Fantasy Baseball 2013: How Will Jose Reyes do in Toronto?

Jose Reyes flashes his grin. Image courtesy of flickr user Lakeland.

The Blue Jays landed some of the last pieces of a blown up Miami Marlins mega team, unless Giancarlo Stanton is next on the move of course.  This happens just one year after bringing in Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle, and Heath Bell to join Hanley Ramirez (already gone), Josh Johnson, and the aforementioned Stanton and one of my personal favorites, Logan Morrison, to help open up the new Marlins Park.

Sending Johnson, Reyes, Buehrle Emilio Bonifacio, and John Buck to Toronto in exchange for Yunel Escobar, Henderson Alverez, Jeff Mathis and a glut of prospects.

This is about as much excitement as we can hope for in a fairly weak free agency class that has only: Torii Hunter, Ichiro Suzuki, Michael Bourn, Josh Hamilton, B.J. Upton and Angel Pagan as its big names. So let’s dive in and figure out what this means especially regarding the most marquee player Jose Reyes.

Jose Reyes has been one of my favorite players since he appeared in a ESPN the Magazine’s Body Issue. Uh, nevermind that. Needless to say I am extra excited about this trade for his fantasy value!

Reyes leaves a team that was managed about as old school as a Dusty Baker squad, by the notorious Ozzie Guillen. He had the green light to run and run he did, swiping 40 bags last season. A move to Toronto won’t really hurt his stolen bases, Toronto ran last year, as they have ran a lot the past two seasons. Even with the loss of manager John Farrell, they should continue to run. Besides you do not try to harness a guy like Reyes.

Some more added value for is gonna come from Toronto’s Rogers Centre being a launching pad right up there with Fenway and Yankee stadium. Reyes can hit for power from the leadoff spot, so let’s hope he can return to the 2006 and 2008 output with the new stadium. If Reyes can touch 15/40 as a shortstop next year then he can certainly be the top fantasy shortstop.

An added bonus for Reyes moving to an American League team is that he can have the occasional spell at DH. I am not thinking they will use him there a lot, since they primarily will bat Edwin Encarnacion as their DH with the occasional move to for Jose Bautista as well. However I have to imagine that to save some wear and tear on Reyes’ knees, a few at bats every couple of weeks at DH wouldn’t be out of the plan.

For my own projection of Reyes, I previously had:

However I would add at least a small uptick in some categories with the move to Toronto:

Granted the uptick in home runs might be a little more on the hopeful side BUT, Toronto is a MUCH friendlier fly ball park than Marlins park.  Also I wouldn’t expect many more steals but I would will be keeping my fingers crossed.

A trade like this will definitely help Reyes’ stats, however for those of us trying to plan for a fantasy season we need to be realistic with our expectations going forward.

I’ll leave you with this, we recently did a slow mock with a bunch of great guys: the Dear Mr. Fantasy Podcast guys, Clubhouse GM, @ERolfPleiss, all the Crackerjacks were in attendance and a few others. My second pick (19th overall) was Hanley Ramirez, but I almost went with Jose Reyes. Had this trade been made previous to the slow Mock, I would have gone with Reyes without even thinking about it.