A mound of mystery

The curious saga of Manoah’s lost season

As the Blue Jays made their final push this week for a wild-card position and a gust of momentum, the ghost in the baseball machine remained Alek Manoah.

Out of sight, maybe out of mind, certainly out of involvement. And that must be eating him alive. There isn’t a player on the Jays more delighted in being a part of the team than the strapping righthander.

Of all the mystifying elements surrounding the 2023 Jays — why they lost their hitting mojo, why some of their biggest guns have had relatively flattened seasons, why they lost their grasp on baserunning fundamentals — none has been more head-scratching than Manoah’s discombobulation on the mound, his confidence sapped as the quick-yank starts went up and the metrics went south.

Seven months ago. he was on the cover of Toronto Life magazine, his outsized personality as compelling as the pitching performance that had made him a Cy Young finalist and all-star, prized as a marquee asset for years to come. And perhaps that Manoah will reappear in 2024 and put this whole wrenching experience in the past. But the Jays have a long history of lowballing the truth, of eschewing transparency. Their media paranoia is weird, given that Rogers owns both the team and much of the reporting corps, but few kernels of Manoah info have been disseminated via the Rogers grid.

One such revelatory update, first reported by Sportsnet’s Ben Nicholson-Smith and subsequently confirmed by the Star, is that Manoah has in recent weeks received multiple injections to his pitching arm.

Minus any specificity on what type of jabs, or for what purpose, the obvious conjecture is that these were corticosteroid shots, primarily given to reduce inflammation, which is the bane of pitchers. Thus Manoah transitioned from “temporarily inactive” to shut down for the balance of the season. He hasn’t pitched since Aug. 10.

Manoah had for quite a while suspected that something was wrong with his pitching arm, which is why he had sought several medical opinions. When he was consigned to the minors on Aug. 11 — that demotion felt more ill-boding than his month-long trip to the Florida Complex League for a lab-scrutinized retrofit — Manoah did not immediately make his way to Buffalo. Players have 72 hours to report for a new assignment and Manoah didn’t resurface in Buffalo until well after that.

GM Ross Atkins claimed the lag was due to extensive health testing in Toronto, which sounded suspiciously dissembling. Manoah hadn’t been placed on the injured list. If he genuinely believed himself physically afflicted, he was entitled to file a grievance over the relegation with the players’ union. That didn’t happen.

Off to Buffalo he eventually went, which meant, as per collective bargaining rules, his salary was slashed from $745,650 (U.S.) at the major

league level to $350,100 in the minors. His career isn’t in big bucks territory yet.

Because the impression was left, rightly or wrongly, that Manoah was possibly dealing with a personal or mental health issue, there was little stomach among journalists to harass the guy. In any event, Manoah wasn’t talking and hasn’t talked since he departed Toronto, declining requests for interviews. (His agent did the same when reached by the Star.) But Manoah looked fine when spotted around Toronto walking his dog and in Buffalo, where he participated in the club’s autograph day.

The upshot has been that the Jays have controlled the narrative, though Manoah was not told that he shouldn’t comment. The effect, deliberate or otherwise, has cast Manoah as dissatisfied with the diagnosis of team doctors and something of a dissident, seeking medical opinions that aligned with his inner sense that a root physical ailment had caused his drastic fall-off.

It should be noted that the Jays knew there was something wrong with Manoah’s delivery at spring training and hoped those issues had been corrected during his Florida sojourn. Manoah was certain of it but there was no significant evidence of a return to form after he rejoined the club, when he had a 4.91 ERA over six games.

The hyper analytics-driven Jays had tracked metrics — including

FIP (measuring what a pitcher’s ERA should look if he were to experience league-average results on balls in play), expected FIP and expected ERA — that indicated a trending regression stretching back to last season: FIP from 3.35 to 6.02, XFIP from 3.97 to 5.86, xERA from 2.24 to 5.87. Barrelled balls up, walks up, hard-hit balls way up, strike percentage down, out-ofzone swing percentage way down. First-pitch swing percentage down. Some of the peripheral pitching stats were the worst in the majors.

By mid-August, the Jays felt they had brought Manoah back too soon from Florida and concluded they had stuck with him too long when restored to Toronto.

But there are some other career factors at play, or potentially. As of Jan. 1, Manoah had accrued one year and 130 days of service time. In 2023, the number of workdays that count for a full year of service is 172. That means Manoah entered this year 42 days shy of surpassing two years service. Players get six years’ service before they are eligible for free agency. Manoah spent more than 42 days on the active roster — IL time counts too — so the situation in which he finds himself doesn’t impact when he becomes a free agent, at least not yet.

But there’s something called the Super Two. Players are eligible for arbitration after three years’ service. As part of the CBA, some players are awarded arbitration after two years’ service, theoretically getting a bigger raise before free agency

because arbitration generally gives a nice bump in pay and is guaranteed to increase every year after that. But to qualify for Super Two designation, a player must rank in the top 22 per cent in terms of service time among all players who have amassed between two and three years in the majors.

Yes, it’s eye-glazing stuff but not to players and their agents. While Manoah’s demotion doesn’t impact his free agency, he’s almost certain to miss out on the extra year of arbitration because he is unlikely to be a Super Two. There’s a good chance he would have been, had he been with the Jays all season. How much might that cost Manoah over the course of a deal? It could be a lot if he flames out entirely, or a couple of million dollars, which isn’t chump change even for Manoah.

His worst-case scenario: If the Jays keep Manoah in the minors for a lengthy period of time next season, he could fall short of reaching three years’ service by the end of

2024, which would delay his free agency for another year. And that would cost him a ton.

Look, maybe the Jays have Manoah’s well-being completely front of mind. He was a pitching gem before he turned into a lump of coal. Surely the club’s most ardent wish is that he finds himself again, that Manoah circa 2021 and ’22 was the real stuff and ’23 an anomaly which can be reversed.

The thing is, we don’t know what the 25-year-old is thinking, whether he’s feeling betrayed by the Jays, if he sees a future with this organization. The only clue that came down the pike was Jays broadcaster Ben Wagner’s on-air comment earlier this month that Manoah’s camp was unhappy because the demotion was performance-related.

The Jays have offered little clarity. Manoah has gone mum.

None of it augurs particularly well for spring training next year. Pitchers are expected to report Feb. 13-15.