A Note On A Quote

"Do they all pan out? Do they all do well? Who knows? But I'm not opposed at all to taking prospects and trading them for big-league players.

"They're not all going to play up here and part of drafting and signing and developing these players is to use them to supplement the big  league team. I think the depth is certainly there to make a trade, and it's something we'll look at if we think we can get a player who can be part of this."

I've thrown those words around on this blog a number of times, and I'll be damned if I don't keep coming back to them.  That was Alex Anthopoulos in November 2010, just over two short years ago.  The context then was different than it is now for the Toronto Blue Jays.  At that time, acquiring "a player who can be a part of this" sounded tantalizing, despite the fact that many of us didn't have a clue what "this" was.

We had an inkling that we were in the early stages of a plan; Anthopoulos has always seemed to have a plan.  Or maybe we just needed to believe he had a plan to help us sleep at night.  In the autumn of 2010, the notion of trading large swaths of the still-under-construction prospect base was more far-off fantasy than immediate option to create a contending major league roster.

As a result, two years ago, I was probably spending more time trying to sort out whether departing players were Type A or Type B free agents under the old collective agreement than whether incoming players were any damn good.  The idea of bringing in-their-prime, elite talent to Toronto was fun to think about, in the same way that buying a winter home in the Cayman Islands is fun to think about -- maybe one day if things break right, but not really in the cards right now.

Still, I (and many others) clung to the "They're not all going to play up here" quote, through the strange ride that saw marginal relievers and backup-turned-starting catchers cycle through town as part of the Anthopoulos quest for supplemental draft picks.  I told myself it's all going somewhere, that watching Kevin Gregg walk three or four guys in an inning was just the price we were paying to stock the prospect pipeline.

Then something funny happened along the way:  I got to really like some of those prospects.  I read all the analysis, and then the analysis of the analysis, of all the annual Top 100 prospect lists, upon which more and more names from Lansing, Dunedin, New Hamsphire and Las Vegas seemed to turn up every year.

I still kept the quote tucked in my back pocket, ready to pull out when Anthopoulos made a deal that made me squirm a little bit because I'd invested a few hopes and dreams in a kid I'd never really seen play.  Sure, Alex, move one or two of those stud prospects, you know, if you have to, but don't trade the special ones.

Turns out none of them were special.  Or, more accurately, even the most special ones weren't immune to what was foreshadowed of November 2010.

I can't claim any deep inside knowledge of the character or intentions of the GM of the Toronto Blue Jays.  I can only take what he says, compare it to what he does, and see how they match up.  And even though he seems to talk in circles that leave the kind of wiggle room any politician would envy, I've found that he generally does what he says.

So long, then, Travis d'Arnaud.  Be well, Jake Marisnick.  Go get 'em, Noah Syndergaard.  You were fun to read about.  You're probably going to be fun to watch for other teams.  But then again, "Who knows?" Right?

But we should have known all along you weren't all going to play up here.

Music City Mundanity

For as many years back as I can remember, the annual Major League Baseball Winter Meetings were something I anticipated with a sense of both optimism and dread.  Optimism, because even if the actual track record says otherwise, the impression that the meetings are where the off-season dealing takes place can give the fan looking forward to roster improvements a reason to think they may be coming soon.  Dread, because a lot of the time (at least for the Toronto Blue Jays), the rumours and speculation flying around the Twitter-sphere and whatever southern town was hosting the meetings usually ended up bearing little to no fruit for my team of choice.

As the buzz around the team confirms, though, this year is a little different, with so much of the off-season dealing seemingly already done and roster holes fairly nicely filled going into 2013.  Alex Anthopoulos has already been a busier GM than most would be in an entire off-season, in keeping with his well-cultivated industry persona as a enthusiastic, thorough, and diligent baseball man.  But it's that same persona that leads most to believe he isn't about to coast into Nashville this week just to sit in a corner booth at the Bluebird Cafe, sip Jim Beam and pat himself on the back.  Most of the flapping jaws and twittering thumbs that feed the baseball rumour mill from November through March believe that AA isn't done, and that there are at the very least details left to attend to.  So what could our man be up to in Music City this week?

More Pitching

Much to AA's credit, the scrambling for major-league bullpen arms that is likely to preoccupy some of his colleagues is not on his to-do list.  But more pitchers that can carry a larger load than the 60, 70 or 80 innings the team would ideally ask from its confirmed stable of relievers would remain a welcome addition.

Much of the talk of starting depth has boiled down to whether the team can land an arm that would push J.A. Happ to 6th-starter status.  But slipping into AA's brain for just a minute, I don't think he would be entirely dissatisfied opening the season with Happ in the rotation.  I have a feeling Anthopoulos acquired Happ for a reason, and that he has been keen on him for a long time, if the rumours we heard around the time of the Roy Halladay trade have even a kernel of truth to them.  And frankly, at this point, are there that many reasonably-priced pitchers out there, at least in the free agent pool, that would without question be upgrades on Happ?  I suppose it depends on what you'd consider to be a reasonable price, but with the payroll the team has already added, I'm guessing they're shopping at Dollarama for now, as opposed to Holt Renfrew.

That doesn't preclude another out-of-nowhere trade going down that brings back that fifth member of the 2013 rotation (and perhaps beyond).  Speculation persists that Toronto matches up well with the Mets in a potential deal for National League Cy Young winner R.A. Dickey, for instance.  I think the uncertainty about whether Josh Johnson will be a Blue Jay beyond next season might preclude the team from acquiring another pitcher who comes with some-assembly-required from a contract point of view, however.

Besides, we need look no further than the words that actually came out of the GM's mouth in the above-linked article, where he says that he's more likely to be looking for Buffalo-type depth via the minor-league free agent route, as an insurance policy against injury to the current batch of Johnson, Happ, Brandon Morrow, Ricky Romero, and Mark Buerhle (not necessarily in that order).  If there's anything one might expect as a signing out of Nashville's meetings this week, I'd bet on an Aaron Laffey type like that.

Platoon Partner at DH

To put things charitably, Adam Lind has been not good against left-handed pitching for the better part of his career.  I mean, over the last couple years, he hasn't exactly been a superstar against right-handers either, with sub-.800 OPS numbers in 2011 and 2012.  But barring a more expensive 1B/DH acquisition before spring, he's notionally still penciled in as the every-day guy at one of those two positions.  I'll restate the blatantly bleedin' obvious here and say that the words "Adam Lind" and "every day" shouldn't find themselves in the same sentence anymore, and having him face left-handed pitching in anything but an emergency should be avoided at all costs.

Thankfully, with the re-installation of John Gibbons as manager, there's evidence that the smart use of platoons will once again enter the strategic picture in Toronto.  Now they just need the personnel to make it happen.  But cheap lefty-mashers don't necessarily grow on trees -- while there are some out there who could be useful, those that are most useful tend to get snapped up for seemingly more prominent roles (Jonny Gomes) or have questions about age, health and/or bat speed (Andruw Jones).  Scott Hairston would seem to be a reasonable fit to partner with Lind in the DH spot and take some reps in the outfield occasionally.

But it's also not as though there aren't right-handed bats on the roster as currently constructed that would make the old "half-day off" routine a viable route for Gibbons to go when facing southpaws.  The added positional and switch-hitting versatility that the acquisitions of Melky Cabrera, Emilio Bonifacio and Maicer Izturis bring could make it feasible, for instance, for the likes of Jose Bautista or Brett Lawrie to cycle through the DH spot, with one of Bonifacio and Rajai Davis moving to the outfield, or one of Bonficacio and Izturis moving to third base.

