Ah yes, the old Clemens signing - the team was rebuilding in 95/96  and had just 74 wins in '96 but Beeston was tired of losing and wanted to make a big splash so they traded 6 prospects for Carlos Garcia, Orlando Merced and Dan Plesac (Garcia a flop, Merced wasn't terrible for 1 year, and Plesac was very good in the pen for 2 1/2 years before being traded for Tony Batista and John Frascatore. Talk about a steal (Ash did do the odd good trade) then came back as a free agent and later was traded for Cliff Politte.  The prospects included Craig Wilson (8 WAR with the bat in Pittsburgh, but -6.1 with the glove).  The big name in the deal was Jose Pett who was 93rd on the BA top 100 list (had peaked at #75 a few years earlier) but never reached the majors.  I remember being excited when they signed Benito Santiago as a free agent, a 118 OPS+ the year before but dropped to a 73 his first year here and just 15 games year 2 then gone.   Then December 13th they shocked us all by signing Roger Clemens to a then record deal.  7 days later a contender for worst trade by Ash was done (John Olerud AND cash for Robert Person).  The team lost 2 players in the rule 5 draft and 1 in the minor league part (all 3 reached the majors eventually) - none did much but it was a sign there was depth in the system at the time. Blows ones mind how much talent the Jays had and squandered back then.

Bottom line - signing Clemens was in and of itself a good idea, but dang it really didn't make sense with a tight budget and the stupidity going on at the time mixed with the fact they were still in rebuild mode.  How they won only 76 the next year with Clemens over 10 WAR and Hentgen at 5.6 is hard to believe.  Garcia's 47 OPS+ at 2B helps explain a bit, Carter's 77 at DH also helps explain that record.  Carter was -0.8 bWAR, Olerud +4.1 - there was 5 wins thrown away that any baseball fan saw coming pre-season (that gets them to 500).  Garcia's -2.0 bWAR vs Alomar (who Ash could've resigned but delayed thinking prices would go down) 3.4 would shift another 5 wins the Jays way, putting them at 86 wins.  Of course even if both of those things had happened the Jays would've still been 10 games out of the playoffs (Yankees were the WC with 96 wins, O's won 98 that year with Gillick their GM - grrrrr).  Still, not hard to see how with a little better GM the Jays could've been a contender that year (and some luck) but instead blew it.  For 98 they brought in Jose Canseco (1.5 WAR), Tony Fernandez returned from the dead (2.8 bWAR after leaving Cleveland) but Hentgen flopped, Myers was brought in to close and was released mid-season (Ash got very lucky when SD picked him up and ate his contract).  However, we did get the 'wow' of seeing Roy Halladay come within an out of a no-hitter on the final day of the season (giving up a solo home run that was caught by Dave Stieb in the pen - how poetic was that).

After suffering through those years fans today have no idea what a bad GM is really like.  One who trades stars for scrubs, one who trades away a big chunk of your prospect capital for meh players, etc.

Tim McCarver was a thinking person's catcher.  There are many stories about that.  The one about him pointing out that bringing in the infield in with Mariano Rivera pitching and Luis Gonzalez hitting in the World Series was dangerous because of Rivera's use of the cutter in on the hands and the common result with a left-handed hitter being a bloop.  Here's another from a Slate article in 2016:

"When thinking back on mistakes he’s made, Neyer recalls a long-ago postseason game in which “Tim McCarver was raving about pitch framing and how important it is.” McCarver, who caught in the major leagues for 21 seasons before becoming an announcer, talked at great length about how a catcher could receive the ball in such a way—catching the ball in front of his body, making sure not to jerk his glove—as to influence an umpire’s ball and strike calls. Neyer says he “wrote a typically arrogant column mocking the notion that major-league umpires could be fooled by a catcher,” citing his own experience as an unfoolable Little League ump. (This column, it seems, got lost in some long-ago ESPN.com redesign.) Neyer wasn’t alone in pooh-poohing McCarver’s hobbyhorse. In 1999, Baseball Prospectus’ Keith Woolner did a convincing-seeming study showing that catchers had no influence whatsoever on a pitcher’s performance.

Nine years later, a writer named Dan Turkenkopf found what Woolner couldn’t. Turkenkopf, Max Marchi, Mike Fast, and other pitch-framing researchers of recent vintage have the benefit of Pitch f/x, a high-tech camera system introduced in major-league ballparks starting in 2006 that captured pitch speed, movement, and location with great precision. Armed with better data than Woolner and Neyer had at their disposal, sabermetricians found that the best pitch framer in baseball could save his team roughly half a run per 100 pitches while the worst would cost his team about half a run. As Lindbergh explained in Grantland, that’s an enormous difference: “For comparative purposes, Barry Bonds’s bat during the 2001-2004 seasons, when he basically broke baseball, was worth about 0.78 runs above average per game.”

McCarver was probably the key player in the 1964 World Series.  Bob Gibson won the MVP by going 2-1 with a 3.00 ERA that year.  McCarver hit .478/.552/.739 including a game-winning 3 run homer in the 10th inning of the 5th game, and produced the most WPA of anyone in the series.  He had 103 post-season at-bats overall, going .273/.359/.432 with a 13/9 W/K.  This was much better than his in-season line and in the context of the 1960s awfully impressive.  

Fine, fine player. 

The Phillies traded McCarver to the Expos straight up for John Bateman - who was a year older - in June 1972. I don't know why. Bateman could never carry McCarver's jock strap. Boone was almost, but not quite, ready. Bateman took over as the number one catcher for the rest of 1972, but Boone seized the job himself in 1973.

Steve Carlton's ERAs by catcher:

Tim McCarver 2.82
Bo Diaz      3.09
Bob Boone    3.22
Ted Simmons  3.24
Ozzie Virgil 3.36
Joe Torre    4.28

Our 3 regular OF over the past 2 years

• George Springer: 925 PA
• Kevin Kiermaier: 611 PA
• Daulton Varsho: 907 PA (mostly at catcher in 2021)

Plate appearances by Jays outfielders in 2022:

Hernandez 490
Gurriel   429
Tapia     416
Springer  393
Zimmer     96
Bradley    80
Merrifield 60
Biggio     30
Capra       4
Moreno      2

I'd forgotten Moreno played a game in LF.

O ye of little faith.  Dasan Brown starts off 2023 in New Hampshire, tears it up and makes it to Buffalo where he hits well enough that he earns a September call-up and a spot on the playoff roster.

It's true though.  They are likely to need an outfielder for 2024.  What precisely they need though is very much in question.  Varsho can move to centerfield in the (objectively likely) event that Brown isn't yet ready, but finding an everyday leftfielder isn't the worst problem to have.  One season at a time.

Incidentally, I would be a lot happier if the club gave PAs to Biggio in RF (rather than Lukes or Lopez or anyone else around) when Springer gets a day off or a DH day against a RHP.  Having Merrifield on the bench also has the plus of having him available to pinch-run late in a base-stealing situation.