It’s pretty fitting that on the same day on which James Click got hired by the Blue Jays to be their Vice President of Baseball Strategy, I was set to interview Evan Drellich, the author of the new book “Winning Fixes Everything,” which tells the story of the Astros’ 2017 sign-stealing scandal through the lens of the egotistical leadership of Houston rabblerousers Jeff Luhnow and Jim Crane. Drellich had been a beat writer for the Astros at the Houston Chronicle from 2013-2016, then got word of their cheating ways while working in the Boston sports market. He, along with Ken Rosenthal, were the authors of the article breaking the news of the scandal in November of 2019, which started Drellich down his path of authoring what was truly an enlightening book. You can read some of my thoughts on “Winning Fixes Everything” by clicking here.
After GM Jeff Luhnow was fired in the aftermath of the sign-stealing scandal, he was replaced by a longtime veteran of the Rays organization in James Click. Although most of the success of the 2020-2022 Astros came with players brought in by Luhnow during his reign, Click made some savvy, analytical, and pragmatic moves of his own that kept the Astros relevant, as Houston won the 2021 AL pennant and the 2022 World Series. But due to disagreements Click had with Astros owner Jim Crane and an insulting one-year extension offer, Click decided to leave the Lone Star State for greener pastures. Now, just a month before the 2023 regular season gets underway, Click has joined the Toronto Blue Jays as their Vice President of Baseball Strategy. What does that mean, you ask? Well, to be honest, I had the same question, which is why I was eager to read the press release that announced Click’s hiring, which you can find below.
As a financial journalist by day, I’m used to reading my fair share of corporate-sounding gobbledygook in press releases, but this press release sounded especially gobbledygooked, even after reading it a few more times. Is Click the new GM, replacing Ross Atkins? Is he the new team President, replacing Mark Shapiro? Is he both of those roles? Is he the entire front office? Is he the new owner? Maybe I was overly skeptical of the Blue Jays’ statement because I had just read about a franchise with such a confusingly uncomfortable front office. After all, Click had left the Astros. I know he has nothing to do with the 2017 scandal and literally replaced the guy that did have everything to do with it, but this all seemed a little fishy.
Evan Drellich and I hopped on a call this past Monday afternoon, just a few hours after the Click news broke, and I saw an interesting opportunity to pick his brain on this whole ordeal. So, after bonding over the college newspaper that we both worked at, Binghamton University’s Pipe Dream - him as a sports reporter in the mid-2000s, me as a bookkeeper in the late 2010s, I expressed my “curiosity” (or “concern”) of the Blue Jays’ seemingly-ominous James Click press release. His explanation certainly gave me a more sensible outlook on the situation.
Drellich explained to me that it seemed as though Click is simply meant to act as another mind for the Blue Jays’ front office to utilize, providing a more practical approach to roster construction than the approaches of Shapiro and Atkins. “[Click] is not the final decision-maker,” Drellich speculated. “[He’s] somebody who is involved in the strategic planning and best practices [of the Blue Jays]. You would hope that he was hired with the intent that they would value him and use a lot of what he has to say, and maybe it’s not the worst thing that someone [other than Click] has the final decision.”
The Blue Jays have one of the American League’s most potent lineups, but with a questionable pitching staff, it’s hard to say where they will finish in the standings come October 2023. It seems to me that, with Click’s hiring, that they’re preparing to tackle what is sure to be a tumultuous Trade Deadline and future offseasons where they will have to sign or replace Bo Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. Click worked for two franchises that relied heavily on analytics to produce good ballclubs. He grew up in the Rays’ system for 15 years, a system that must innovate to stay financially stable, then moved onto a richer team with more resources for more innovation, like how Andrew Friedman went from the Rays to being the President of Baseball Ops with the Dodgers.
“[Click’s] a valuable asset for any team. He’s coming from the Rays and the Astros, and ownership groups certainly love the Rays and there’s no denying the Astros have had success,” Drellich said. “I had no doubt he’d find a pretty good title somewhere.”
Perhaps what tripped me up the most about Click joining Toronto is the vague press release combined with the even vaguer title. Any front office person is in charge of baseball strategy in some capacity, but I think after talking to Evan, I’m realizing that the idea with hiring Click is that his thought process will hopefully leak into how the Blue Jays operate moving forward. The fluidity of his role and the description of said role provides enough structure to establish him as a figurehead of the front office but doesn’t pigeonhole him into a role that’s too restrictive of his ideas. “It’s actually a role I think would’ve been best suited for Jeff Luhnow,” Drellich posited. “At the end of the day, he ran into a lot of troubles as the overall GM [of the Astros], but he certainly had a good vision of how to innovate and where the industry was going."
Reading “Winning Fixes Everything” and talking with Evan about Click’s appointment has got me thinking a lot about the make-up of front offices. A lot of the baseball decision-making roles are arbitrary, but any business needs an org chart to keep the ship sailing. Said Drellich, “Baseball titles can be kind of tricky to decipher. The leader of an organization doesn’t have to be at the forefront of the analytics. You can construct a front office in different ways.”
Those “different ways” that Evan mentioned can manifest into the caustic Luhnow-led Astros that wanted to win at all costs, a "pipe dream" of eternal benevolence and baseball championships, or somewhere in between those two extremes. No matter what, though, I’m excited to see how Click’s thought leadership affects the Blue Jays in the future, despite their annoyingly ambiguous press release. Thanks to Evan Drellich for speaking to me this past week. If you want to check out more of his writing at The Athletic, click here, and if you’re interested in reading “Winning Fixes Everything”, click here. I’ll talk to you next week for another edition of Baseball with Matt!
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