All of this is to say that there's really very little pressure for Anthopoulos to get something done in Nashville beyond poking around for what might be available and checking on price tags.  It's a nice situation for him to be in, I'm sure, and it's definitely a change of pace for fans like me.

Splish Splash - This Is What You've Wanted All Along

Hey look, it's Emilio Bonifacio!

You wanted a splash, and you got it. In fact, it's hard to conceive of a move more splashy than this. Twelve players - Josh Johnson, Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle, Emilio Bonifacio and John Buck in one direction, and Yunel Escobar, Henderson Alvarez, Adeiny Hechavarria, Jeff Mathis, Jake Marisnick, Justin Nicolino, and Anthony Desclafani in the other - along with tens of millions of dollars in salary shifting north. Not to mention the deep impact on the psyches of the two fan bases.

Big names. A much bigger payroll. It's precisely that for which so many of you - fans and media alike - have clamoured over the past few years. It's a demonstration of might. A show of strength. And as such, I hesitate to dampen the expectations or somehow speak ill of this pending mega-deal.

And yet, here I stand with a bucket of cold water weighing heavily in my hands, the weight of which is dominating my thoughts at the moment.

Okay, let's take a step back. Let me splash a bit of that bucket's contents on my own face to snap myself out of this odd funk, and to accentuate the positives of this proposed deal.

The Blue Jays come out of this deal with a pitcher who can pitch like a legitimate staff ace, and another starter who has traditionally been reliable for more than 30 starts and 200 innings per season. plus an All-Star offensive talent at a premium position who has put up WARs around 6.0 in multiple seasons. Plus, they get a versatile switch-hitting utility player and a veteran catcher who returns to the fold, and who remains a pretty good catch and throw guy.

If that's where the Blue Jays netted out at the end of the offseason, you would have probably been pretty satisfied that they were living up to their promises of adding big league players to the 2013 roster. And maybe more importantly, you would have been happy to see the payroll's "parameters" - collect yourselves, it's gonna be okay - broadened somewhere closer to the $120 million mark.

If seeing "proven veterans" added to the 25-man roster and a substantial amount to the payroll is your thing, you're understandably over the moon today. I can't blame you, either. The notion that the club has more resources going forward expands my notion of what will be possible in the coming years, and that maybe the Blue Jays will settle into life as a top-10 payroll. This is all good, and the sort of thing you can dream on.

Now, here come the bucket.

Let's not mistake this trade for a long term solution to the Jays' woes. Because the Jays are trading for a single season of Josh Johnson (or his pursuant value) this trade is completely oriented towards success in 2013. The Blue Jays needed two starters to plug into their rotation while they wait on the development of the next generation and the convalescing masses, and in order to get that, they needed to take two bad contracts - Buehrle and Buck - and one very expensive-if-defensible contract in Reyes.

The Jays also moved five players under the age of 24 to Miami, and while upsides of Alvarez and Hechavarria seem to be as something less than All-Stars, they are still in their ascendance. The Jays' system doesn't seem to have been overly culled in sending Nicolino (perhaps the most movable of the Lansing Three) and Marisnick (who struggled in a year in which he was pushed through two levels), but there's plenty that is going in the other direction.

And all of that is wagered on Josh Johnson being healthy and having a good season next year. That's the bottom line.

Certainly, the notion of José Reyes as a fixture in Toronto is an attractive one, even at that price point, but by this time next year, people will be judging this trade on two levels: Did the Blue Jays make the playoffs? Or did they retain Johnson beyond 2013? Otherwise, you're staring down the $39 million left on Buehrle's deal and hoping that it is offset by Reyes' performance, minus the $82 million he'll be owed from 2013 through 2017.

And don't forget that the mere presence of these players by no means guarantees a good outcome. As much as the Marlins were pushed to the forefront at the beginning of last season, let's take a moment and recognize that the same players we're gleefully taking in are the ones who were heralded as missing pieces which would put them over the top in the NL East last year.

Our splash? It's last year's splash in Miami.  

There's plenty of downside to this deal, but if I'm going to be optimistic about it, I'll recognize that a bigger payroll permits the Jays to make some mistakes and sit on them if they need to. If Buehrle's contract turns into Barry Zito's in two years' time, it's possible that this newly flush front office can swallow it and go about their business. 

Again, let me be clear: It's really fun to envision all of these players wearing blue next year. Also, this move is probably a much better one than overpaying for one or two starting pitchers. Would I trade this package for Zach Greinke and Anibal Sanchez or Edwin Jackson? Probably not, especially when you consider the years and annual salary they'd have commanded if they even deigned to come to Toronto.

Ultimately, the team is better today than they were at lunchtime yesterday. If I feel somehow as though I have to begrudge the mechanism that got them to that place, then let me at least acknowledge that there's a reason to be excited about the team on the field. And that should be all that matters.

But if this goes completely pear-shaped, keep in mind that this is the game that many of you implored the Jays to play. You want this? You got it. 

Video Daily Double - Strombo and AA on Rasmus, Snider, and the Old Unis

It's Strombo and Antho, together again for the first time.

For those of you who didn't see the Jays' GM on George Strombolopoulos Tonight last night, the video above is a web-exclusive outtake, in which he talks about Colby Rasmus, Trvis Snider, Brett Lawrie and the out-sized expectations that get placed on them.

Also, check out this bit below, in which the sometimes cagey Anthopoulos lets loose his true feelings on the old uniforms. As if our mancrush couldn't be bigger.

The full interview, for those who missed it, is now up on the site at Strombo.com.

State of the State of the Franchise

(Photo courtesy of @rallycap_andy...artsy!)

We weren't able to make it to the Rogers Centre in person for Monday night's State of the Franchise meeting between the team's brain trust, the season ticket holders and other superfans and hangers on.

We were able to check in via the live stream and follow along with the snarktacular tomfoolery of our Twitter pals who were in attendance, gazing up the pantlegs of President Paul Beeston, GM Alex Anthopoulos and Manager John Farrell. (Oh, and moderated Buck "Albert" Martinez, just for good measure.) From the tales of morning after woe from those who we know were in attendance last night, it sounds like a good time was had by some.

A few observations, if you'll indulge us.

Beestmode: They say: "Only speak when it improves on the silence."

At last year's State of the Franchise, Beeston let slip that the team could, in some conceivable universe, spend $120 million or more in player salaries. No sooner had that vague speculation slipped out than the cries of "when can the payroll get to $120 million?" began. Give people a fencepost off in the distance, and they'll train their eyes on it to the exclusion of all else.

This year, Beeston fed the future fixation by intimating that the team has been examining ways of playing baseball on grass in the Rogers Centre. It was a bit of a dumbfounding statement, especially since we were prepared to scoff at the notion when it was raised by a fan.

In spite of Beeston's subsequent assurances to the subsequent media scrum that the installation of natural turf is feasible, we're left feeling more than a bit skeptical. To install a grass field would require some sort of drainage system being installed into a 23 year-old stadium, which is no small feat. Subsequently, a grass field would require plenty of sunlight, which would mean keeping the roof open on cold days an in all sorts of other weather. And while Beeston floated the notion that a multi-use stadium could indeed accommodate multiple tenants and still preserve the precious new sod, we also remember hearing how well the current carpet was supposed to stand up in spite of all the non-baseball events.

Not to dismiss the notion outright, because the ideal situation for the Blue Jays is that the park is exclusively theirs and that they can find a way to spread out a luscious lawn with impunity. But by giving the idea just enough oxygen last night, Beeston has helped to make the rolls of turf look that much uglier for a large swath of the fans.

Compressed Timelines: Remember the "Five Year Plan"? Oh, how we wish we could forget that monolithic bit of rhetoric which overshadowed so much of the last regime. And yet, there was Beeston, assuring those in attendance that he expects the Jays to be in the playoffs "two-to-three times" in the next five years.

