[JayP]

Originally Posted by jayswin

I think there's a lot of misunderstanding going on in this back and forth. Nobody is saying the Blue Jays won't be a very good baseball team, we're saying the way things are going we will likely be a 3rd place team, with the faint possibility of a wildcard spot.

Why though? No one has explained it. Yes, the Red Sox are better with Price and Kimbrel. They were also a 78 win team. Those guys put them in the conversation for 85-90 wins, potentially more.

The Jays were a 93 win team last year. However, the important point is that to finish the year the team they were fielding (with Price, Stroman back, Tulo, etc.) was a 100+ win team if they played together for a full season. The Jays have lost Price and Lowe from that team. Maybe Estrada doesn't have a career year. That still easily puts them in 90-95 win range and competing for the division.

Also, again with the "people are acting shocked like they don't know Rogers is like this, they need to understand they're a company that.....etc". Nobody in here doesn't understand how Rogers operates, trust me, we've been talking about it forever.

I guess some of us just had some hope that after 22 years with no playoffs and finally seeing a championship caliber roster, plus a $100mil windfall for Rogers that maybe just maybe we'd see them say "you know what this is incredible, the fan base is ready to explode with Blue Jays fever, we have a core that can do it again if we add and keep pace with the contenders, we have an extra $100mil, let's go for it!".

Your two paragraphs are in direct conflict of each other. You say you understand how Rogers operates and then are surprised when a publicly traded company that has obligations to it's shareholders doesn't just dump $100m to the Jays to chase a championship. Unfortunately, winning a championship does nothing for Rogers shareholders. The financial windfall of that sort of run would, but that's a hard number to speculate on and there's also the risk that the Jays just have a bad season (due to injuries, bad luck, etc.) and that $100m invested in them goes down the drain.

And they predictably aren't. And as much as I don't appreciate the shots of "Haha, these guys are like new hockey fans they don't understand how anything works, lulz!!!!!!", I do understand that we've shored up some minor positions with lots of money that suggests there isn't much left to spend, and baseball insiders seem to agree. Yes, the offseason works differently but now we're into trade only scenarios of making the team better after trading a lot of our good prospects to get us to contender status.

Trade scenarios also acquire cost controlled players. This allows the Jays to use the money saved on these players to plug holes in free agency in future years. It's all about opportunity cost. It's easy to say signing free agents is free because it's only money, but that's not true. Signing free agents to multi-year deals prevents the team from making other moves in the future. It could be the difference between having some extra cash available at the deadline to acquire a starter at the deadline after Happ and Chavez both have season ending surgery (or something to that effect).

Could a trade be made that puts us up to contenders again? I guess so. Is it likely? Not really, unless we destroy another GM in a trade. But again, thanks for the condescending "new baseball fans" talk in this discussion guys. Yes, some of us might not have been following religiously (still watching though), but I think most of us have enough knowledge of the situation to join in discussion without the ****ty remarks.

The problem is that somehow the Jays aren't contenders anymore because they lost a pitcher that made 10 starts for them last year - worth 2.4 WAR. Stop the doom and gloom about how the Jays are .500 team because they didn't mortgage the future of the franchise and give David Price $217 million dollars and maybe people will take your talking points seriously.

The same people that are complaining that the Jays should've been all in on Price are the ones who won't be watching in 5-7 years when Price blows his arm out and the Jays are paying $31 million to a guy with a 5.00+ ERA and sitting at the bottom of the AL East because of it.