The Re-birth

Suddenly and emphatically the Toronto Blue Jays announced they are back on the scene 

It will be easy to say this is a risky move by the Jays, that they took on too much money and too many bad contracts. It is. They did.

Jose Reyes got overpaid as a free agent last year (6 years, $106M) and missed good chunks of the three years before that (playing in 295 of a possible 486 games). Josh Johnson is a total gamble*.

Mark Buehrle is by far the surest thing in this deal for the Jays, but he'll be 34 by the time next season starts and has somewhat improbably made at least 30 starts and pitched 200+ innings every year since moving into the starting rotation to begin his second major league season back in 2001.

Those three, along with John Buck and Emilio Bonifaco will cost Toronto over $160M in salary. If Reyes is trending down, if Johnson gets hurt, and if the mileage catches up to Buehrle, it could easily go all wrong.

But even if that scenario plays out, what does it mean? Another 3rd, 4th or 5th place finish? If it doesn't work, it's just status quo. Jays fans are used to it.

Which is why so many of us are thrilled not so much with the actual components of the trade, but that Anthopoulos ultimately pulled the trigger and ownership actually approved it.

And on the bright side, Reyes fills obvious needs both at the top of the order and in the stolen base department. With only 1 year remaining on his hefty $13.75M contract, the 28 year-old supremely-talented Johnson is a chance worth taking. Buehrle is a workhorse, a dependable veteran presence who has won in the playoffs.
 
This trade was a bold move. It might not translate into playoff games for the Blue Jays, but at least it finally feels like they're truly trying to get there again.
 
 
*After a very good rookie year in 2006, Johnson missed almost all of 2007 and more than half of 2008. Johnson was then dominant in 2009 and 2010 (he was briefly considered the best pitcher on the planet during one stretch) but missed most of 2011 (only 9 starts) and was only okay last year when he stayed healthy and pitched 191 innings. For 2013, you really have no idea what to expect out of him.

Fixing Major League Baseball

After hearing about the Red Sox swooping in to sign Carl Crawford to a $142 million deal only days after trading for Adrian Gonzalez, I quickly went into yet another doomsday level of panic on behalf of Toronto Blue Jay fans everywhere.

Totally unfair. Ridiculous. What's the point?

It was the same old storyline: How can the Blue Jays ever realistically expect to compete when a maximum of two teams from one division make the playoffs, and the Jays reside in a division with the two biggest spenders in the sport?

Of the last 27 AL East teams to qualify for the playoffs, 24 of those births have gone to either the Red Sox or Yankees.

When the inevitable finally occurs and Cliff Lee accepts somewhere around $160 million from the Yankees in the next few days, the two Evil Empires will have spent around $530 million on five players (Crawford, Gonzalez, Jeter, Rivera, Lee) over the last two weeks. (The Red Sox have agreed to an extension with Gonzalez for about $154 million but won't announce it until opening day in order to save money on the luxury tax.)

In an attempt to have another baseball geek console me and remind me that the Rays have managed to sneak past both Boston and New York and into the playoffs twice in the last three years, I turned to my friend Marshall and quickly began texting up a storm. After several exchanges, neither of us were particularly hopeful that things would get better.

And that's when Marshall came up with gold.

Rather than luxury tax payments going into a pool that is then evenly divided between all the non-luxury taxed teams, why not have all (or at least the bulk) of luxury tax payments stay within the division? Why should the Pirates or Padres or Marlins get an equal amount of Boston and New York's luxury tax dollars when it's the Jays, Rays and Orioles who have to compete with them?

And wouldn't this model actually potentially curb the spending of these teams? If the Sox and Yanks knew that going into luxury tax territory would mean directly financing their AL East counterparts, wouldn't they think twice about their next big acquisition?

Season Over

Eighty-six games. That's how long the fun and excitement lasted in what was the most fun and exciting start to a Blue Jays season since the team went to back-to-back World Series in '92 and '93.

Sure the 2006 edition was 49-39 at the All-star break and finished with 87 wins but they never held a playoff position, division or wild card, after the first two weeks of the season. Other than that, it's been a long and painful grind for Blue Jay fans over the last 15+ years.

With the emergence of the prospect-loaded Tampa Bay Rays last year, the playoffs went from being an extremely difficult but not totally impossible proposition for Toronto - hoping either the Yanks or Red Sox have an off year and no other team runs away with the wild card, to indeed becoming an impossibility. Beating three teams in your own division that are very clearly better than you, perhaps even the top three teams in all of baseball? Not going to happen.

That's why on May 18th, at 27 -14 and sporting the best record in the majors, Blue Jays fans were varying degrees of delighted, ecstatic, and shocked. The hitters were knocking the cover off the ball, a no-name pitching staff (outside of Doc Halladay) was racking up quality starts, Cito Gaston was baseball's winningest manager in the previous 100 games and the fans were enjoying a different, and foreign, feeling. A winning feeling. A first place feeling.