More tellingly, Beeston mentioned that while a postseason berth doesn't guarantee a World Series, that getting there gives you as much of an opportunity as "the other nine teams." We're not sure if that was a slip of the tongue, or if Beeston views the expanded post-season as a fait accompli.

Maybe we're just reading a lot into nothing, but it may be revealing that the team's president has oriented his impressions of future success around a ten-team playoff.

Succession Plans: Someone (whose identity I can't confirm, but you know who you are) posed a question with regards to the future planning in the Jays' executive offices, hinting at something that we've been carrying in our back pocket for a while: The notion that Alex Anthopoulos will eventually - maybe soon - take over the Jays' presidency from Paul Beeston.

Given Beeston's reticence to assume the position in the first place, we would assume that he's not looking to spend that many more years at the helm of the franchise. Moreover, the role of the president may well suit Anthopoulos as it provides for some greater personal security and an ability to set the long-term vision for the club.

How would AA do sitting around the table with his fellow senior executives at Rogers? We actually think this might be a perfect role for him. Eventually.

In Search of Authority: We've seen a lot of this in our years as a blogger and a longtime listener to the JaysTalk post-game shows, but it was great fun to hear the competition among the questioners when it came to the legitimacy of their fandom.

"I've been a fan since 1977!"

"I've been a season ticket holder for 32 years!"

Of course, most people who feel the need to air these bona fides do so immediately in advance of some angry screed with regards the direction of the franchise. As though watching Danny Ainge flail at the ball for a year or so in the early 1980's somehow equips the mind with a greater insight for the game than is possessed by those employed by the team.

Look, we get that people are going to be fans on their own terms, and we're going to do a better job at not telling you how to cheer for the Jays. If you feel as though the 30 years or however long you've been a fan gives you a license to be angry and impatient, have at it. Be that thing.

Just don't expect your presence at the home opener against the White Sox in 1977 to legitimize your views on Colby Rasmus' contract.

Transcendental Blues - On Losing Darvish, and Reclaiming Perspective

We can't say that we blame you if you went to bed or woke up disappointed with the news about Yu Darvish. A week full of groundless-yet-enthusiastic speculation had led all of us to the precipice of something that we thought would be great, but turned out to just another opportunity to feel your heart sink.

Still, it's worth remembering that the Darvish posting process was a far from perfect way to acquire a player, and while the Jays may have put forth a very aggressive bid, the shortfall shouldn't be held up as an exemplification of the team's unwillingness to get better. Things happen. It's a competitive marketplace, and the Jays are - as we've just found out - just one player among many trying to improve.

While you're swallowing hard and trying to keep a stiff upper lip today, keep these three things in mind:

1) The 2012 Blue Jays were already an improvement over last year's model. A full year with a focused Colby Rasmus, a bullpen that is a lot more settled than many of you give them credit for (Villaneuva-Perez-Litsch-Carreno-Janssen-Santos, with more to come), a full year with Edwin Encarnacion at DH (where he posted an .855 OPS last year), and a full season of Brett Lawrie is something that we want to see, and that we still contend can win 90 games without any further additions.

2) There are no guarantees. Maybe Darvish could have been the difference between the Jays running away with the East, or another third or fourth place finish. But it's unlikely that one player who had never so much as thrown a pitch in North America would be that difference-maker. Maybe he catches a spike in Dunedin, or maybe he'd only have been great in the Texas heat. We'll never know, and we shouldn't posture as though we do.

3) The offseason isn't over yet. There's still moves to be made, and you have to know based on recent events that Alex Anthopoulos will be working hard to bring another arm and another bat to the Jays before they congregate in Dunedin this February. Maybe there will be something marginal coming, or maybe there's a big deal to be signed or consummated before then. Either way, this is not the end of hope.

And that right there is the thing. Hope. It's as enthralling as it is infuriating. It's the thing that's kept us awake all night, blogging at 2 AM, trying to sort out what comes next. The trouble is that we can't pretend to know, as much as we want and feel like we need to.

But that's also the fun of being a baseball fan. If you need guarantee of meaningful games next year before you'll commit to coming along for the ride, you may well miss something extraordinary. We tweeted late last night that there is a certain amount of suffering that is implicit with being a fan, but that this is one of the great things about the game. As Bob Dylan sang: For those that lose now will be later win.

Transcendence - shedding what you are and becoming a greater version of yourself - is a painful process. It hurts. But the pain is there as a future reminder of what we've gone through, and what makes the greater moments all that they are.

After last night, we've all got one more scar. One day, we'll all compare them, and celebrate them, and recognize them as a signpost on the road in our rearview mirror. And this one will barely register as much of anything at all from that perspective.

This is all prologue.

A Few Things About Yu

We were always told that there's a treacherous distance between a cup and a lip, so we've spent much of the past two days bringing down our heart rate and bracing ourselves for bad news on the Yu Darvish front.

In the absence of leaks or information upon which to report, virtually every story over the past week has taken it as a given that the Jays were going to be aggressive in their bid for the Japanese hurler, and likely more so than anyone else. Those comments are mostly just baseball's chattering class spouting off conventional wisdom, but Blue Jays fans (yours truly included) have let the possibilities dance about our heads like so many visions of sugarplums over the past week.

As apprehensive as we have been to give into it completely, Yu-mania has been a welcome respite from the offseason of anger and recriminations over the perceived lack of commitment on the part of Rogers to empty out their bottomless buckets of cash for this guy or that one, and mostly, the fat expensive one. Getting excited about the possibilities with Darvish in the fold is undeniably fun, and incredibly contagious.

Making the speculation all the more compelling is the fact that even a blowout deal for Darvish could be less expensive than Fielder, and a smarter investment for the Blue Jays. It's possible that Darvish might find North American umpires less in awe of his pitches on the edges of the strikezone, or that his fastballs up in the zone get hit harder than he could ever have imagined. But even if that is the case, the posting fee paid by the Jays will be a front-end sunk cost, and the contract won't be so onerous as to impede them from either moving him should the need arise.

You see what we did there? We don't even have Yu Darvish, and already, we're speculating on moving him. That's the insanity of this moment.

Mini-Tweet Bag: Answers to a Few of Your Tweeted Questions
Because it's been awhile, we figured we'd answer a few tweeted questions, especially since there are so many pertinent questions to be answered.

@VictorVitaliano asks: If the Jays land Darvish, do you think they should go all in on Fielder?

No. We don't think the Jays should go all in on Fielder, regardless of what happens with Darvish. Fielder wants too many years, and we don't want to see the Jays as the team paying him $25 million six or seven or eight years down the road. If something under five years for Prince were to pop up, we'd consider thinking about it. But we're beyond exhausted with this discussion.

@bwoolley12 asks: What's a reasonable amount of years/dollars for this guy?

Assuming "this guy" is Darvish, we'd think five-to-six years at $12-to-14 million per year. Somewhere just under the money that C.J. Wilson received, though we think that Darvish will be the much better purchase.

@captainlatte asks: In 30 days, will Prince still be available?

We'd guess that a deal gets done before then, but not by much. If the Jays get their man in Darvish, we'd guess that the Rangers may take a run at Fielder. But we think that Scott Boras will keep Prince out on the market as long as possible to make him some team's last desperate gasp this winter.

@djanssen4 asks: Who hits more home runs next year, Kelly Johnson or Colby Rasmus?

Barring injury, we'd say Rasmus by a fairly comfortable margin. People forget what a coup it was acquiring him, and he'll be a significant contributor to the Jays' success this year.

