Opinion | James Click is an intriguing Blue Jays hire, but Ross Atkins has nothing to worry about

NORTH PORT, Fla.—The Blue Jays made a huge addition to their front office Monday, hiring James Click as vice-president of baseball strategy.

According to a release from the team, the 45-year-old Click will be “working closely with general manager Ross Atkins and department heads on strategic planning, decision making and evaluation. He will work across both professional and amateur levels to identify best practices, develop plans and implement strategies.”

The addition of Click — the first head of baseball operations since 1947 not to return to a team that won the World Series — is quite a coup for the Jays.

He worked his way up to VP of baseball operations over 15 years with the Tampa Bay Rays before joining the Houston Astros to help clean up in the wake of its sign-stealing scandal. Houston brought him on as GM in January 2020.

The Astros didn’t completely clean house on the field under Click, but the team that won the whole shebang last October only had five members left from the dirty, dirty cheaters of 2017: second baseman José Altuve, third baseman Alex Bregman, first baseman Yuli Gurriel and pitchers Lance McCullers Jr. and Justin Verlander.

Click’s contract expired after last season. After they beat the Philadelphia Phillies in six games, for the first legitimate World Series championship in franchise history, he couldn’t come to an agreement with owner Jim Crane to return. The Astros wound up hiring Dana Brown, a former Alex Anthopoulos lieutenant in both Toronto’s and Atlanta’s front offices, to replace him.

“Any time you can have another set of eyes or another set of opinions from a place that has had a lot of success, both Tampa and Houston, I think it’s great,” Jays manager John Schneider said after Monday’s 7-0 loss to Atlanta. “Come in and kind of check your work, double down on what you’re doing (well) and check your processes.

“(Jays president Mark Shapiro) and Ross (Atkins) are obviously very open about saying, ‘We’re going to use any resource we can get.’ I think all of us are going to be constantly learning from one another … It’s a cool addition, definitely. I can’t wait to pick his brain.”

Click comes from a very different baseball background than Atkins, having been hired by the Rays from Baseball Prospectus, the sabermetrics and analytics publication whose early years produced so much talent that eventually found work in big-league front offices and other high-profile places.

Chaim Bloom, now chief baseball officer of the Boston Red Sox, brought Click to Tampa Bay in 2005. Like Click, Bloom graduated from Yale University and wrote for Baseball Prospectus.

Atkins’s route to front-office success came the old-fashioned way. He was a pitcher in the Cleveland organization, making it to Double-A before retiring and moving right into coaching, then becoming an assistant farm director and working his way up to VP of player personnel before Shapiro went from Cleveland to the Jays and took Atkins with him.

The hot-takey speculation that Atkins will have to start looking over his shoulder with Click around is nothing more than that. Atkins and Shapiro have been joined at the hip for decades and, as the primary architect of a team that has gone from 95 losses to 91 wins, then 92 and a playoff berth over the last three full (non-COVID) seasons, Atkins doesn’t really have anything to worry about.

Remember, when Anthopoulos was running the show in Toronto he had former major-league GMs in his front office as well — including Jim Beattie, who had been GM of the Montreal Expos in the late 1990s, and Dan Evans, who was at the helm of the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2004 when they won a playoff game for the first time in 16 years.

Schneider was the subject of the same sort of speculation when the Jays hired Don Mattingly as bench coach, about a month after Schneider got a three-year contract as manager. He didn’t look at Mattingly as a manager in waiting; he was just thrilled to have him.

“First and foremost,” said Schneider, “you look at it as: How is this going to make us collectively better? I think we’re all confident enough in what we do and how we go about our day to where we’re not looking over our shoulder by any means. And I think that whether it’s bringing Donnie in or bringing James in, it just shows the confidence level — that we’re in this for the players, we’re in this to try to make ourselves better.”

For Schneider and the rest of the team, Mattingly — the six-time all-star, nine-time Gold Glover at first base and borderline Hall of Famer who went on to manage the Dodgers and Miami Marlins for a dozen years combined — has been a huge win already, less than two weeks into camp.

“He’s been great,” said Schneider. “I think just him getting back into the teaching part of it, whether it’s offence or defence. You know, we’re sitting here in a game like (Monday’s) just talking through situations, like: Would you play the first baseman back? When would you play him in front (of a runner) and when would you hold (the runner) on? … Constant conversations.”

And just as Mattingly is an indispensable resource for Schneider, Click has been brought in to do the same for Atkins. The Jays hope both additions will help them to their first World Series in three decades.

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