January 30, 2024

By Mark Whicker

Canadian Baseball Network

He has never hit 30 home runs in a season, or scored 90 runs, or driven in 100. His next birthday will be his 40th.

Yet the Toronto Blue Jays did something wise and insightful Tuesday when they gave Justin Turner a one-year, $13 million contract, something that might return them to the playoffs and get them closer to an A.L. East championship. If Turner clears some numerical bars he can make $14.5 million this season. And if you promise not to tell Auston Matthews about this, since he has the NHL’s highest average-annual-value at $13.5 million, I will too.

Hockey’s salary asymmetries aside, Turner is a commodity because of the things you can’t see. Granted, his clubhouse presence did not save the Red Sox from the American League cellar, and in all of his years as the drum major for the Dodgers, they only won one World Series, and that was the Shrimp-Cocktail Playoff, in 2020, the one conducted after a third of the regular season had been completed.

That was also the night Turner barged onto the field for the team picture, unmasked, even though he had tested positive for COVID-19. That was not cool, necessarily, but it would have taken a large cavalry regiment to keep him away.

But what Turner brings is an uncommon professionalism and the type of peer pressure that, at his age, doesn’t worry about popularity. The Blue Jays at this point should be maturing into a team that doesn’t need a sergeant-at-arms. And that really isn’t what Turner is. He’s that rare player who never gives in to navel-gazing, who looks around the room and reads it accurately. The closer who can’t get through the ninth will get Turner’s support. The rookie who doesn’t quite see the need for a 90-foot sprint will get his quiet disapproval. It takes a load off the manager and it spreads.

Besides, Turner can still hit. He did strike out 110 times in 2023, which was a career high, but so were his 96 RBIs. That was only four behind club leader Rafael Devers, and Turner managed an .800 OPS. He was a .338 hitter with men in scoring position, which is his happy place. His career scoring-position average is .312.

“I haven’t seen a guy who has made such an impact, on and off the field, so quick with another organization,” said Red Sox manager Alex Cora.

Turner, known as Red to his family and friends back home in Bellflower, Calif., doesn’t play much third base anymore, having spent 98 games as Boston’s DH, but he can handle first base if needed.

“Red’s only plus-tool was his pair of hands,” said George Horton, who coached Turner at Cal State Fullerton. “He still has those. But he never hit fourth for us. Or even third.”

The Titans won the College World Series in 1984, but they actually got to Omaha three times in Turner’s four years. He was beaned so hard, in the ‘03 CWS by Stanford’s Matt Manship, that his ankle began bothering him at a Team USA summer event, and when he finally got treatment he learned it was broken — from that pitch. Typically, Turner’s first post-trauma at-bat was a bunt attempt, in which he faced the pitcher.

His major league career is a nearly unprecedented rebellion against typecasting. Turner was known as a Quadruple A player for most of his 20s, with Baltimore and the Mets. Out of work, he attended the Cal State Fullerton alumni game, right before spring training. Dodger coach Tim Wallach, a former Titan great, was there. Wallach recommended the Dodgers sign him as a non-roster player, and Turner became the stand-in third baseman when Juan Uribe pulled a hamstring. That was in 2014. Turner hit .340 in 109 games. He kept the hot corner until he left after 2022.

By then Turner had done what most players don’t. He rejected the pigeonhole and began searching for an identity. There’s risk involved in that, but Turner had seen how Marlon Byrd, with the Mets, had improved his timing at the plate by lifting his left leg and then planting just before impact. Turner also saw the coming lift-and-separate trend in hitting. As former MLB manager Clint Hurdle used to say, “The money comes from the OPS, and the OPS is in the air.”

Suddenly Turner was a power threat. For three consecutive years, beginning in 2017, Turner’s slugging percentage was over .500, and he hit 27 home runs in three different seasons with the Dodgers. Some of them were quite memorable, like the bomb off John Lackey that won Game 2 of the 2017 NLCS over the Cubs.

The Dodgers’ clubhouse could be turbulent back then, with Yasiel Puig’s mood swings and wild-horse approach to the game, with personalities like those of Uribe and Adrian Gonzalez and Matt Kemp and Brian Wilson not always meshing. Dave Roberts, the new manager in 2016, changed some of that, but Turner was the one organizing the spring training ping-pong tournaments, the team dinners, and the daily quest to improve oneself in hitters’ meetings, along with the dugout observations that sometimes unlocked a pitcher’s secrets.

“He did so many things that people didn’t know about,” said Max Muncy after Turner left. “We’ve always been known as a welcoming clubhouse for new players, and he was probably one of the biggest reasons for that.”

“I’ve always made a point of introducing myself,” Turner said. “I don’t expect anybody to know who I am.”

But leadership doesn’t put runs on the board by itself. It can be augmented by All-Star production. The Dodgers won 100 games last season without Turner and a lot of other core elements, and Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman were at the forefront. There were no audible complaints about the clubhouse atmosphere. Would Turner have prevented the sweep by Arizona in the Division Series? Not unless he pitched shutouts.

It’s not about what people miss when Turner leaves, it’s about what they gain when he arrives. And players know players. Even though Bo Bichette had never played with Turner and hadn’t been in the same division with him until 2023, he said Turner was precisely the type of presence Toronto craved. The real question is about the timetable, about when Turner takes his presence into a major league manager’s office. They’ll have to remove his bat first.