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. 

There Will Be Hard Times: Vague Thoughts on 2012, 1995, Gose and Batting Coaches

Photo courtesy @james_in_to. He's swell, and has lots of awesome Jays pics here.

I won't bore you with a rehashing the past two months of Blue Jays baseball, which has rushed past us in a furious blur of crazy injuries and depleted lineups and...well...you were there. You get it. And if you were here right now, we'd hug it out, with a couple of additional back slaps and an extra squeeze, just to let you know we're there with you.

Then again, we haven't really had much to offer lately on the blog, which is attributable in part to real life getting a lot more hectic than I'd anticipated. With limited stores of strength and intestinal fortitude remaining, the prospect of tossing out a blog post that would certainly result in my being smeared as a puppet, Kool-Aid drinker, apologist or stooge seemed like a waste of my time and energy.

I try to take all of this with a sense of humour, but I don't always succeed. I've found my own mood about the Jays to be somewhat less than generous lately, which leads to some bile spillage on occasion. But I'm always a bit sad when I tweet out something sardonic on the state of the team, and see that my comment gets gleefully magnified by others. I guess some people can take it in good fun, and others just want to smear their anger over the state of the team across everything. Maybe we all just need to chill a bit.

Before getting on with the business of talking baseball, let me add one thing that I intend as a positive, but will likely sound negative on its surface: Things can always get worse. At some point, the Jays' fortunes will undoubtedly be worse than this. One thing you can rely on in life is that if you get through the bad times, there will be more on the way. You suffer, and you persevere. You take care of the things that are under your control and you don't get upset over the things that are beyond you. That's life.

What's Worse Than This?
If you were to construct a full roster of the greatest Blue Jays of all time, you'd likely find Devon White, Robbie Alomar, Paul Molitor, Joe Carter, John Olerud, Shawn Green, Carlos Delgado, Juan Guzman and Pat Hentgen all in the mix for that team. You might even be able to squeeze David Cone or Al Leiter into the mix, based on the high points of their tenure with the Jays.

And yet, a team with ALL of those aforementioned players went 56-88 in 1995, finishing dead last in the AL East and looking miserable doing it.

The majority of those players had just contributed to championship teams, and most of them would go on to be productive members of either the Blue Jays or other teams in the ensuing decade. So the point here, as much as there is one, is to point out that sometimes good teams have terrible seasons. Sometimes, teams play far above the level of their talent - Hello Baltymore! - and some teams play so far below it that it's hard to imagine how things got so bad.

The 1996 Blue Jays had a lesser roster than the year before, with Alomar, White, Molitor, Cone and Leiter out, replaced by Tomas Perez, Otis Nixon, Jacob Brumfield, Erik Hanson and Marty Janzen. And yet, the latter and lesser squad won 18 more games. They say you can't predict baseball, and you certainly can't expect to track progress in straight lines.

In the coming months, there are going to be many in the "spend to contend" camp who assure you that if ownership just got off its wallet and spent on acquiring free agents or expensive veterans to fill in the roster voids, this team would certainly contend. It sounds so easy, really. You plug in the numbers of "known quantities", and bingo-bango: There's your contender. But the truth is that 29 teams every year fail to win the World Series. Two-thirds of teams will fail to make the post-season, for a multitude of reasons. Some of this is foreseeable, but there's a big chunk of it that is dumb luck. And if someone props themselves up beside the flaming pile of a wrecked season and says "I told you so", just remind them that predicting failure in baseball is pretty much the easiest bet there is.

The Jays might "fix" everything this offseason. They might spend vast sums on all of the proven veterans, build a super-Strat-o-Rific monster team, have the benefit of great health and tremendous contributions from their emerging players, and they could still end up on the outside looking in.

If that's a problem for you, you might want to find another pursuit. There is no "Rookie" setting on the real game.

Anything Gose
I don't want to get too far out in front of the "Anthony Gose is back on track" story, but seeing him finally put a few good swings on balls reminded me of another Jays outfielder after his initial call-up.

In his first two seasons with the Jays, Alex Rios posted a .321 on base and a .390 slugging percentage, managing just 11 homers in 979 plate appearances. At the time, it seemed to me as though Rios was focused on just getting his bat on the ball, and not getting embarrassed at the plate. For a player who was 6'5", it seemed as though he was satisfied to just poke at the ball and manage to put it in play.

Gose's approach in the early days has included him trying to drop lots of bunts, a skill at which he is oddly deficient in spite of his apparent affection for it. He's also taken lots of weak and late swings, hacking down on the ball and rarely lifting it with any authority.

Rios was three years older than Gose before he started to really settle in and start swinging with some vigour, swatting 41 homers and posting a .352 OBP/.505 SLG in the 1209 plate appearances that made up his third and fourth seasons. With another year of seasoning at Triple-A next year, Gose might prove yet that he's more than a slash and burn, fourth outfielder.

Two Batting Coaches?
Chad Mottola's reputation continues to grow, as Gose's improvement coincided with some additional time spent with his batting coach in both Las Vegas and after they both received the September callup.

It's always difficult to know how much impact coaches have on players, but if there's something positive that Mottola can contribute at the big league level, I see no reason why the Jays wouldn't add him as an additional hitting coach for next year. So long as there is some agreement between Mottola and hitting coach Dwayne Murphy on the approach they want to take to addressing specific players, an additional set of eyes on the coaching staff is a pretty minor financial investment that could pay dividends at the plate.