Blue Jays and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. unveil historic $500M, 14-year extension

Inside the Rogers Centre interview room, tucked in the stadium’s bowels beyond the left-field corner, the Toronto Blue Jays and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. finally gave their $500-million, 14-year extension a proper unveiling.

A week ago, as late Sunday became early Monday, word of their deal leaked. Two days later, after scouring the Boston area for the resources to conduct a physical and make the deal official, the four-time all-star first baseman and GM Ross Atkins were hauled out before a backdrop in a dingy and frigid Fenway Park concourse to discuss the deal. 

Then, Monday afternoon, all the bells and whistles feting easily the largest contract in team history, and the second-biggest ever in Major League Baseball in terms of net present value. Guerrero’s family was there, along with Blue Jays teammates and club staff, and the four-time all-star first baseman sat on the podium to the left of Edward Rogers, chair of both the club and parent company Rogers Communications Inc. (which also owns this website), bookended by Atkins and club president and CEO Mark Shapiro. 

Atkins presented a contract. Guerrero and Rogers signed it, while José Berrîos, Anthony Santander and Andrés Giménez whooped it up from the back. Pictures were taken, content made, capturing a moment, and a decision, that will impact the Blue Jays until 2040.

And as such, the day was much about Rogers as it was about Guerrero, who mentioned “World Series” five separate times during the 25-minute event while messaging a standard for the franchise to the public in a way he personally hasn’t before.

“A World Series championship coming back to Toronto would be an easy one,” he replied when asked what the return-on-investment needs to look like for the deal to be successful. “But we strive every year, wanting to put a competitive team out there. And we believe with Vlad at the front of that, that we’re closer.”

Of that, there’s no doubt because without Guerrero, bought out of his potential free agency this fall, the competitive window for this team would have collapsed as early as next year, forcing the team into a deadline selloff that would have launched a wider-scale rebuild.

The extension doesn’t make the Blue Jays any better in the here and now, but it does help them set a baseline moving forward and it’s up to the front office to ensure the 26-year-old’s upcoming peak years don’t go to waste. Responding to a question about whether he was taking a more active role with the Blue Jays, Rogers pointed out that ownership’s “job is to do everything possible to make sure that the team has what it needs to be competitive – that’s something that we want very much.”

Underlining that point is that three of the seven largest financial commitments in club history were made during the last five months and the club is projecting a Competitive Balance Tax payroll beyond the second luxury-tax threshold of $261 million. 

While Guerrero’s deal is the only one of that trio Rogers participated in — “obviously a contract of this size we would get a little bit more involved with,” he said, adding that RCI president and CEO Tony Staffieri “was very helpful” — the owner also flew to California to meet with Juan Soto during his free agency, helping the Blue Jays dabble in tiers of free agency long out of reach.

The franchise, of course, has been building toward becoming a financial behemoth, renovating the Rogers Centre to run a better business to underpin higher payroll spending, and the Guerrero extension, in the type of mega-contract the club first tried to give Shohei Ohtani and then Soto, is a mean, not an end. 

Leveraging the deal, then, becomes the club’s new central focus, and the way the Blue Jays do that is to “lean into each day and try to get better every day, is how we’ll think about improving this organization from, whether it’s agency, trade, player development, every single aspect that we can improve, we’ll look to get better,” Atkins said.

Given the number of questions facing the roster and the farm system, they’ll have to, fast.

Bo Bichette is still a pending free agent at the end of this season, while Kevin Gausman, George Springer and Daulton Varsho are up at the end of next year and there aren’t enough prospects in-house to cover the turnover. 

Guerrero alone can’t carry the day and as he noted about Bichette, “I hope he stays here from the bottom of my heart but I can’t control that.”

That’s on the front office, and locking in Guerrero should help on all those fronts. 

Berríos said he attended the newser because, “we don’t see many people getting $500 million, so that was special for me, a good experience. I’m also happy because I think he deserves it. He’s a great human and athlete. That’s why they’re paying that amount of money. So it was a great moment to be there and see that.”

Berríos added that what Rogers said at the podium “means a lot.”

“We play this game because we love it, but we also understand this is a business for people,” he continued. “Hearing those words, they invested $500 million in Vlad. They also paid me. They paid Gausman. They paid Santander. They’re getting more involved and are spending money in this game. Also, they renovated the ballpark and spring training (facility). That helps us see ourselves in a better position every day, every year.”

In turn, there’s more pressure to justify all those investments with the type of sustained success on the field the franchise hasn’t had since its golden era from 1985-1993, culminating in back-to-back World Series titles, when the Blue Jays were atop the payroll scale. More than three decades later, they are once again flexing their financial might, handing Guerrero the lifetime contract he’d thought about “since I signed here. I always thought I would be a Blue Jay forever, and that’s what happened.” 

The $500-million deal, however, can’t be the happy ending for the story. For this to really work out, it needs to be just the beginning.