One of the winter’s earliest surprises was Shane Bieber’s decision to pick up a $16MM player option for the 2026 season rather than take a $4MM buyout and return to free agency. That choice was viewed as a head-scratcher around the league at the time, as the former Cy Young winner’s track record and the 3.66 ERA he posted in 59 innings between the regular season and playoffs with Toronto was likely enough to justify a solid multi-year deal.
A report this evening from The Athletic’s Mitch Bannon offers a bit more perspective on Bieber’s decision. Towards the end of the 2025 campaign, Bannon reports that Bieber was dealing with forearm fatigue. Bieber has since begun rehab work, and Bannon notes that Ross Atkins told reporters that the right-hander is “in a strong position.” While the Jays are currently taking things week-to-week with Bieber’s recovery process, Atkins noted that Bieber being ready to pitch on Opening Day remains “a very realistic outcome” though he stopped short of definitively saying Bieber would be part of the Opening Day roster.
That Bieber was dealing with a forearm issue just 13 appearances into his return from Tommy John surgery certainly seems to help explain his decision to exercise his 2026 player option. While there’s little doubt that Bieber could have beaten the $12MM he would’ve left on the table by declining the option in terms of overall guarantee, it’s plausible that teams would have been hesitant to commit a substantial average annual value to a pitcher coming off elbow surgery who was already rehabbing a fresh ailment. By sticking with Toronto this winter, Bieber gives himself the opportunity to rehab with the Blue Jays rather continuing his rehab as a free agent, and can now look to enter free agency next winter with what he’s surely hoping will be a full season of starts under his belt in 2026 to allay any concerns about the health of his arm going forward.
With Bieber’s status somewhat uncertain for Opening Day, it’s all the more understandable that the Blue Jays have been aggressive in adding to their rotation. Dylan Cease, Kevin Gausman, Trey Yesavage, Cody Ponce, and Jose Berrios figure to make up the club’s Opening Day rotation if Bieber were to start the year on the injured list, though the depth provided by players like Yariel Rodriguez, Bowden Francis, and Eric Lauer is strong enough that the Blue Jays seem to be considering the possibility of trading Berrios this winter. Cease, Gausman, and Bieber are all surely locked into rotation spots when healthy, and Yesavage showed more than enough down the stretch and into the playoffs to warrant first crack at a rotation job headed into 2026.
That would leave just one spot available for Ponce, Berrios, and the team’s depth options to compete for in Spring Training, and so it would hardly be a shock to see the Jays make a move that ships a rotation piece out at some point this winter. At the same time, however, Bannon reports that the Jays remain interested in adding starting pitching even after landing both Cease and Ponce in free agency earlier this winter. While the team is overflowing with rotation options, not all of them are especially reliable. In addition to questions surrounding Bieber’s health, Ponce’s return from the KBO league this year will come with inherent question marks.
Meanwhile, Berrios struggled in the second half and was relegated to the bullpen for October while Yesavage is a young arm who threw a career high in terms of innings this past year between the majors, minors, and postseason. It seems unlikely the team would look to add another high-end arm to the rotation given their needs in the bullpen and lineup, but perhaps additional depth to join players like Francis and Lauer as depth pieces would be valuable, especially in the event that Berrios is traded or Bieber opens the season on the injured list.
What? I thought he opted in for his love of Toronto!!!!!!!!
I don’t think it’s impossible for both things to be true.
lol yea, that’s what blue jays fans wanted everyone to believe but no one loves a city that much to forfeit the amount of money he was projected to make.
Logical move. Anyone would have suspected that was the reason for not testing the market.
Yep, seemed pretty obvious, since it was otherwise a bizarre decision.
Every rotation arm has some question mark. Signing another starter for the full season simply because one MAY not be ready out of spring training seems a bit of an over reaction. Don’t the Jays have more realistic needs for their $$$?
lol when has adding pitching depth ever been a bad idea?
Signing/replacing Bo Bichette and strengthening the bullpen would rank higher on my priority list. But who am I – I’m no GM or team owner, just a guy commenting about baseball!
I think they should still be adding starting pitching depth. Not major league deals. But their AAA guys that keep getting mentioned as starting depth are relievers or injured. Trading for a starter or two with minor league options or minor league signings should still be on their to do list.
I can understand why he opted in a little better but I don’t think this concern would have stopped him from getting a solid multiple year deal and considering he just had tj and is now experiencing some more issues, if it were me, I’d still gamble a little and see what multi year deal and money I can secure. I’m sure it would have been well more than 12 mil. And jays fans, he doesn’t love the city that much to forego the amount of money he was projected to get. This news or an extension was what everyone was expecting.
The rehab process is what makes the most sense of it. When you’re in the middle of a rehab program, it could be daunting to opt out of the organization whose training staff you’re working with and have to hire a new set of people, only to have to transition to a third set of people when you sign with a new organization, all in a few months as you’re trying to get your body ready for spring training. Probably took a huge weight off his mind to just stick with the Jays and avoid that. Maximizing dollars isn’t always as important as minimizing stress.
AS good as he has been over the years, it seems likely someone would have offered more. The question becomes: Is he better served by banking the $12M and getting, hopefully, a healthy year in and seeing where that puts him or taking a compromise contract this off-season? Just off major surgery and experiencing ongoing concerns, he made a realistic choice.
You can speculate on other possibilities (I was thinking/hoping an extension was part of it.) and I will, too. At a guess, I would suggest he had feedback from teams, either directly or through his agent, that this was the wise short-term choice.
Can’t begrudge him a safe bet under the circumstances, especially when a good year sets him up for a better future deal.
He left some money on the table in the short term, but the idea he was projected to get a whole lot of money seems strange to me. After the injury and then not being particularly good last year at the things that get pitchers paid for, suggests he wasn’t going to get a big guarantee. Business wise, he was likely to be trying to hit the market again next year. And in that sense, being comfortable with the organization you are trying to improve your stock with is maybe the better bet than risking the uncertainty of the market. Continuity, whether the poor performance was injury related or not, always seemed like a motivator for him rather than money.
Some soreness or fatigue is expected. He seemed fine in the playoffs. Either way, I still think he could have gotten more in free agency, so I don’t think that was the determining factor here.
Re-entering the free agent market means passing a physical, a risky proposition , considering the forearm issue. Smart move on Bieber’s part.
@HALfromVA
There was no way something wasn’t wrong.
Cleveland fans know, had he an absolutely clean bill of health, he was heading to the open market. He had planned for a big splash for years which was suddenly derailed by the elbow problems that emerged in April 2024–his walk year. (And for those of you who insist, it “couldn’t be bad because he seemed sound down the stretch” this summer, keep in mind despite his elbow hanging by a thread in April 2024 he had two excellent starts to open the season. The guy has such guile he could pitch through it.)
You just had to know he didn’t want to subject himself to a physical now.
Cleveland dealt him away this summer because he wasn’t hitting projected benchmarks and had to move on with other alternatives. It was a wise choice, because they netted a top pitching prospect who will help them for many more years than Shane will help Toronto.
We’re all rooting for Bieber, he’s such a class act, and it has to be killing him that he was so close to the big bag, but it has proven elusive.
Now one wonders is he was the best remaining choice in the 11th of game 7. Half the pen was still available.
John Means 2.0 incoming
Occum’s Razor. You don’t turn down bigger deals unless there is something wrong.