Quote:
Originally Posted by GirlySports
I think Toronto has it a bit backwards. Teams like Kansas City, Tampa Bay in the past and Chicago Cubs in the future ride their youngsters into the playoffs and deal with the consequences once those contracts expire. Yes Kansas City will need to blow it up at some point but they've already got two World Series appearances. San Francisco used Sandoval as much as they could and then let him go once he was useless. They are reloading for next year.
Toronto was doing the opposite. Those teams above would never trade a cheap prospect like Hechavarria. Toronto trades him for Reyes which is 20 million more and has a bad wheel. And in that trade they add Buerhle and Johnson, another 30 million. Then they add Dickey that's 15 more million. That still only got them to .500 so of course Rogers is not happy.
Fire of the Phoenix: no doom and gloom here. If Shipiro can get a good GM I think they'll be better off without AA but it'll take a year or two.
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The fact that we are sitting here comparing Toronto to teams like Kansas and Tampa Bay speaks volumes to what the problems are in Blue Jay land. These are two small market teams you are comparing the Jays to when the Jays play in the third largest market in MLB (without even consideration of the rest of Canada).
Toronto has the ability to spend like a big market team, but they don't because of their bull#### ownership structure. I don't like it, but I could live with that if they flat out said that's what they are going to do, and stuck to the model. The problem is that they don't. They don't spend enough to win, and they don't keep enough talent to build from within which has resulted in the years of mediocrity. Rogers does just enough to keep Jays fans' targets off their telecommunications business so they can continually suck every dollar of profit out of the MLB team. Even when they do increase the payroll a bit, it's a short term counter punch to battle the growing discontent of Jays fans. It's not a strategic baseball move at all (see the Dickey/Reyes trades from a few years ago).
With respect to Sandoval, San Francisco has one of the highest payrolls in baseball. They keep all their players that they value. The reason Sandoval isn't there any more is he's very obese and they were smart enough to realize you can't be signing a professional athlete in poor condition to long term 100M dollar. Not the money that stopped them, it was the term.