Santander goes on IL with left shoulder inflammation

TORONTO -- The Blue Jays have placed Anthony Santander on the 10-day IL, a decision that feels like it’s been looming as a possibility for weeks now.

Santander’s official designation here is left shoulder inflammation, but he’s also dealt with some left hip inflammation over the past week-plus. Santander clearly hasn’t been right at the plate through this stretch, either, so this will give him an opportunity to fully reset after a difficult start to his Blue Jays tenure.

“It was still bugging him, and he had an MRI last night,” manager John Schneider said prior to Friday’s game against the A’s. “We’re still kind of reading through it a bit but don’t know if the course of action is going to be an injection or just rehab it.”

Through his first 50 games with the organization, Santander has hit just .179 with a .577 OPS, and while he came to Toronto with a reputation for being a slow starter in April, we’re on the doorstep of June now and the Blue Jays desperately need the power that Santander was brought in to provide.

Santander had been forced to work around both of these issues, missing a handful of games along the way but never reaching this point of an IL decision being made. It’s important to get this 100% right, though, because it sounded like Santander was beginning to get away from his own strengths. Recently, Santander spoke about how the lingering hip and shoulder issues were helping him to focus more on making contact.

“I always swing hard,” Santander said in Tampa last week. "When I’m struggling and swing hard, I don’t make good contact, so this is going to help me be more calm, be more straight to the ball and put the ball in play.”

Contact has never been Santander’s identity, though. It’s always been about his power upside, which peaked in 2024 with 44 home runs for the Orioles. While those big, hard swings Santander references can lead to some empty at-bats in between, they’re also the source of his value to this organization.

In Santander’s place, outfielder Alan Roden (No. 5 prospect) is back up for another crack at the big leagues, and he’s earned it.

Roden was the story of Spring Training and cracked the Opening Day roster, but he hit just .178 with a .522 OPS through 28 games. He dominated Triple-A when he was optioned, though, and has put up a 1.029 OPS with the Bisons. At his best, Roden is an on-base machine with one of the best plate approaches in the organization -- the type of on-base potential that could still make him a leadoff option down the road -- and now he’ll have another shot at proving he deserves to stick around.

“He did exactly what we had hoped,” Schneider said. “I think that he’s going to hit. In Triple-A, it’s obviously different pitching there, but what we wanted him to focus on was getting pitches he can hit and having his at-bats. I think he was caught in between, probably sitting on some pitches he thought he would get here and not swinging at the right pitch for a period of time before he did go down. All things were really positive when he was down there, so it’s nice to see a guy do that and get back up.”

There could be a competition of sorts while Santander is on the IL, too, with Myles Straw, Jonatan Clase and Roden competing for time and the right to remain on the roster once Santander eventually returns.