With Santander likely out through August, Blue Jays could seek aircraft carrier at Deadline

TORONTO -- Anthony Santander has been “week to week” for nearly two months now … and the Blue Jays are starting to run out of weeks.

The Blue Jays’ big offseason splash has been stuck in a long, often mysterious dance with left shoulder inflammation that just won’t go away. It began with a shoulder subluxation -- which is a partial dislocation of Santander’s shoulder -- earlier this season, and when Santander eventually tried to play through the injury, it just wasn’t working.

Now, after weeks of hope that Santander could start to swing a bat again “soon,” manager John Schneider’s comments prior to their big series against the Yankees on Sunday provided some level of clarity.

“Talking with him and the staff, he’s still going to be a couple of weeks away from hitting,” Schneider said, “and we’ll evaluate him week to week to see when that does start.”

Let’s start from the best-case scenario, which would be Santander picking up a bat again by mid-August. Even by then, he’d have gone 2 1/2 months without swinging and would need to build up carefully. Besides, shoulders are complicated, and everything about this situation has been exactly that. In this scenario, Santander would still be unlikely to return until late August or September.

While Schneider says the Blue Jays are not at all closing the door on Santander returning to help this season, that’s clearly a question that’s on the table. Now in the first year of his five-year, $92.5 million deal, Santander has appeared in just 50 games and hit .179 with six home runs and a .577 OPS. His WAR (per FanGraphs) sits at -0.9. It’s not what anyone had in mind.

“He’s disappointed, I think, and it’s bad timing in his first year here and all that kind of stuff,” Schneider said. “He’s frustrated, but happy with the way we’re playing, and it’s good to have him back around.”

The big picture: How this impacts the Trade Deadline
The bizarre context here is that the Blue Jays have surged out to the American League East lead without Santander and enter this week with the 10th-most runs scored in baseball. With an elite defense and a pitching staff that has done enough, that will play.

The absence of Santander still leaves room for a true power bat, though, and for the sake of planning their approach to the July 31 Trade Deadline in a season with this much potential, the Blue Jays need to fully prepare to be without Santander for the rest of the season. If he returns and mashes, that’s a cherry on top of all of this.

Diamondbacks third baseman Eugenio Suárez is the top bat expected to be shopped over the coming 10 days, and Toronto obviously needs to be involved in those talks, given Suárez’s ability to raise this team’s ceiling. The market boasts plenty of other power bats, including Suárez’s teammate and Canadian Josh Naylor, but the Blue Jays don’t need to just round out the corners of their roster. This lineup is good enough already. It needs a true headliner, and unless this market gets some surprise additions, Suárez is that man.

Glass half full: What if Santander returns?
In a world where Santander returns for the September run, what type of player would the Blue Jays be adding to their lineup? Santander is a gifted power hitter who launched 44 home runs last season for the Orioles, making him worth every penny of the contract he signed with Toronto, but he’d be fighting uphill to catch up to pitchers after such a long layoff.

In that situation, Santander would surely return as a nearly full-time DH, which would force George Springer into the outfield more regularly. Of the 14 games Springer has started in July, he has played the outfield in just three of them and started at DH in 11. The DH days are clearly part of the 35-year-old’s stunning resurgence, so this needs to be factored in, too.

This is all for weeks down the line, though, after the Trade Deadline has passed. The Blue Jays will hold out hope that Santander can return and be part of what has the potential to be a memorable September and October in downtown Toronto. But the unfortunate reality for everyone involved is that they’ll need to prepare for what life looks like if that doesn’t happen … just in case.