it's entirely reasonable to not believe Vladdy is worth an overpay. I happen to disagree.

If the reporting is to be believed, the Jays did make an overpay offer.  Vlad simply priced himself more than is reasonable.

[Brock Beauchamp]

8 minutes ago, Jimcanuck said:

If the reporting is to be believed, the Jays did make an overpay offer.  Vlad simply priced himself more than is reasonable.

And if that's true, the Jays made the right decision. As I said several days ago, it's going to be in someone's best interest the leak the number. Whose interest that is depends on the numbers exchanged but I think we'll find out at some point.

[Stangstag]

6 minutes ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

And if that's true, the Jays made the right decision. As I said several days ago, it's going to be in someone's best interest the leak the number. Whose interest that is depends on the numbers exchanged but I think we'll find out at some point.

Then why do you hold the opinion that not getting a deal done with Vlad is "a massive fail by the front office" ?

It takes 2 to tango and its fairly obvious that Vlad is the main reason a deal didn't get done.

Even the fact that we are talking about it in past tense is all because Vlad made some arbitrary deadline for an extension.

[Spanky99]

They'll sign him in the winter at market value, if his word is true on staying a Jay for life, simple.

[Spanky99]

23 hours ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

That's entirely fair, obviously criticism is welcome. Personally, while I may not have put it quite as hyperbolically as Megan, I agree that not getting a deal done with Vlad is a massive fail by the front office. Whether that deal happened two days or two years ago, I don't really care. At the end of the day, the job was not done and someone has to be the fall guy for it.

And I'm fully aware and accept Vlad's flaws. I don't think he's going to be a player who ages gracefully. Still I believe he should retire in a Jays jersey, wearing only a Jays jersey for his career.

If anytime it was to be done, I'd think it was after the '21 season but Vlad said they offered 175M not sure of term, but they should've certainly got it done then. After '22 and '23 I don't fault either side for matching a number, and now I believe he's outpriced himself, obviously. I legit think he signs next winter with the Jays at market value, chin-up Brock, lol.