A Robbie Ray-Blue Jays reunion could happen. Just don’t bet the franchise on it

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This article was published 06/11/2021 (1462 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Blue Jays would love to find a way to re-sign Robbie Ray, but the question general manager Ross Atkins will be asking himself in the coming weeks is how far is he willing to go to make it happen?

The fit between these two parties seems obvious. The Jays need pitching and, after veteran Max Scherzer, Ray is the best one available through free agency. If Ray returns, Atkins will possess the top rotation in the American League East, perhaps in all of baseball.

Ray also seemed to enjoy his year-and-a-half stint with the Jays, even though he spent more time in Buffalo than Toronto because of the pandemic. The 30-year-old hit it off with pitching coach Pete Walker and turned his career around in what will soon become a Cy Young Award-winning season.

The Jays are expected to have a boatload of money to spend this off-season, potentially upwards of $50 million (U.S.), and George Springer is the only player with a guaranteed contract beyond 2023. With an ability to top just about any offer out there, re-signing Ray should be a no-brainer, right? Well, not exactly.

There is a large gap between the 2021 version of Ray that the Jays got to see firsthand and the guy who pitched parts of seven seasons in the majors before that. The former would be worth just about every penny he gets this winter, the latter would be headed for a very large overpay.

The benchmark Ray likely will be shooting for this off-season is the five-year deal worth $118 million that Zack Wheeler got from the Philadelphia Phillies prior to 2020. The two pitchers have different styles, but they entered free agency at the same age with somewhat comparable track records, although it’s worth noting Wheeler was the more consistent performer while Ray had more peaks and valleys.

Wheeler had the lower career ERA (3.77 vs. 4.00) but the teams that were bidding on him during that off-season, including the Jays, were betting on his untapped potential and the belief that he was going outperform his previous numbers. After a pair of back-to-back seasons with a sub-3.00 ERA, the Phillies’ gamble has paid off.

It’s a similar story with Ray, except he has already flashed that upside with a dominant 2021. The native of Tennessee posted career highs in innings (193.1), strikeouts (248) and wins above replacement (6.7). He also posted career lows in walks/hits per innings pitched (1.045) and walks per nine innings (2.4).

His highest bidders will be banking on that level of performance continuing for the foreseeable future. What they can’t afford is a return of the guy he was before, an erratic lefty who frequently battled mechanical issues while posting a 4.53 ERA with 5.1 walks per nine and a 1.427 WHIP from 2018-20.

Ray has a shot at securing more guaranteed money than any other pitcher this winter and yet there’s a reason he was forced to settle for a short-term deal a year ago. Ray bet on himself that he’d be worth more the next time he hit the market, which turned out to be a wise move. Now teams will have to ask themselves whether he’ll ever be worth his current price tag again, or if this is yet another blip.

Internally, the Jays have bought into his improved strike throwing after Ray put in a lot of hard work with Walker en route to throwing a career-best 50.8 per cent of his pitches in the zone. They believe he found a repeatable delivery that should help avoid the nightmare that was 2020 when he was walking 7.8 batters per nine innings.

Ray is a power pitcher, not a finesse guy, but when he was rolling during the summer months, he wasn’t just throwing strikes, he seemed to be placing the ball almost anywhere he wanted it. Fastballs were being painted on the black of the home plate corners with relative ease.

With hitters anticipating more strikes, it also meant they were forced to chase more pitches, especially Ray’s lethal slider. His 30.1 out-of-zone swing percentage was the second highest he has posted. The overall strike throwing might stick, but those perfectly located pitches on the corners seem less sustainable, which would also lead to less chase.

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Another potential concern is that Ray has turned into a maximum-effort, two-pitch starter. He throws his fastball and slider combination almost exclusively, only occasionally tossing in a curveball or changeup. That’s effective now, but it could prove unsustainable on the back end of a long-term deal if he experiences a drop in velocity.

One of three things is going to happen with Ray: He’s going to pick his preferred destination and take less money to make it happen; a team and his agent will align on a deal that factors in both his upside and the previous dips in production; or a pitching starved team will bank on his Cy Young performance continuing and offer whatever it takes to get him to sign.

The Jays would love the first option because it means he would take a hometown discount to stick around, but that rarely happens among the game’s elite players. The second could work out, too, a middle ground between the pitcher Ray used to be and the one he became. The third would almost assuredly result in his departure because, while the Jays want him back, they’re not going to spend whatever it takes, especially if it hampers their ability to sign Jose Berríos to a long-term extension.

Ray has one of the most interesting cases of any free agent on this year’s market. He’s the very definition of a high-risk, high-reward pitcher and while the Jays desperately need his upside, with a lot of viable alternatives available elsewhere, don’t expect them to go all out to make this signing happen. There will be a limit, they just have to hope there’s a way to keep Ray within it.

Gregor Chisholm is a Toronto-based baseball columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @GregorChisholm or reach him via email: gchisholm@thestar.ca