MLB Hot Seat – Alex Anthopoulos, Blue Jays

The Blue Jays have to make a series of decisions at the conclusion of this season and the first one will be what to do with general manager Alex Anthopoulos. For the first three years of his reign, he received a pass mostly because he wasn’t former GM J.P. Ricciardi. In what was considered a fresh start, the Blue Jays didn’t play much better under Anthopoulos than they did when Ricciardi was the GM. They were mostly mediocre and were never contenders. The focus seemed to be on stockpiling youngsters, staying relatively competitive at the big league level and waiting for the chance to bolster Jose Bautista and the other power bats.

After the 2012 season, a 73-89 disappointment, manager John Farrell was traded to the Red Sox to be their manager and the Blue Jays began a massive reconstruction by acquiring Josh Johnson, Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle and Emilio Bonifacio from the Marlins for a large chunk of their farm system. They then acquired reigning National League Cy Young Award winner R.A. Dickey from the Mets for even more prospects and signed Melky Cabrera. Finally, Anthopoulos rehired the same manager who had run the team in the midst of Ricciardi’s tenure, John Gibbons. Needless to say, it hasn’t worked.

Anthopoulos runs the club without the outspokenness, bluster and controversy that seemed to follow Ricciardi around like the stink of a weekend bender, but he hasn’t had any more success than his former boss. In fact, the argument could be made that he’s done worse. Anthopoulos is a frenetic tinkerer who doesn’t seem to have a plan. They dealt with the Ricciardi hangover, built up the minor league system, hired and fired a couple of managers and decided to spend a lot of money to go all in for 2013. They’re in last place.

What now? They can make more trades, free agent signings and bring in another manager and different coaches, or they can fire Anthopoulos and let the new GM plot a course.

If the Blue Jays make a GM change, the call will be for Tony LaCava to get the job. Would it make sense to bring in another GM who worked under Ricciardi and Anthopoulos? The Blue Jays didn’t interview anyone when they elevated Anthopoulos to replace Ricciardi. Safe in the “anyone but Ricciardi” theory, they went with the next guy. They can’t do that again no matter how impressive LaCava is.

Some 35-year-old with a spreadsheet and a degree from MIT making grandiose proclamations isn’t going to fly again. It has to be a totally different approach from the past decade.

Once the question shifts from, “how do we take the next step?” to “what now?”, it’s over. Anthopoulos is on the hot seat because he’s the only one left to blame and there’s no other move the Blue Jays can make that combines the sense and simplicity as firing the general manager.

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Blue Jays’ Hot Streak Saves Them From Painful Decisions

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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Bashing and Smashing the Real Underachievers—American League

Yesterday I asked why the Mets were being hammered for playing pretty much the way anyone and everyone should’ve expected them to play. Today let’s have a look at some teams that were—according to the “experts,” payrolls and talent levels—were supposed to be performing better and why they aren’t.

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Toronto Blue Jays

It’s becoming apparent that the Blue Jays are not a team off to a bad start. They might just be plain bad. In addition to that, one of the main culprits in their mediocrity/badness over the past two seasons—former manager John Farrell—has the Red Sox in first place with the best record in baseball. I don’t think he’s a good game manager, but the reality doesn’t lie. The Red Sox will fall to earth at some point, but will the Blue Jays rise?

They may not be making the same baserunning gaffes they did under Farrell, but they’re third in the American League in homers and twelfth in runs scored. They’re last in batting average, next-to-last in on-base percentage, and thirteenth in ERA. The bullpen has been solid, but if a team doesn’t hit and doesn’t get any starting pitching their roster is irrelevant whether it has Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle, Josh Johnson, Brandon Morrow and Jose Bautista or whatever refuse the Mets are shuttling in and out of their outfield.

There’s too much talent with too long a history for this type of underperformance to continue for the whole season, but if it does it may be time to stop looking at the players, coaches and manager and turn the blame to the front office.

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Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim

What I find funny is that one of the main arguments for Mike Trout’s 2012 MVP candidacy apart from his higher WAR over Miguel Cabrera was that the Angels took off after he was recalled. Without him to start the season they were 6-14; with him in the lineup after his recall they were 81-58. Trout’s been there from the beginning of the 2013 season and the Angels are 10-17, looking haphazard, disconnected and awful. The only “war” being mentioned is the undeclared, but known, “war” between the front office and the manager.

