Quote:
Originally Posted by TheAlpineOracle
What teams make it worse routinely with less? The model franchises for yearly success are San Francisco, Boston, Yankees, St. Louis, Dodgers, Anaheim, Washington, and Detroit. All of these teams accept for St. Louis have significantly higher payrolls than the Blue Jays. St. Louis spends about the same as Toronto, but doesn't play in a the AL East where the majority of the mega spenders reside.
You can throw up Kansas and the Mets, but they are not routinely successful and they are full of players on their rookie deals. These are going to be 200M payroll teams when their entry level deals expire . Christ the Mets are going to have to dump 100M on pitching alone in the near future if they wish to keep it together. We'll see if Kansas keeps its team together. My guess is they won't as deals start to expire. They have budgetary constraints much like the Jays, but they are a small market team with probably 3/4 less of a fan base than the Jays have.
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Teams routinely do make it with less (like you point out as well) but I agree it is impossible to sustain, while keeping all the same players anyway. It remains to be seen what they will do this off season, so I'm not going to get too excited about it... yet. They need to fill some holes in their starting rotation and bullpen, if they don't do that, yes I'll be pissed. There are other ways to fill holes besides signing free agents though so I don't think it's time to panic yet necessarily. Lets just see what they do over the next 5 months.
Last year, 9 teams had a higher payroll than the Jays. Not one advanced as far as the Jays did. 6 missed the payoffs completely, 2 were eliminated in the divisional series and one lost in the WC game. Every year it seems that multiple top 10 payroll teams miss the playoffs and a couple mid/small markets squeeze in. Maybe it's not the same teams every year and yes, money will fix a lot of things, but I just don't think it's as black and white as you make it seem IMO. It's more important you maximize the resources you do have than to worry about what the other teams are doing. Especially since most of them seem to employ a shot gun approach to financial management anyway, wasting tons of money (and their inherent advantage) in the process. There's lots of good, available players not making big bucks yet, the key is to find and target those guys.
The tone of this thread surprises me. Pretty doom and gloom for all the success the Jays just had. Yes, next year will likely not be the same and yes, the farm has been depleted, but those aren't reasons to lose hope. AA is gone, Shapiro is in, I'm pissed at that personally but i also realize that it doesn't preclude us from ever having success again either. Also, even if next year goes off the rails, we have some great trade assets that could re-stock the farm nicely (for those who think we have no future). Things are hardly as dire as some make it seem around here.