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?

The Easiest Job in Sports

There are a number of cushy jobs in the world of sports. Goaltending coach for the New Jersery Devils, offensive coordinator for the Indianapolis Colts and massage therapist for Maria Sharapova all come to mind.

But no job in sports is easier than the one Joe Girardi currently has - Manager of the New York Yankees.

At his disposal Girardi has the greatest collection of baseball talent ever assembled on a single team. The current Yankee roster has made a collective 48 All-Star game appearances, has more than 2000 career homeruns, 3 regular season MVP awards, and a Cy Young trophy.

Girardi manages the highest paid third baseman in the game (A-Rod - $33M a year), the highest paid short stop (Derek Jeter - $21.6M), first baseman (Mark Teixeira - $20.6M), closer (Mariano Rivera - $15M), catcher (Jorge Posada - $13.1M) and DH (Hideki Matsui - $13M).

The toughest decision Girardi has made in the postseason is which restaurant to eat at following each inevitable win. He could've managed this team to a championship in his sleep...we all could have. Kate Hudson has had a bigger impact.

The 2009 Yankees payroll is $208 million, which is 40% more than the second highest paid team (Mets - $145M) and almost two-and-a-half times the league average ($86M). It's not like Girardi was fiddling with his roster, playing hunches and taking chances. And why would he? They have the best of the best, an All-Star team stacked from top to bottom that was purchased to win.

The Yankees four starting infielders cost them more in salary than 16 teams pay their entire roster. They have two of the six highest paid starting pitchers in baseball and a third who has won 229 regular season games.

When you have a team stacked from top-to-bottom with stars, it's not like you need a manager to motivate or provide strategy. How hard can it be to fill out this zillion dollar line-up? Or hand the ball to Rivera to finish any game? Outside of potentially choosing between Joba Chamberlain and Phil Hughes to bridge the gap from starter to closer, Girardi can pretty much kick his feet up for nine innings and enjoy the ride.

In fact, if the Yankees really want to suck every single penny they can out of their fans (and the evidence indicates they do, with the $2500 seats and $10 hot chocolates), why don't they go ahead and auction off the Manager's job to the highest bidder?

I'm sure Rudy Giuliani, Billy Crystal, Adam Sandler, Jay-Z and a host of other celebrities would jump at the chance to put on the pin-stripes and pretend it matters who is in charge of the ship.

Good-bye Roy?

If it does indeed happen, if he does really get traded, it will be hard to see Roy Halladay go. Very hard.

As Jays fans, we've been treated to watching the best pitcher in baseball the last five years, and our admiration for him - his demeanor, his work ethic and talent - is considerable.

But ultimately, moving him is necessary.

If you want to watch one great start every fifth day, keeping Halladay makes sense. If your goal is to play more than 162 games a year (Hello Playoffs, you may not remember us but we're the Toronto Blue Jays!), trading 'Doc' for multiple prospects is the only way to make it happen.

If the Jays could get Manny Parra and prospects Alcides Escobar (SS) and Matt Gamel (3B) from the Brewers (or a similar-type package from someone else) in exchange for Halladay (cnnsi.com writer Jon Heyman speculates)...that would be awesome. It might even save J.P. Riccardi his job. Seriously. An infield of Aaron Hill, Escobar, Gamel and possibly Adam Lind (after next year when Overbay's contract runs out, or sooner if Overybay is also traded) would be very promising and just as importantly, under contract control the next few years. That means cheap.

A rotation featuring any five of Ricky Romero, Sean Marcum, Dustin McGowan, Jesse Litsch, Brett Cecil, Scott Richmond and Manny Parra (again all are under team contract control) would offer depth to protect against injury, and on paper appears very solid overall.

Obviously Vernon Wells and Alex Rios, because of their contracts, are going to be in Toronto for the foreseeable future (2014 if you're actually counting, but I wouldn't recommend it) and have to factor into any equation, but it's not like they aren't talented players. Both still have the potential and ability to bounce back, to perform like they did prior to receiving a combined $196 million. No really, they do. It could happen.

Even with the Pop-Up artist (Wells) and the Strike-out artist (Rios) eating up over $30 million a year going forward, the group discussed above along with Travis Snider completing the outfield, makes the Toronto roster look a lot like the Tampa Bay team that began developing a couple years ago.

And that is a good thing. A very good thing. The Rays have shown fellow A.L. East fodder (hello Baltimore and Toronto) how to compete with the Yankees and Red Sox, and guess what? It's not by trying to spend with them! After years of wasting money on free agents in hopeless efforts to keep up with their free-spending big brothers, throwing away millions on players who were never going to be the difference between making or missing the playoffs, Tampa finally tried something different. Of course all the top-end draft picks helped them, but still, they proved the way to sneak past the Yanks and Sox and into the playoffs isn't by spending. It's by developing. Push through as many high-end prospects and break them all in at the same time. Let them build and grow together, experience the ups and downs of Major League baseball, and then cross your fingers it works out.

Oh, and maybe hire a new-age goofy-looking but strategically sound manager to run the team. Just a hunch.

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?