@PrinceDeRozan asks: If the #Jays get Darvish are they done improving the team this off season?

No, we think there is still another deal to bring in a bat, either by free agency or by trade. And there will be a few additions to the bullpen which we think will be marginal, but who knows. We've been shocked by Alex Anthopoulos before.

Mood Music for the Yu-letide
Fox Sports' Jon Morosi noted that the announcement of who's bid won should come this evening, perhaps around 9 pm. In the interim, we'll be blasting Europe's The Final Countdown all day to get psyched for the hopefully positive news.

On Payroll, Mixed Messages and Marginal Improvements

Coming at it purely from the fan's point of view, it's hard to make heads or tails of this week's Winter Meetings.

The Blue Jays certainly were able to address the two primary areas that required tending when they made an astute trade for closer Sergio Santos and had Kelly Johnson accept arbitration, presumably to fill their hole at second base. In a vacuum, we'd be happy with those developments, and look forward to perhaps another deal or two to come to fruition before pitchers and catchers report. But in the wake of a Winter Meetings which returned to its former glory as a jamboree of signings, we've been flooded over the past week with angry tweets and notes focused on what the team didn't do, and how through their reticence to engage in the free agent market, they've failed to keep pace.

Our primary interest in the Blue Jays' success remains on the field, and we want to see the team built into a perpetual contender. This is not just about wanting to see "meaningful games" one year, but about building the foundation for a team that is always in the mix. That means spending on scouting, buying lots of lottery tickets in the form of draft picks and international free agents, and signing those emerging stars to club-friendly deals early on. From our perspective, the long term success of a team comes from within, and not by adding big contracts to demonstrate a "commitment to winning" to the fans.

But tied into the team's fortunes is its success off the field, and what frankly scares us going into the 2012 season is that a step back on the field could be disastrous to the team's conversational capital in the inherently cynical and nasty Toronto sports market. The smart moves made by the new regime and some exciting play on the field has brought back a set of fans who had checked out over the past decade or more. But spending money - BIG money - on free agents still seems in the mind of so many fans to be the exemplification of commitment, and a demonstration of the team's readiness to compete.

For those who had made the signing of Prince Fielder to be a moral imperative for the Jays, any step back,status quo or even gains that are too modest will constitute an abject failure to capture the moment. "You gotta spend if you want to compete with the big boys", they tell us.

(This morning's announcement that Rogers will buy a portion of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment only serves to further muddy those waters, and leave Jays fans apprehensive about the ownership's interest in the baseball team's success.)

It bears a mention here that the Boston Red Sox have made more splashy big offseason moves than any other team in baseball, and yet, they have missed the playoffs for two consecutive seasons and haven't won a playoff game since 2008. Carl Crawford, John Lackey, Adrian Gonzalez, J.D. Drew, Bobby Jenks, Marco Scutaro...all were considered big deals when they were acquired, but none of them have contributed to the team's relative success as much as the homegrown core of talent, including Dustin Pedroia, Jacoby Ellsbury, John Lester and Kevin Youkilis. And none of the acquisitions were enough to "guarantee" success, as many have attempted to convince us that the signing of Fielder clearly would for the Jays.

To be a bit less charitable to the Jays front office, we'd point out that they are beginning to reap the fruits of a media and fan relations strategy that is elusive at best, and illusory at worst. The desire to keep the team's budget a mystery is understandable from the point of view of the competitive marketplace, but the artfully dodgy allusions to growing the Major League player budget leads to an increased appetite to see that growth happen sooner. If you tell the fans and media that you can and will increase payroll when needed, the message that is sent when the payroll is not expanded is: "We're not ready to win yet."

We're not sure that giving a hard, self-imposed cap number would necessarily be more beneficial, as it might just feed the cynicism by making the gap between the Blue Jays and the bigger payrolls more obvious. But floating the $120 million figure, as Paul Beeston has on numerous occasions, has only served to create a desire to hit that number as soon as possible, whatever the consequences for the team.

Spending like sailors on Fleet Week is not the path to long-term, sustained success. We'd far prefer for the Jays to sign deals like the five-year, $14 million deal that the Rays just signed with Matt Moore as opposed to the five-year, $77.5 million deal that the Angels signed with C.J. Wilson. This isn't just a matter of being cheap, but it's a matter of maximizing every dollar spent for a team that doesn't have unlimited resources.

The deals that the Blue Jays have made over the past week were astute, and make the team better. So why the misery?

On "Parameters": The payroll elusiveness mentioned helped to fuel the parsing of the word "parameter", when it was dropped by Alex Anthopoulos earlier this week. We'll defer to some of the reporters who were on site, because they look the GM in the eyes when he talks about these matters and probably have a far clearer tableau from which to read than we do. But our initial take on the use of the term was this: The Blue Jays have several interwoven budgets, which include all aspects of the team's operations and which have clear dollar figures attached. However, they also have the ability to come back and make budgetary adjustments throughout the year if they can make a case that a modest investment in mid-stream could provide a short-term return.

In plain English: They'll be able to add a player with a large salary in mid-season if it provides a reasonable expectation of added playoff gates to the bottom line.

This is why we think Anthopoulos tends to punt discussions of bigger acquisitions to the trade deadline. It seems like an entirely defensible policy, though it won't do much to warm the hearts of Blue Jays fans through the Winter.

A Bird in the Hand

As the Texas Rangers made their postseason run, a friend of mine asked me, in all seriousness, whether the Mike Napoli – Frank Francisco trade was going to become the second-most regrettable Blue Jay trade in history. Now, given the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments that stemmed from that deal for the better part of 2011, I was almost relieved to hear that he would only consider it the second-most regrettable.

After a less-than-inspired effort to talk him off the ledge, I started to wrap my head around the trade he considered to be the most regrettable, which also happened to involve the Rangers: Michael Young for Esteban Loaiza.

Even if you rightfully believe Michael Young has been overrated for a large part of his career, it’s still tough to defend the trade from the Blue Jays’ perspective (though it can be done, based on the fact that they were only 1.5 games back of the first-place Yankees, and thought they might catch them with another arm in the rotation to complement David Wells, Kelvim Escobar and Chris Carpenter, while a 23-year-old Roy Halladay sported a 10.90 ERA. There’s a fine recap of the trade here). A great many fans have pined for a decade over the All-Star, batting champion middle infielder the team let get away for a second-rate starting pitcher that never helped them reach the postseason promised land.

The Young deal is probably just the most glaring example of “the one that got away” for Blue Jays fans. It’s hardly the only one. In the above-linked article, it’s pointed out that the Jays traded away three other middle-infield prospects in the system at the time in Felipe Lopez, Cesar Izturis, and Brett Abernathy. There’s obviously been varying degrees of big-league success amongst those erstwhile Jays prospects, but the returns were indisputably slim, including the likes of Steve Trachsel, Mark Guthrie and Luke Prokopec.

I think my friend who still rues the Young trade to this day uses it as a proxy for what he would perceive as the team’s tendency to get very low value back for its prospects. Young is his talisman, representing the what-might-be for every Jays prospect past and present, the upside realized, every last drop of value squeezed from the talent the player possesses.

I can pretty much guarantee you, though, that in 2000, my friend wouldn’t have had a sweet clue who Michael Young was. The fact is, even today when minor league stats, scouting reports and video are more readily available than ever, most fans have a familiarity level with their favourite team’s prospects that’s comparable to my grandparents’ familiarity level with programming the clock on their microwave.

But if hindsight is 20/20, then prospect hindsight is, like, 20/10 – and everybody has it, even Frank Costanza. That’s because prospects develop actual track records over time, across whatever organizations hold their rights, and we can see perfectly how they developed and what they accomplished after the fact. But the ones we remember are the ones that actually develop into big leaguers. Fans can be forgiven for feeling like we’ve seen way too many of them go on to bigger and better things for other teams, even if it’s just patently not true. We still don’t want to let ours go.