They’re not a cohesive unit and when you have a bunch of mercenaries, some of those mercenaries had better be able to pitch.

Yesterday’s win over the Athletics was indicative of one of the Angels’ biggest problems: veteran apathy. In the eighth inning, an important insurance run would’ve scored had Mark Trumbo touched the plate before Josh Hamilton was thrown out at third base to end the inning. Mike Scioscia’s teams were known for the inside game, pitching, defense, speed and going all out. Those small fundamental mistakes didn’t cost them games because they didn’t happen. Now they do. And they’re 10-17 and going nowhere in large part because of that. They got away with it yesterday, but just barely. It certainly doesn’t help that their pitching is woeful, but their issues stem from more than just bad pitching.

Why don’t the Angels just put the man out of his misery? He’s been there for 14 years, it’s no longer his team, his sway in the organization is all but gone and the players aren’t responding to him. It’s like delaying the decision to put down a beloved pet. Another week isn’t going to make a difference other than to make things worse. Sometimes making a change for its own sake is good.

Tony LaRussa’s says he’s not interested in managing. He might be interested but for one thing: his relationship with Jim Leyland is such that he won’t want to compete with his friend in the same league and possibly ruin Leyland’s last shot at a title so LaRussa could stroke his own ego, make another big payday, derive some joy over abusing Jeff Luhnow and the Astros and being the center of attention again. It’s Ivory Soap Pure (99 44/100%) that you can forget LaRussa.

Phil Garner took over an Astros team that was floundering in 2004 and brought them to the playoffs; the next season, they were 15 games under .500 in late May of 2005 and rebounded to make the World Series. Even Bob Brenly, who was a figurehead as Diamondbacks manager and whose main attribute was that he wasn’t Buck Showalter and didn’t tell the players how to wear their socks, would restore a calming, “it’s different” atmosphere.

Someone, somewhere would yield a better result that Scioscia is now. It’s known and not accepted yet. Maybe after a few more losses, it will be accepted that it’s enough so they can move on.

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Toronto Blue Jays: Early Season Notes

Considering that the majority of players on the roster have never won anything and that they acquired a vast percentage of one of the most disappointing and dysfunctional teams in recent memory in the 2012 Marlins, there is reason to be skeptical about the Blue Jays. The slow start certainly didn’t help. But to equate this team with the 2012 Marlins just because Josh Johnson, Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle and Emilio Bonifacio are on the team as if their mere presence in the problem is searching for reasons to criticize. The Marlins were working for a hair-trigger ownership more interested in the number of fans they’d immediately attract rather than giving the club—and fans—a chance to get to know one another. There was constantly the hovering paranoia of a housecleaning if it didn’t work, with good reason as it turned out.

John Gibbons is not Ozzie Guillen and won’t start savaging the players in the press. There haven’t been the off-field issues with the 2013 Blue Jays that there were with the 2012 Marlins and the Blue Jays’ fans are going to come to the park to support their team. There’s no threat of a dismantling at mid-season.

The backs of the baseball cards are highly relevant with the Blue Jays and R.A. Dickey, Johnson, Buehrle, and Jose Bautista will be fine. The key will be how much Edwin Encarnacion can replicate his 2012, 42 homer performance. He’s currently hitting .133. Brett Lawrie has to get healthy. Reyes is on the disabled list.

They’re not deep enough to withstand a litany of injuries and underperformance and there’s still an ominous, “I don’t know if this is gonna work/I hope this works” from inside and outside the organization. The AL East is parity laden so no team is going to run off and hide, giving the Blue Jays wiggleroom to get their bearings. Once the starting rotation gets its act together, Lawrie returns, Bautista starts hitting and if Encarnacion can be 75% of what he was last year, they’ll be okay.

One note regarding Reyes, I’d understand the references to his injury history if he’d pulled a hamstring, but he severely sprained an ankle sliding into second base. It was an impact injury that could’ve happened to anyone at any time and had nothing to do with a history of maladies.

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Keys to 2013: Toronto Blue Jays

Starting Pitching Key: Josh Johnson

There’s a perception that Johnson is injury prone. The term “injury prone” on the low end automatically makes one think of Carl Pavano as an example of someone who has simply not wanted to play; on the “he just gets hurt a lot” level, there’s Chris Carpenter.

