Gose, still just 21, has a line of .292/.375/.432 with 29 stolen bases. He played last week in the Futures Game in Kansas City during the major league all-star break. He was the long-term project acquired from Houston for Brett Wallace.
Until Anthopoulos shares his reasoning, we tried to come up with some reasons why the Jays would make this somewhat counter-intuitive move. Pick one you like or offer one of your own in the comments.
1. The Jays honestly want Snider to get off the yo-yo of being called up and sent down for the last four years and are committed to leaving him in one place for an entire season. As Anthopoulos has said, when Snider returns, he wants it to be for good.
1(a). Snider is not fully healed from his own wrist injury. The Jays might prefer, again, to let him keep working in Las Vegas rather than risk taking another chunk out of his potential and confidence.
2. The club is protecting Snider’s trade value. A 24-year-old corner outfielder, even with 799 spotty major-league at-bats, has value. He could be someone else’s Colby Rasmus. Management does not want to call him up and have him go 0-for-15 and have trade partners get cold feet if Snider is a key piece in a potential deal for a front-line starting pitcher (or the Diamondbacks’ Justin Upton, as is the popular rumour).
3. They are burnishing Gose’s trade value. Rasmus is a tremendous defensive centre-fielder and his bat has started to re-emerge this season. He is only 25. There have always been questions whether Gose would pair his speed with an ability to hit major-league pitching. Perhaps the Jays are showcasing him for two weeks to say, “Here’s what he looks like in the majors (but don’t look too hard if he only gets a couple of hits in these two weeks).”
4. Anthopoulos and Farrell didn’t like what the batting lineup looked like with Snider but without Bautista. They preferred, instead, to go with something like this — Davis/Gose, Lawrie, Rasmus, Encarnacion, Lind, Escobar, Johnson, Arencibia, Gose/Davis — rather stick Snider into the middle or bottom of the lineup, move Encarnacion into No. 3 and try to find a No. 4 hitter. It is probably better to leave Adam Lind out of the No. 4 spot while he is hitting well and gaining confidence, and it is a bad fit for anyone else.