It does seem that at least among a more modern generation of Jays fans, the tendency to overvalue the team’s own prospects is beginning to wane. We can be forgiven for harbouring an unhealthy prospect infatuation here and there, but many of us are coming around to the idea that some prospects just aren’t going to be Blue Jays.

Maybe our added peace of mind with trading prospects comes from knowing that it’s Alex Anthopoulos who will be doing the trading. Before he’s done as General Manager of the Toronto Blue Jays, he’s going to make some bad trades (and it can be argued he has done so already). But for now, he seems to be pretty good at it, and he gets the benefit of the doubt more times than not.

That might be something we should all bear in mind this offseason. One thing I’ve noticed about Anthopoulos is that, while his forays into the media are occasional and vague, he usually does what he says he’s going to do. If he says he’s not going to break the bank for a top-tier free agent, I’ve seen nothing in his work as GM that should lead a fan to not believe him. Conversely, if he says he’s going to explore the trade market, and that not all the elite prospects in the system are going to be Toronto Blue Jays at the big league level, I believe him there too. He’s already shown he’ll make those moves. So we better not get too attached to those prospects as we get ready for more deals.

It’s entirely possible that this off-season, Alex Anthopoulos will trade another Michael Young out of the Jays’ farm system. Some fans, two or five or ten years later, are still going to have big problems with that. That’s fine – second guessing the GM is part of the fun of being a fan. But we should probably at least mentally prepare ourselves for the possible departures of our prospect man-crushes, and even the guys that we didn’t think would amount to much (the same way the Jays saw Michael Young back in 2000), and be reasonably comfortable that the Jays’ GM isn’t going to move any of them for another Esteban Loaiza.

Where It All Changed - A Prelude to the Season's End

You'll have to pardon the gratuitous Grateful Dead reference, but what a long strange trip the season's been. And somehow, it's still going.

We're working up to a piece that wraps the season up into a few pithy paragraphs, which we hope to have for you by the end of this week. But given our recent fits of delinquency on the blog, we figured we'd pull out a couple of the lesser strands from that piece for their own post. It's a little like watching the deleted scenes before you see the movie.

The most notable thing about looking back this season is that it's hard to find the beginning point of this year versus the closure of last year. In all likelihood, it went back before pitchers and catchers reported, and we suppose you could figure that the calendar truly flipped when the Jays named John Farrell as their manager on October 25th. But truth be told, we're still not sure after almost a full season what Farrell is as a manager, or what he brings to the mix. A strong jaw and a willingness to abide baserunning outs? But what more than that? We're still trying to figure that cat out.

As we look back, we keep settling on that day back in January, when Vernon Wells was traded out of town. We can still picture the restaurant where we had just walked in for a meal with Mrs. Tao, and the feverish exchange of tweets and messages as the details came to the surface. (Also, the indulgence of the missus as we lost our mind and ignored her for the entire meal. Sorries.) We suspect that the magnitude of that transaction has been lost somewhat over the past few months, to a point where we even saw tweets and heard JaysTalk calls which wondered about how good a trade it was, usually after a bad outing by Frank Francisco or a good night by Mike Napoli.

(Hopefully, Mike Wilner could back us up on that. We listened to A LOT of JaysTalk this year. It wasn't always like an exchange of discourse among gentleman and scholars at the Acropolis.)

But with almost 10 months' distance since the trade was announced, it's still worth remembering what a momentous change for the franchise that single transaction represented. It wasn't just about riding the team of a middling bat (though that helped) and a heap of cash (that was pretty nice as well). It wasn't just about opening up the middle of the diamond to a younger player with more upside, nor was it about reworking the middle of the lineup. The point is that a franchise with Vernon Wells as it's begrudging centrepiece does not make the deal for Colby Rasmus, and the Jays don't take the hyper-aggressive approach to drafting amateurs and signing international free agents this year if they are still trying to find a dance partner for the Wells Jubilee.

There's a touch of unease in personifying all that has gone right with this franchise around Wells, because we fear that he's been made to be more of a villain than he deserves. Many have filled in their own notion of how Vernon's intangible presence might have detracted from the team, but we wouldn't suggest that we know what occurs behind the closed doors of the Jays' clubhouse. Though it's hard to conceive of Wells' presence in the middle of the raucous, Delta House atmosphere that we've seen in the dugout as young stars with out-sized personalities made their way into the lineup.

Regardless, the $25 million per annum that the Jays would have had to pay out to him through the end of the 2014 season would have cast such a shadow over all other moves that they made that the team and its wunderkind general manager wouldn't have had the flexibility to take the calculated risks that they have since.

There's going to come a day when we write the book on how it all came together for the next great Toronto Blue Jays championship team. We have a notion that the Wells trade will not only provide the jumping off point for that narrative, but that it will weave its way through many of the other strands. The elasticity of the Jays' plan going forward depended on that single transaction.

A Little Touch of Terrific

We've made a point through most of this year of toning down some of the outlandish fanboy praise for Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos, if only to pull back the reins on some of the expectations that have been built up by his initial moves over his first two years in the post. Anthopoulos is not wizard, secret agent, ninja, evil genius or whatever other stock movie character to which he has been compared.

And yet, it's hard not to let the plaudits fly after another extraordinary player personnel move yesterday.

Within the past week, we had told people that we thought it highly unlikely that the Jays would have any capacity to acquire a player such as Colby Rasmus. The notion that a player would be available when he is controllable, plays a premium position, possesses all five tools and has seemingly yet to reach his ceiling seemed to be remote at best. Add to that the fact that a number of other suitors were certain to step forward if he were to become available, and the notion that the Jays would empty out their newly restocked system for him just didn't compute.

Of course, we hadn't really factored in Anthopoulos' ability to make possible the impossible. Trading Vernon Wells' contract? Impossible! An unmovable contract! Getting value for Roy Halladay when he's shrunk the pool of possible destinations to one? How could anyone do such a thing? Acquiring another team's number one prospect in their system? That just doesn't happen! Don't be ridiculous!

What we especially love about this deal - and much of the Anthopoulos oeuvre - is how it flies in the face of conventional wisdom. The Jays are a team that, if the baseball scriptures are to be heeded, should be selling. They should be emptying out their system of talent sending pieces to buyers. Because that's how this works.

But this trade is yet another example of Anthopoulos both flouting the conventions, and using the momentum and ambition of other "contenders" in order to extract what he needs to build a solid core of a team that will be in Toronto for at least four-to-five affordable years. And he does it without leaving the other teams feeling as though they were fleeced. That's no small accomplishment when you consider the magnitude of this equation: The bodies, contracts, cash, futures and picks getting balanced out somehow in such a manner that three teams could walk away satisfied.

Moreover, the Rasmus trade is positively brilliant in as much as it makes the team's lineup better now and in the future while essentially costing the team a left-handed reliever and a pitching prospect. (There's a lot of clutter and contracts that were swapped, but in essence, this deal comes down to Stewart and Rzepczynski for Rasmus. And were you to tell us that the cost of acquiring Colby Freaking Rasmus would be two young pitchers drawn from a growing crop of hurlers, we would have told you to stop dreaming.

In baseball, as in most other pursuits, there are no sure things. It's entirely possible the Colby Rasmus ends up being a decent centrefielder who hovers below an .800 OPS and occasionally rubs his teammates the wrong way. But there's evidence to suggest that, at 24, he can grow into a transcendent player who is the sort of star that we as Jays fans covet when they are given outlandish contracts by the Yankees or Red Sox.