Boy was it sweet. Continuosly playing with the lead. Repeatedly getting the two-out hits when they mattered. Waking up everyday and poring over another winning box score. Checking and re-checking the standings and always seeing Toronto at the top. It was completely unexpected and altogether unlikely to continue, but it didn't make it any less painful when it stopped.

Following last night's loss to Tampa, the Jays are all the way back to .500 on the season and are considerably closer to last place than first in the AL East. Seven teams are ahead of them in the wild card race and it might as well be all of them. It feels like the wind has been knocked out of me, like my dog ran away. It's nice to see that key positional players, guys like Vernon Wells and Alex Rios, are also taking it personally. (Sarcasm alert.)

The bats predictably cooled off, the rotation features several guys nobody has ever heard of and changes on a daily basis, and the bullpen has completely imploded. The ride is officially over.

Earlier in the week J.P. Riccardi publicly stated his willingness to deal the most dominant pitcher in the game, the same guy who also happens to be the only current reason anyone would bother tuning in to the Blue Jays, Roy Halladay. Every fifth day could be the time Halladay throws the second no-hitter in Toronto history, he's that good.

It just doesn't matter. Halladay could win 25 games a year and throw multiple perfect games and it still wouldn't matter because a middle of the range payroll will never compete with New York or Boston in the AL East. At least not the way this middle of the range payroll team is constructed.

The Rays have provided the blue-print: Stockpile young prospects and then hope they develop.

Until Toronto does, a 41 game start and an 86 game ride back to .500 is the best Blue Jay fans can ask for. But what if we want more?

It's Time to Start Over

With the Tampa Bay Rays (the freakin RAYS!) on the verge of finishing off the Red Sox and completing their journey from AL East doormat to possible World Series champions, a major change in strategy is necessary if the Blue Jays ever want to get back to the postseason.

Because for the last decade or so Jays fans only had to worry about the two Evil Empires: the hated Yankees and the (now equally) hated Red Sox. However, with Tampa and their ridiculously stacked team of young star players, Toronto now has three very good teams directly blocking their path to the playoffs.

And it's clear the Jays are the worst of the four teams by a wide margin. With or without A.J. Burnett. If the AL East were 'Entourage', Boston would be Vince, New York would be Ari, Tampa would be E and Toronto and Baltimore would flip a coin for Turtle and Drama. Constantly on the outside, forever mocked and left behind.

During the offseason the Red Sox will tinker a little, add more pitching and be better next year. The Yankees are getting ready to spend roughly half a billion dollars on superstar free agents to add to their already formidable core, and the baby Rays will be a year older and armed with ample playoff success. Hell, B.J. Upton and Evan Longoria might surpass 100 homeruns all by themselves. The point is, none of the three teams that finished ahead of Toronto this year are getting any worse.

Toronto is no closer to the playoffs today than it was 5 or 10 years ago. If anything, they’re further away.

The cut and paste technique that has been employed by the Blue Jay front office for more than a decade isn't working. The core of the team simply can’t compete with the best. Scott Rolen and Lyle Overbay are complimentary players. The holes at shortstop and behind the plate aren’t going away. Adding mid-level free agents and swapping mediocre veterans for more mediocre veterans (Brad Wilkerson or Kevin Mench anyone? Anyone?) isn’t going to change the fact that the nucleus of this team doesn’t have enough skill to go head-to-head with the three AL East powers.

For that reason, it’s time to move in a new direction. Think ‘firesale’. Or see: Marlins, Florida (1998).

Which means it's time to cash in the biggest chip the Jays have and move Roy Halladay. It will absolutely be tough to watch ‘Doc’ go. The guy has been unbelievable in his decade as a Blue Jay and is unquestionably the best pitcher in the AL over the last five seasons. He's thrown more complete games than entire teams and has consistently been amongst the league leaders in ERA, wins and strikeouts, but he was always more than just stats. Watching him work every fifth day was truly a treat, every time out you thought "this could be the day Roy throws the second no-hitter in franchise history".

But the thing is, no matter how well Halladay pitches next year, or even the year after that, he won't be able to pitch the Jays into the postseason. It will not happen. Can't happen. Impossible. Unless baseball changes the playoff format and adds more teams, Toronto has zero chance of reaching the playoffs in the next two years. So what is the point of finishing fourth with a high-priced veteran club? Wouldn’t it make more sense to tear the whole thing down?

Moving Halladay, Vernon Wells, Alex Rios, and B.J. Ryan would net a significant haul of prospects that in combination with Travis Snider, Adam Lind, Aaron Hill and the surplus of young pitching already in place, could form the type of core group it takes to realistically stand up to the free-spending Yanks and Sox.

Re-directing free agent cash towards drafting high-ceiling, expensive amateur players is the obvious formula. That could be the only way to ever really contend in this division. It’s certainly how the Rays did it.