There is definitely something to be said to waiting a year.
If he has a healthy 2021, I would say he will be a 2-3 WAR player. That should make him more valuable than he is now and that certainly could be part of the thinking.
My only issue with that is his injury history. I’m willing to gamble that we can get 75-80 cents on the dollar now (compared to what a healthy 2021 could bring us) vs waiting.
Makes the games interesting at least. I think O's ownership could throw the fans a bone and try and add a few good players. Top draft picks are nice but I really hope this is the last "burn it to the ground" season.
You never know when the Jays will just stop spending. Remember when they had a team in contention and their corporate ownership just flatly refused to add any payroll for the stretch run?
The Jays had a payroll as high as $182 mm as recently as 2016, but they’d cut it all the way to $64 mm in 2019. They were projected at $76 mm last year before the pandemic.
Obviously, they have a lot of room to increase payroll. Like the O’s, they’ve been clipping coupons for a couple of years. But they are a little ahead of us on the development curve with the ascendance of their second generation major leaguers (Biggio, Bichette and Guerrero). It’s a logical time for them to add some free agents.
I don’t really think this applies to Baumann anyway. It’s not like this guy spent a year at AAA and excelled there. He had a really good half season at AA in 2019 and then had to be shut down early at the alternate site this year. Sure some guys like that can jump straight to the majors, but honestly I’d just make sure he’s healthy, let him start the year in AAA and consider moving him up if he’s pitching well there. I’d probably be advocating that even if the service time issue didn’t exist, but the service time issue makes that a pretty easy call IMO. I don’t consider it to be holding him back to test him at a level of the minors where he’s never pitched before.