The true brilliance of this trade is that it's as if sometime, eight-to-ten years down the road, Alex Anthopoulos decided to forgo the free agent sweepstakes, hop into his modified DeLorean and zip back to a time where he could acquire the $100 million player for pennies on the dollar and enjoy the years which built him up to that value before someone else paid through the nose for that past performance.

And there we go...getting all supernatural again. Alex Anthopoulos brings that out in us.

The Inscrutable Mr. Anthopoulos

That word keeps coming to mind lately when we think of Alex Anthopoulos: "Inscrutable". The more that we think that we have started to figure out the Jays GM, the more that we realize that we truly don't understand him at all.

There's something vaguely infuriating about trying to pin down AA, in part because we feel as though he's offered up a sufficient evidence as to his thought process and mindset. When the man speaks in interviews, he speaks in long sentences, with multiple tangents, all fully contextualized. And while some speak multitudes to obscure their true intentions, we still get the sense that Anthopoulos wants to be as open with the media and the public as possible without putting himself at a competitive disadvantage.

But even with all of that context, we find it hard to use any sort of shorthand to assess what sort of moves might be on the Jays agenda for the rest of this week, through the rest of the season and into next year. On the surface of it, the notion that the Jays may be scouting Heath Bell or Ubaldo Jimenez seems odd, as our instinct is to think of the team as "sellers". And yet, when we look at the signings and trades that the team has executed over the past two seasons, it's hard for us to say: "That's not the sort of deal that this team would make."

To torture an analogy, AA doesn't leave a trail of breadcrumbs. He leaves a massive pile of them, and you're left staring at them thinking: "Well this is just no help at all."

(Both the Miguel Olivo and Anthony Gose trades keep coming to mind as we parse through all of the trade rumours, as neither was anticipated beforehand and neither fit into any sort of mould as a "type" of deal.)

The upside of this is that the Jays don't seem to be locked into a philosophy that would preclude them from doing anything at this point. (Okay: They won't trade for Carlos Beltran. We can pretty much guarantee that.) We don't see the sense of trading prospects for a veteran at this point in the season, but by the same token, it wouldn't surprise us to see the Jays take a stab at someone who a team was looking to unload.

We often get asked to put on our Carnac soothsayer hat and predict what the Jays are going to do with trades and acquisitions, and we can honestly say that we really don't have any idea what they're going to do between now and either of the trade deadlines. We're basically just closing our eyes and expecting the unexpected.

And in a way, isn't that a good thing?

Yunel plays the game the Blue Jays way

So Alex Anthopoulos went off the radar and locked up Yunel for (potentially) the next four seasons at $5M per, huh? Did not see that coming, which means I probably should have.

The news is fresh off the wire as of this posting, so I haven't yet had time to fully wrap my mind around it..... but I don't think I'm going to overthink this one.

I like watching Yunel Escobar play baseball. Five million dollars per season for an all-star calibre player at a position like shortstop is not a lot of money (relatively speaking). So what's not to like?

I suppose there are going to be a lot of reasons put out there in the days (hours?) ahead. With any player, there are worries that with a big contract comes reduced motivation. Bobby Cox and The Braves Way disciples will probably overstate the significance of this factor when applied to Yunel (too flashy! He dogs it! No grit!).

Others will wonder if Yunel will hold up at short for the duration of the contract, and if he doesn't, well.... maybe $5M per doesn't look as good for a second baseman with average pop and speed. I don't know. But at two years guaranteed and two seasons at club option, does that even matter?

A few other points:

* What does the signing say about the Jays thoughts on the development of Adeiny Hechavarria and his potential as a long-term fit at the major league level? He's only 22, but a career minor league OPS in the low .600's isn't.... promising, let's say.

* ... or does it speak more to the club's thoughts on Aaron Hill, who has team options hanging in the balance?

* Par for the course with Anthopoulos, but the "out of nowhere" factor with this signing reinforces my belief that we could see a potentially significant shuffling of the deck as the season plays out and the deadline approaches.

And once again, I'll mention that I like watching Yunel Escobar play baseball. I grew up idolizing Tony Fernandez flash his glove and play shortstop with flair, and Yunel is most definitely not shy about making his swag known.

I'm sure many folks smarter than this guy will provide many defensible reasons as to why this is not a good deal for the Jays, but in the meantime, I'll just enjoy watching the guy play.

The Obligation

"We also have to be responsible and try to win as many games as we can."

..... and that quote, my friends, remains the sticking point for me concerning this whole sordid (well, not "sordid", but you get the point) affair whereby Travis Snider apparently starts over in AAA.

As I've mentioned more than once on these pages, in the blogging game, if you aren't first you're last.... and this post is shaping up to be no exception. I'll probably end up parroting the theme of Griff's piece (linked above) and rip off my own comment found below Tao's post.... which is sure to be much more reasonable and thought out than this self-entitled whining. But that goes without saying.

But aaaaanyway.... how can Alex Anthopoulos state a responsibility to put the most competitive team possible on the field in one breath... but unabashedly admit Jo-Jo Reyes has a major league job simply because he's out of options? And furthermore, if we can make the leap and assume that Jo-Jo is one of the five best starting options in the organization (personally, I can't)... is that really the goal now? I mean, really? To scratch out as many wins possible, development be damned?

It can't be. I'll disagree with Griffin in stating that the Jays braintrust cannot possibly be sizing up the division and calling an audible - building off! Win now on! One look at the roster construction tells us this is most certainly not a club built to win now. All due respect, but Corey Patterson, Juan Rivera, Jose Molina, Jayson Nix, and yes, John McDonald, are not players at the stage of their career who should be leaned upon for everyday contributions on championship clubs.

And quite frankly, friends, it's that roster construction that troubles me somewhat - neither built to win now nor designed to break in future cornerstones. I mean - how many new players are learning at the major league level just exactly what it takes to win? JP Arencibia catching 3 out of every 5 games? Kyle Drabek taking his regular rotation turn? Do we really believe that David Cooper is here to stay?

Early to be sure - not yet May! - but a season scraping the .500 level with a roster largely consisting of players that we don't expect to be contributors on that next great Blue Jays team wasn't what energized this fanbase the winter past.

I'm fairly confident the tune will change in a month or six weeks time, but until then.... ugh.

Quick hitters
My last comment maligning Jo-Jo Reyes, who I'm sure is a proper and decent fellow being tarred and feathered for reasons beyond his control: does anyone believe he will be part of the five man rotation in 2012 and beyond? And if not..... what exactly are the Jays so loathe to lose by trying to slip him through waivers? A potential long relief arm? At the expense of developing someone who will?

If Vegas is such a death knell for young pitchers that the club would have Zach Stewart repeat AA to work out the last few kinks.... how does sending an emotionally shattered Brett Cecil to hitters heaven make the most sense?

Anyone else nerding out with a nightly review of MiLB boxscores for the Jays affiliates as I am? I just can't wait until the short season clubs get underway. No, you're lame. Leave me alone.

Speaking of which, Travis Snider is 3 for 3 in his Vegas "debut" as I type this. Miss you, Lunchbox.

Ripping off my own tweets now, but Jose Bautista is must-see TV. I wish there was a PVR setting for "record all JoBau plate appearances".

So Frank Francisco is eventually going to be the full-time closer, right?

And Marc Rzepczynski is already the new Scott Downs, yes? We're all good with that now? (I am.)

Middle relief is criminally underrated; innings 6 and 7 aren't sexy and those dudes get no love. But I got you, Shawn Camp and Casey Janssen.

One last note on the main post above - don't sweat me. I'm still a believer. I just like to let out some bitch every now and again. Until next week!

