The Blue Jays came into the offseason at a crossroads. With Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette headed for free agency after the 2025 season, the pressure is on: Make the playoffs or go the entirety of their team control years without a single playoff win. (They’re 0-6 in three Wild Card series.) It’s no surprise they were in on Juan Soto, and after coming up short there, they pivoted to the trade market, acquiring Andrés Giménez (and Nick Sandlin) from the Cleveland Guardians in exchange for Spencer Horwitz and Nick Mitchell. The Guardians then sent Horwitz on to the Pirates in exchange for Luis L. Ortiz, Michael Kennedy, and Josh Hartle, all of whom we’ll break down in a forthcoming post.
This trade improves the Blue Jays’ outlook for 2025, and it does so in a way that fits their recent team-building to a T. Two years ago, they added Daulton Varsho and Kevin Kiermaier, perhaps the two best defensive outfielders in baseball, and frequently played them together. They gave Santiago Espinal regular playing time when his defense graded out well, then phased him out in favor of new defensive wunderkind Ernie Clement when Espinal faltered defensively. They used Isiah Kiner-Falefa to patch defensive holes across the diamond until they traded him this past summer. Now they’re adding Giménez, one of the best infield defenders in all of baseball, to the mix.
Last season marked Giménez’s third straight Gold Glove and second straight Fielding Bible award. The voters (full disclosure: I am one of them) didn’t give it to him on reputation. He’s not just a shortstop playing second base; he’s a very good shortstop playing second base. He has the strongest throwing arm of any second baseman and uses it to his advantage, ranging up the middle to make outrageous plays. He has soft hands and quick reflexes. Statcast credits him with 37 runs above average over the past three years, tops in the majors. DRS thinks Statcast is being too modest – it credits him with 59 runs saved, 22 ahead of second place.
The Jays could use the help. While they were markedly improving their outfield defense over the past two years, their infielders struggled. Toronto went from an above-average unit in 2022 (nine outs above average) to a bottom-half group in each of the last two years. Second base was part of the problem: Kiner-Falefa did well in limited time there, but Cavan Biggio and then Davis Schneider played plenty of innings at the keystone and didn’t grade out particularly well. It’s hard to assemble a good defensive infield with two so-so defenders (Guerrero and Bichette) while having a weak fielder at second base. That isn’t the case anymore; now, I’d consider this one of the top units in the game.
It’s rare to start a discussion of a star player with his defense, but make no mistake, Giménez is a star. He signed a seven-year, $106.5 million contract before the 2023 season, with a team option for 2030. At 26, he already has a six-win season in his rear view mirror, one that earned him MVP votes. But in his case, defense really is the draw. His career batting line, .261/.322/.393, works out to a 103 wRC+, roughly league average.
In 2024, he was meaningfully worse than that. He hit .252/.298/.340, launched a paltry nine home runs, and ended the season batting in the bottom third of the offensively challenged Guardians lineup. We’re projecting he’ll bounce back toward his career average, but no matter how you slice it, the Blue Jays want Giménez for his glove first and his offensive contributions second.
I think that makes a ton of sense for Toronto. It’s hard to find defenders this good who are even passable offensively. It’s even harder to find defenders with multi-year track records, and nearly impossible to get them with six years of team control. At just under $20 million a year for the next five seasons, he’s a bargain by pretty much any financial framework. Borderline All-Stars make more than that in free agency, if you can even find ones who fit this archetype. Willy Adames might be the closest thing to Giménez in free agency this winter. His 2025 WAR projection is similar, he too is a plus defender at an up-the-middle position who has been slightly above average offensively. It’s not a perfect fit – Adames is a better hitter and on the decline defensively – but it’s at least in the ballpark. Adames got more years at a higher average annual value than Giménez’s remaining contract, and he’s three years older to boot.
For a team that is both willing to spend money (witness Toronto’s pursuit of Soto) and interested in defense, Giménez is a perfect fit. He’ll make this roster more cohesive. Schneider headlines a group of utility players better suited to the corner outfield and occasional cameos in the infield than full-time roles with their feet on the dirt, and now that’s exactly the role they’ll have.
This lineup is still light on impact hitters, but the Jays weren’t going to get one of those at second base, so in getting Giménez, they’ll have no problem sliding a power bat with a shaky glove into their lineup because they have such solid up-the-middle defense.
In Cleveland, the equation was different. The Guardians are extremely cost-conscious; with Giménez out of town, only José Ramírez and Shane Bieber have meaningful multi-year guaranteed contracts. (Bieber’s new deal is for one year and $14 million with a $16 million player option and a $4 million buyout for 2026, and while he probably won’t exercise it unless something goes wrong with his rehab, Cleveland still could be on the hook to pay him $30 million over the next two seasons.) The Guardians perpetually turn their roster over to keep payroll down. In recent years, they traded Francisco Lindor before he hit free agency, shipped Josh Bell out of town to cut costs mere months after signing him in 2023, and now have traded Giménez.
