The Blue Jays were facing a series of harsh choices if they’d continued down the road they were on. With GM Alex Anthopoulos having cast his lot by acquiring veterans with hefty contracts Mark Buehrle, Jose Reyes and Josh Johnson; by trading for R.A. Dickey and giving him a long-term deal at age 38; for gutting the farm system; for rehiring the same manager the team had fired in John Gibbons, Anthopoulos’s job was clearly in jeopardy if the Blue Jays would up with 90+ losses. The new GM would’ve undertaken a new rebuilding/retooling project with a different strategy. The fans’ enthusiasm for the club would also have waned if they started over again following a failure of this magnitude.
They were never as bad as they were playing when they were eleven games under .500 on May 10th. Of course, the same holds true for this eleven game win streak. Accumulated not against terrible teams but against the Orioles, Rangers and Rockies, this hot streak has given them some wiggleroom not to do anything drastic in terms of clearing out players at the trading deadline, but instead adding players who can assist them for a playoff run.
When a team makes the series of bold maneuvers that the Blue Jays did this past winter and they immediately fall flat, there aren’t many options available. Their hands were essentially cuffed. It was either this team will get itself straight or they’re all done for in Toronto. That the team somehow reeled off this win streak is a rarity among teams who have pushed all their chips into the pot as the Blue Jays have and got off to a disastrous start, but it’s happening. Two months is generally not enough to come to the determination that the entire thing has to be torn down especially where there are proven players on the roster, but the frustration with so many years of mediocrity and the constant frenetic tweaking on the part of a GM who was a member of the mostly failed regime of former GM J.P. Ricciardi would have created a groundswell to do something else with someone else. The what and who are irrelevant, it would simply be a change for its own sake. And don’t think that firing Anthopoulos would’ve yielded a move to the next in line, the respected Tony LaCava. In that kind of situation, clubs generally move in an entirely new direction, presumably with an older, veteran GM who thinks in an old-school manner.
If it had gotten to July and the Blue Jays were sitting 10 games under .500 and 12 games out of playoff position, a “For Sale” sign at clearance prices could easily have been posted outside the Rogers Centre. As it stands now, they may not make a serious playoff run. They’re still only two games over .500 and the season hasn’t been saved nor have the moves haven’t been validated yet (ironically, they were also two games over .500 a year ago to this day and their current win streak has been due to unsung players like Adam Lind, Chien-Ming Wang and Munenori Kawasaki), but they’re able to make baseball moves to get better and try to win for 2013 rather than play out the string, get rid of money, placate the angry crowds and fickle circling media to start all over again.
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