Tumblin' dice: Assessing risk and the JoBau deal

Signing any player to a contract is a risk, and with more money and more years, you only magnify that risk.

Add to that the lack of clear evidence based on past performance, and the backlash amongst some of us against the José Bautista deal hopefully seems less like smarmy snark directed from the back of the class. We can't speak for Dustin or Drew or Stoeten or others who've raised concerns about the deal or questioned the urgency of signing this now (and they can speak for themselves just fine, we're sure), but there is something about the balance of risk that Alex Anthopoulos has taken in this deal that left us uneasy.

(And not to bore you with the plight of the blogger, but it's weird how we spend years getting accused of being on Rogers' payroll - I wish! - and how we're apologists for everything they do, and the moment we look with hesitation on a deal, people write us off as cynics. Cripes.)

Now that the deal is done, we're left trying to piece together the rationale. And with a full night's sleep and some time spent thinking in a manner that we assume AA might think, we're coming to a point where it's starting to come to us.

While we still more or less agree with Parkes' recent point that the Jays needn't have made a move early on Bautista, we're rethinking the equation and coming to this point: The Jays were set on this guy, and not just potential value.

What we mean is that the notion of acquiring value back for Bautista later this year in the form of returns from a trade or draft picks was less appealing to the Jays' brain trust than working through to achieve the best value that they could in order to retain the player they had.

It's not exactly "we want Bautista, whatever the cost". But certainly, they were set on this particular asset. It wasn't his level of production that they wanted...it was him.

(And maybe it would be too cynical to tell a bunch of baseball fanatics that we really shouldn't start naming the animals on the farm or getting attached to them, because those attachments are half the reason we're here writing, and you're here reading.)

Once you set it in your mind that the Jays wanted the man himself, then the timing starts to make sense. Whatever his performance in the first few months, the Jays were going to start to lose leverage in their ability to retain him. If it's June 2nd and Bautista has 10 homers, would the Jays have been able to grind him down to a three-year deal? And if he has a three-homer day on June 3rd, and hits five more within two weeks, and suddenly he's back on a 40-homer pace, does the price go back up? Could they get one type of prospect on June 2nd, and a whole other level on July 1st?

And would they have wanted to play that game all year?

It's pretty clear at this point that the Jays would not have retained Bautista had they not moved before this season. We love what he produced last season, and we're really quite happy to have him back in the fold. We share your enthusiasm. (For criminy's sake, we compared him to Lolita and us to Humbert Humbert last Spring.)

But know that this is signing is a risk. They say that fortune favours the bold, and this sort of deal may be as bold a move as Alex Anthopoulos has made since he's arrived. By giving significant money to Bautista for several years, he's begun to sketch out for us what the team will look like four or five years down the road. While some other deals looked as though they had an eye towards the future, none did as much to solidify the roster's composition for the 2014/2015 seasons.

One way or another, José Bautista is going to be central to the conversation five years from now.

So dizzy - Making sense of a whole new game

Our head is spinning like it hasn't since that unfortunate incident with the teacups ride back when we were nine.

(And to the lady standing beside the ride who became the victim of our overexuberance, we want to let you know that all these decades later, we still feel bad.)

Overextended analogies aside: Alex Anthopoulos is playing his game at a higher level than we comprehend at the moment. His modus operandi does not seem to orient around "see player, get player" or "get budget, spend budget" in the same way as his predecessor or his contemporaries. Anthopoulos truly seems to be balancing out undervalued player assets versus contracts, potential arbitration outcomes, and future compensatory picks. It's a longer game with many more moving parts than we're used to, and it makes us a bit uncomfortable to try to assess what he's done.

To wit: We actually would prefer Mike Napoli over Frank Francisco next year. And that's mostly to do with a salary/contract agnostic point of view, where we just think in terms of a playground pick and figure: "We'll take Napoli."

Moreover, given what Napoli could contribute to the team's offense, his contract status over the next couple of years and the abundance of right-handed arms in the Jays pen, it only makes sense to us that you'd rather go into the season with him over Frankie.

But given how astute some of Anthopoulos' deals over the past year have been, and how much foresight seems to have gone into the acquisitions of Alex Gonzalez (and then Yunel Escobar), John Buck (and the pick he'll bring back) and others, we're finding it harder to pass judgment on them. And with this Frankie Francisco deal, we know that there's an aspect that we just haven't thought through yet that makes it make sense.

For someone who is opinionated and more than willing to broadcast his opinion on just about any baseball topic, it's a maddening state of affairs.

That Wells money shouldn't be burning a hole in your pocket

After the "hysteria and hyperbole" (TM John Lott, NatPost and J-School Jedi) subsided on Friday night, we received a number of cards and letters outlining to us that the only way to determine the efficacy of trading of Vernon Wells was to see what the Jays did with the money that they saved.

To which we say: Are you frickin' kidding us? Do you not realize and appreciate what was just accomplished here?

Before the trade, Jays were on the hook for $86 Million to a player with ongoing injury and performance issues over the past three seasons. They were going to carry on a significant percentage of their player payroll being attributed to a player who is likely (given age and past track record) to diminish in on-field value. Now, they've moved a contract that was deemed "untradeable" right up until about 5 PM Eastern Time on Friday evening.

"But wait!" you exclaim! "It shouldn't matter because Alex Anthopoulos and Paul Beeston said that money wasn't an issue, which I of course took to mean that the Blue Jays can spend all of the money that they want and sit on a huge contract if they have to because Rogers is totally the richest company ever!"

To which we respond: You've really got to learn to parse words better than that, and stop hearing what you want to hear. (Also, you should probably see a shrink, because we're assuming that this sort of behaviour doesn't limit itself to the Blue Jays. For your sake and the sake of your loved ones: Get help.)

When AA or Beeston make claims along these lines, they are intended primarily to move the conversation away from Ricciardi-style defeatism where the limitations of the budget made competing in the AL East seem to be an impossibility. Which is not to say that they are cynical, because if the Jays' front office can make a compelling business case for upping the payroll, we're sure that their comrades around the Rogers senior management table (you know, the mobile and cable guys who make all that money that you're looking to piss away on Vernon Wells' 2014 performance) might actually be able to buy in. But no one at that table is going to put their own personal performance bonus on the line so that the Jays can heave cash at this fire or that one in the hopes of putting them out.

What the Jays bought themselves this weekend was payroll flexibility. And that flexibility will allow them to look towards extending their relationship with the products of their own system over the next four season. They'll have the funds to lock up Travis Snider, should he turn into the 35 homer, 5 WAR player that we think he can be. That $21 million four years from now will also go a long way towards locking up Deck McGuire, or some June 2011 pick of whom we haven't yet even heard the first peep.

Just because the Jays have this additional money today, it doesn't mean that the trade pulled off this weekend can only be judged based upon how they spend that extra dough. Because frankly, spending the money in your pocket just because you've got it is how Tony Reagins got himself into this deal.

It's a shame about Vern

Pt I: It didn't have to end this way (but we're all kinda' glad that it did)
At the end of the day, it was always about the money. Vernon Wells ranks at or near the top of every major offensive category on the Blue Jays career leaders list - and yeah, they're mostly counting stats based on longevity, but isn't that the point? - and yet, his relationship with the fans has always been...... strained. To say the least.

I mean, who gives themself the nickname "Boo"? A pretty good player living under the shadow of a ridiculous (as seen now) 7 yr/$126M deal handed out at the apex of MLB contract insanity, that's who.