When you’re operating with a budget of around $100 million, paying an average annual value of $20 million for a defensive wizard doesn’t work out quite as well. In Toronto, Giménez will be a piece of the puzzle. In Cleveland, he’d need to be more than that in the long run for the team’s strategy to pan out. The plan isn’t hard to suss out. Heck, Giménez himself came to Cleveland as part of the return for Lindor. This is just how the Guardians do things; they acquire and develop good young players, then attempt to either sign them to early-career contract extensions, trade them for new young players, or both.
Horwitz, who turned 27 last month, will provide a spark for the Pirates, and quite frankly, he would have for the Guardians, too. He’s nominally a utility infielder, and he played 300 innings of second base in the majors this past year, but our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen describes him as “heavy-footed,” and I think his future is either at first base or in left field. He’s undersized and on the slower side, but put simply, he can hit. He pairs a keen batting eye with excellent bat-to-ball skills; he rarely chases, rarely whiffs, and hits a ton of line drives.
Why did the Guardians move him, then? Well, in keeping with seemingly every Guardians prospect, his power is an open question; he’s toward the bottom of the majors in bat speed and feels to me like a 10- to 15- home run guy on average. That works just fine given the rest of his skillset, though. He’ll probably post OBPs in the upper .300s and record a raft of doubles over the next handful of seasons. Steamer thinks he’ll be 20% above average offensively next year, right in line with his brief major league career so far. The problem is that he didn’t have a place to play for the Guardians, who already boast Josh Naylor and Kyle Manzardo as lefty first basemen.
Instead, they turned Horowitz into three pitchers, including two recent draftees and a former top 100 prospect with some interesting characteristics and plenty of risk. It’s a quintessentially Clevelandian move: Trade your star for a multi-prospect return, then trade one of those prospects for another multi-prospect return, always focusing on depth over high-end potential.
Mitchell is a relatively unknown quantity, so I sourced some notes directly from Longenhagen, who put a 35+ FV on the young outfielder. Here’s what Eric had to say:
Mitchell is a relatively small corner outfield prospect who hit for superlative contact in college and during a brief post-draft run at Low-A Dunedin. Mitchell’s college career began at Western Illinois (they’re the Leathernecks) where he hit a combined .348 in two seasons and led the team in every offensive category as a sophomore. Mitchell transferred to Indiana for his draft season and played right field all year, amassing a .335/.458/.512 line despite missing time at the very start of the season with a broken hand. Toronto drafted Mitchell in the fourth round, signed him for a little less than $500,000, and then he went out and hit .289/.350/.467 at Dunedin during the last month of the minor league season.
Mitchell is a small-framed 5-foot-10 but takes a healthy rip for a guy his size. His athleticism is evident in the verve of his best swings, but he generates it without elaborate movement. His swing is simple and compact, and produces all-fields line drive spray. He made in-zone contact at a 90% rate at both IU and Dunedin, though his chase rate took a leap in pro ball (something to watch going forward). Mitchell’s power-indicating metrics, like his hard hit rate and peak exit velocities, are comfortably below average but need to be viewed with his preseason broken hand in mind. Though they were roughly the same in pro ball, even as Mitchell got further and further away from his injury, he should be monitored for an uptick in this area in 2025. The Blue Jays gave Mitchell some reps in center field after the draft and his feel for the position is not great. He played exclusively right field at Indiana and doesn’t always look great in right, either (though Mitchell throws well). Barring a meaningful uptick in his power, Mitchell’s profile is similar to that of current Guardians outfielder Will Brennan: a good contact-hitting corner guy with significantly less power than is typical for an everyday guy. Mitchell could be a similar platoon type player.
That’s it for the major parts of the deal, but Sandlin is a nice add-on for the Jays, whose bullpen was abysmal last year – literally the worst in baseball, 2.5 wins below replacement level. Sandlin is hardly a relief ace, but he’s racked up a solid ERA and acceptable FIP over 200 major league innings, with plenty of strikeouts and walks thanks to an arsenal heavy on sliders and splitters.
In Cleveland, Sandlin was a low-leverage option, but the difference between the two bullpens is enormous. In Toronto, he’ll fit into the broad middle of the group, behind the late-inning arms but ahead of guys like Ryan Burr, Brendon Little, and Tommy Nance. The Jays will likely make several more additions to their relief corps this winter (they’ve already brought back righty Yimi García), but Sandlin is a nice bulk option. If you sign four or five guys like him, one or two of them will probably pan out. As a bonus, he has multiple minor league options remaining, which gives the Jays more roster flexibility while they sort out their best bullpen configuration.
