Wednesday June.13, 2012

Chuck Booth (Lead Baseball Writer and @chuckbooth3024 on twitter)- The events that happened yesterday with the Blue Jays and Vlad Guerrero are strange and totally warranted for further review.  In my opinion, the Blue Jays dropped the ball on this one. Guerrero lit up the Minor Leagues for a couple of weeks and should have been called up when Edwin Encarnacion was hurt on June.4th.  It was the perfect opportunity to have Vladdy come up and replace EE in the lineup.  It should have prompted a return to first base for Encarnacion when he came back from his injury just 5 days later.

The top average on the team actually belongs to EE, who is hitting .281 currently.  Vlad Guerrero has never hit worst than .290 in the last 15 years.  He tore it up in the minor leagues, and was said to have showed up in decent shape.  The Blue Jays had to know that Vladdy would be upset when he was bypassed on in favor of David Cooper or Yan Gomes.  I give full credit to the agent for Guerrero in this case, he negotiated a verbal contract with Alex Anthopoulos that the slugger could opt at any time and request to be released from his player contract with the club.  In the only thing that makes the Jays look okay on this, they never had to go through with letting Vladdy out of this contract.  Really it is a shame that the two sides could not work out something to have Vlad stay with the club.  It may actually work out better for both sides in the long run.

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