That's megastar money for (just) a pretty good ballplayer who found himself in the right place at the right time. But with that money came expectations that could never be met and shoes ol' Boo could never fill. You always got the feeling Wells was a better fit in a supporting role, but that was never going to be an option once ink met paper. $126M players can't hide in the background, and every struggle was magnified. Every roll-over on an outside fastball or pop-up (GODDAMNIT!!) on a decent offspeed pitch brought on the chorus of hate as a result.

And now we won't have Vernon to kick around anymore. I'm not going to lie to you, I'll miss him.

Pt II: .... but it's OK to be happy about this
Am I going to miss the remaining $80+M over the next 4 seasons? Not so much. Being perfectly honest, I don't really care what Wells made. I never have. But it was/is (to the Angels, now) an albatross contract that had to affect the front-0ffice thinking with regards to roster construction, despite the constant proclaim of an open-ended budget.

And now? No more. If nothing else, it lets us dream (which is everything here). It's behind the subscriber wall, but I'll share a line from Keith Law's analysis of the deal on ESPN regarding the final outcome and ramifications from a Blue Jays perspective:

"They could become very good, very fast."

Feels good to be on the other side of one of these, doesn't it?

Pt III: And what of the new guys? Where do they fit?
Mike Napoli is an offensive-minded catcher whose best attribute is his power, and his worst? Fringey defence. Sound familiar? Somewhere, JP Arencibia nods his head silently. That said, don't be so quick to write-off the Jays' feelings about their young catcher or play up the team's apparent hesitation to let JPA play.

I'm of the opinion that Napoli will find AB's at 1B and DH in addition to his catching duties (think 3 times a week or so), with Arencibia likely seeing slightly-above platoon level at-bats. It just seems the franchise has invested too much in the young catcher in terms of coaching (Wakamatsu) and PR ("the kid has to play") to let him waste away on the bench, and there's nothing left for the AAA MVP to prove in Vegas. So play he will.

Juan Rivera? 4th outfielder..... if he makes the trip north out of Spring Training still a Blue Jay. I'm not convinced.

Pt IV: Where do we go from here?
If I have a concern for the 2011 Blue Jays (just one?), it's this: who are these guys?

Are we close to having all the pieces of the collective puzzle known as The Plan within the system? Or does this magnificent salary mulligan mean more blockbusters are on the horizon - be it this season or next winter? Something even more than a multi-year deal for Jose Bautista? Trades taking on salary? Players in free agency? Extensions for more young stars (Snider, Morrow....)?

(and by the way, if/when Bautista signs on long-term with the club - which I believe he now will - we should get everyone's opinion on record to prevent or justify the tired "I told you so" meme three years down the road. Me? I liked locking up Wells at the time. I know, I know....)

Pt V: Alex Anthopoulos terrifies me
In a good way. Silent Assassin, indeed.

Pt VI: From an LAA perspective
What. The. Fuck?

.... and in the end, it's a great deal for the Blue Jays franchise and a fresh start for Vernon. Remind me to never again bemoan the lack of "blockbuster" moves from the team during the traditional transactional periods. Goddamn, AA. Wow.

A new approach to negotiating?

For years, the Jays took their streak of not busting their players' balls in arbitration hearings as a symbol of their enlightened virtue. And being that we're all a bunch of overly polite Canadians, we probably liked it that way. Those are our guys, so why do we want to be something less than accommodating to them?

(And pause now to link to Jeremy Sandler's NatPost piece from late last night which kicked off this whole line of thinking. Lest you think we have an idea of our own.)

With the deadline for avoiding hearings creeping up fast, and the Jays still holding the line on an MLB-high nine players, it seems to us that the front office has a different view on how to approach the process, and how nice is too nice. (Now, cue all of the signings avoiding the arb process dropping on one day. Boom!)

If the Jays front office does indeed continue to be slightly unconventional in their approach (and the Miguel Olivo deal certainly qualifies as that), then maybe there's something to taking a new path to purchasing the players' services.

Certainly, on the top end, the Jays are faced with an unprecedented issue with José Bautista's contract for next year. His otherworldly 2010 campaign may well force the Jays into a hearing, because really, how the hell do you square away the rest of his career with that one season?

The really interesting question is whether if the team will go to arbitration with some of the more marginal cases, and if so, what do they see as the advantage to such an approach? Niceness aside, is there really any advantage to the team staying away from the arbitration hearing? And what's to be gained by the team by going this route?

The past approach to arbitration seemed to have been one of ensuring that the players were appeased and that a few hundred thousand bucks here or there would suffice to ballast the boat. But a $100K here and $200K there, and pretty soon, you're talking real money. The sort of money that the Jays may be more interested in spending on the multitude of draft picks coming this June rather than their seventh bullpen arm and fourth outfielder.

Moreover, this front office seems to be the sort who wouldn't avoid the arbitrator's room if they thought that they could win. Given the amount of time and resources that have been dedicated to the knowledge and reconnaissance aspects of running the Jays over the past 16 months, we would at least imagine that they would know which cases they could go in and win, and from which awards they might need to walk away.

We're not wanting to present this like we know what the team (or the very polite and kindly Alex Anthopoulos) is thinking, but we wouldn't be opposed to the team taking an approach to this process that is something other than what the orthodoxy would suggest they adhere to, if only to see what the result looks like.

In AA we trust, still

I have to confess that in the early stages of the Great 2010 Blue Jays Managerial Search, I didn't even give the name John Farrell a second thought when he was bandied about as one of the 327 candidates on "the list".

A pitching coach? With no managing experience? Anywhere?

Farrell was one of the names that had me raising my eyebrows at the lengths Anthopoulos et al were taking this exhaustive process in replacing Cito (feels good to be able to say it again). I mean, come on guys, I know you're doing your due diligence, but enough is enough. Quit fucking around with these marginal candidates and hire a sexy (in a baseball way) candidate like Timmy Wallach, or Dave Martinez, or hey - Sandy Alomar Jr.!

Then came word that Martinez didn't make the cut. Wallach's daddy didn't event let him interview with those bullies the Blue Jays, apparently. And suddenly, the hot candidate (Alomar Jr) was informed he was out of the running. And Butterfield.....oh, Butter. Was he ever really "in"? Down we were to a pair of Red Sox coaches, the venerable (I have no idea, but sounds right) DeMarlo Hale and the aforementioned Farrell. And then.... we were told that Hale was told he was out.

Welcome to the Toronto Blue Jays, John Farrell.

Say what (the fuck)?

But, y'know, like seemingly everything Anthopoulos has done in the big chair to date - it makes perfect sense. Forget about John Farrell the pitching coach. Embrace John Farrell, the coach tabbed as Francona's heir apparent. Embrace John Farrell, the former Director of Player Development for a Cleveland Indians organization which, under his watch, was tabbed by Baseball America as having the game's top farm system (2003) & made major inroads in Latin America (sound familiar?). Look at where the Blue Jays are in their life cycle - look at the strengths within the system both at the major league level (young starting pitching) and in the recent amateur draft (starting pitching).

A manager with a background as both a pitching coach and in player development? Make more sense now?

But (you knew there was going to be a "but")...... can he manage?

And once again, like everything Anthopoulos has done, it's a move made with an eye to the upside. Perhaps the safe pick would have been a candidate with extensive managing experience (Baylor - ugh). Maybe a long-time bench coach with a history of minor league success (Hale). I don't think anybody would have been outraged had they gone with the internal candidate (Butterfield). But that's not how Anthopoulos works. He's shown that he's willing to gamble on talent with player transactions, and the same holds true with the selection of his manager.

So far, the gambles have paid off, and we've been given no reason to believe the same won't continue to hold true. Sometimes, you've just gotta trust the process.

(....and in the event the Jays can't come to terms with their man Farrell.....he woulda been a lousy pick anyway. Heyo!)