Alek Manoah is taking a renewal from the Toronto Blue Jays for the second straight year, once again turning down a raise based on the club’s pre-set scale to make a point about fair value for pre-arbitration players.

The 25-year-old right-hander will earn $745,650, according to an industry source, the midway point between the big-league minimum salary of $720,000 and the raise he would have gotten under club’s system for awarding increases based on playing and service time.

Manoah was renewed at $706,200 last year and proceeded to finish third in American League Cy Young Award voting after logging 196.2 innings across 31 starts while posting a 2.24 ERA. That earned him an additional $2,191,023 through the pre-arbitration performance bonus pool part of the new collective bargaining agreement, an improvement for elite players between zero and three years of service time, but still in a system Manoah understands and protests.

"There are no hard feelings there (toward the Blue Jays) at all – this is a business decision. At the end of the day, I'm getting less money in my pocket but there's a precedent to be set,” Manoah said in an interview Friday. “We did a decent job in the CBA last year of fighting for 0-3 players and I was able to dip into that bonus pool a little bit. Me personally, I don’t think we’re where we need to be yet, but we're heading in the right direction. That's the biggest thing, continuing to leave the game better than how we found it.”

Hence, Manoah’s decision to reject a substandard raise based on a pre-determined scale, a call made in conjunction with his representatives. Teammate Bo Bichette took the same approach last year before graduating into the arbitration system this off-season, something Manoah is eligible for after the 2024 season, if not as early as next winter.