If I were the Jays, I’d make this trade every time. This year is make or break for them, a last chance to make the Big League Sons generation pay off before one or both of them depart in free agency. They need wins this year, and Giménez is a better bet to provide them than anyone they traded. He’s also a great fallback option if Bichette leaves town; he’d look right at home playing shortstop. Heck, the best defensive alignment for the team, if it didn’t mess with clubhouse chemistry or what not, would already have Giménez at short, with Bichette sliding to third or (more likely in my eyes) second.
Put another way, the Blue Jays’ biggest issue on the offensive side of the ball in recent years has been coming up with reliable everyday players. They’ve been in a perpetual scramble to find infield depth since Marcus Semien left for Texas. The constant shuffle and churn has, at times, held back an otherwise potent lineup. Even when Guerrero turned the clock back to 2021 this year, there just wasn’t enough support around him. I’m not saying Toronto can rest on its laurels, but this is one great leap in the right direction, and it’s a great leap that fits snugly into its team-building philosophy.
For Cleveland, I like this trade less. It feels to me like a decision made on a spreadsheet: Giménez was making enough money that the Guardians opted to trade him as soon as they were offered some minimum perceived value of prospects in return. That prospect value wasn’t even particularly high: two 40 FVs, a 35+ FV, and a fifth starter/long reliever type. My favorite part of this return is that none of the prospects are Rule 5 eligible until 2026, but that’s damning with faint praise. I get that these guys fit their system, but how many times can you trade a quarter for five nickels before getting annoyed by how difficult it is to manage all the change you’re carrying around?
I get the idea. More than perhaps any other successful team, the Guardians have a type. They look for a lot of the same general archetypes of players whether they’re drafting or trading; they prioritize contact and plate discipline over power and place huge emphasis on age. They look for quantity over quality if they can have only one of the two. That redundant acquisition approach makes them resilient when some fraction of their young players inevitably don’t work out.
That’s how the Guardians have operated for quite a while. Ramírez is part of this strategy, only he turned into an elite power hitter and frequent MVP candidate despite lacking prototypical raw power. If you’re looking to compete for playoff spots in the AL Central every year despite a shoestring budget, it’s hard to argue with this system. But it absolutely limits their ceiling. If you’re always trading with the future in mind, how can you max out the present?
That’s a philosophical quibble, not a methodological one. Even if I disagree with the big picture, I appreciate the way the Guardians often manage to find interesting returns despite behaving in ways that I, and surely every front office in baseball, can predict in advance. I loved their deal for Manzardo, for example, and without dipping too far into the past, Emmanuel Clase’s ridiculous Rangers debut caught my eye and theirs at the same time. They might think too small for my tastes, but they tend to do it really well.
This deal doesn’t hit that bar for me, though. It’s not like Giménez is ruinously expensive this year. He’s making $10 million in 2025, a salary even the budget-conscious Guardians could stomach for a year. His annual payouts don’t get truly punitive for a small-market team until 2027, and average annual value isn’t particularly important to teams that never sniff the competitive balance tax line. Moreover, the AL Central is more competitive than it’s been in years, and Ramírez won’t be outstanding forever. It would be one thing if the Blue Jays had bowled them over with an offer, or if the Pirates were weirdly willing to back up a truck for Horowitz but forgot to call the Blue Jays. That’s not what’s going on here. This is closer to a gutterball than a strike. If you want to keep operating like the Guardians do, you need to win trades, not break even. I think this may end up in the loss column, even.
Maybe they were worried that another down year would tank Giménez’s value to the point that his contract would be underwater, but that feels like a remote possibility to me. Maybe they really believe Angel Martínez (replacement level in 2024) or Gabriel Arias (slightly below replacement level) can man second, though their results don’t exactly suggest it. I just don’t understand why it had to be done right this instant. Would this trade, or one with a comparable return, vanish in a month? I doubt it.
You can lose a trade and still run a good organization. You can win a trade and still miss the playoffs. It would hardly be a surprise to see the Guardians in October, or to see the Jays miss the playoffs again. But I’d make this deal 100 times out of 100 if I were the Blue Jays. I’d make more deals too; this year is phenomenally important for them. Acquiring Giménez is a tremendous start, particularly since it leaves the team with plenty of positional flexibility to fit in a big bat elsewhere. I think we might look back at this trade as a turning point for the Jays in a few years.
Content Source: blogs.fangraphs.com