Johnson is in neither category. He had Tommy John surgery and missed most of 2007 and half of 2008. He started 14 games in 2008, 33 games in 2009 and 28 in 2010. In 2011, he had a shoulder problem and could’ve returned to pitch late in the season, but because the Marlins were out of contention, it didn’t make sense. He didn’t require surgery and it was classified as a “right shoulder inflammation.”

In 2012 he started 31 games.

That’s not injury prone.

Johnson is one of the best pitchers in baseball when he’s at the top of his game and is a free agent at the end of the 2013 season. He’ll want to have a massive year and the Blue Jays need him to be the anchor if their flurry of moves will bear fruition.

Relief Pitching Key: Sergio Santos

For a championship contending team, I would not feel comfortable with Casey Janssen as my closer. Janssen was solid enough as the guy getting the saves in 2012, but Santos can blow hitters away. He was one of the key acquisitions prior to the 2012 season and was out with shoulder inflammation for almost the whole year. It’s hard to recover when one of the most important new faces doesn’t contribute. In 2013, the Blue Jays need Santos more than they needed him in 2012.

Offensive Key: Jose Bautista

Bautista healthy = 45 homers and a terrifying mid-lineup presence whose production will be improved with a better supporting cast and a less haphazard manager in John Gibbons instead of the overmatched and scattershot John Farrell letting the players run wild on the bases.

Bautista injured = irreplaceable and severely damaging to the 2013 hopes for the Blue Jays.

Defensive Key: Jose Reyes

His range has been declining for years and it’s a concern as to how he’ll adapt to playing his home games on artificial turf. The Blue Jays also have 10 games on the turf in Tampa Bay. That’s 91 games. Reyes’s legs and back will take a beating even if he gets 10 or so days “off” as a DH. This will affect his defense and ability to get out on the field at all. He has to be healthy and cover the ground at shortstop.

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Giancarlo Stanton: About as Available as Heidi Klum

Would you like to date Heidi Klum?

Are you a big time actor or rock star? An investment banker with a billion dollars at your disposal? Do you have the money? The star power? The looks? In short, do you have what it takes to get the opportunity?

And it won’t just take a combination of the above factors. There are hundreds of men who have the same attributes, so you have to stand out; you have to go the extra mile; you have to be willing to withstand the scrutiny and, yes, aggravation that accompanies dating a high profile woman.

Can you handle it?

Such an analogy is similar to clubs thinking about pursuing Marlins outfielder Giancarlo Stanton.

The Marlins have said that they’ll “listen” to trade offers on Stanton and, in a baseball sense, he’s in greater demand than a supermodel.

Much like Ms. Klum or anyone will “listen” to offers from men who would like to date her, it’s going to take more than charm, looks, money, and fame to get something done. Thus far this winter, the Marlins have fired manager Ozzie Guillen and traded Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle, Josh Johnson, Emilio Bonifacio, Heath Bell and John Buck to slash their payroll from over $100 million in 2012 to around $40 million in 2013, there has been speculation that Stanton could also be had. That he’s making a pittance ($480,000 in 2012) in comparison with the players and manager they dumped and he won’t be arbitration eligible until after 2013 makes him all the more attractive a target. But these factors also render the trade talk a rumor based on nothing. They have no reason to trade him. With Stanton publicly expressing his displeasure at the gutting of the club, they’d still shown no indication that they were looking to move him, but recently they acknowledged that they’d “listen.”

But what entails “listening?” Listening means if you’re calling, you’d better be serious and prepared to give up a lot. Under no mandate to get rid of him as they were with the big contracts listed above, the Marlins can sit and wait totally uninterested in ancillary factors regarding his potential availability.

He’s unhappy? If any team has indicated that they couldn’t care less about the happiness of their players, it’s the Marlins. They don’t need him? Technically, they don’t. The fans didn’t come to the brand new Marlins Park when there was a star-studded roster, so the number of fans who will go to the games to see Stanton can probably be counted one-by-one like they were background players in an overwrought and self-pitying Michael Powell “It’s awful to a be a Mets fan” piece for the New York Times.

Stanton’s not making significant money yet and is an asset no matter what they do with him.

So what will they do with him and what would they want for him?

The talk that Stanton won’t sign a long-term contract with the Marlins is pure, uniformed randomness whether it’s conjured out of thin air or is coming from sources “close” to Stanton. At his age and in his current circumstances, if the Marlins offer him a guaranteed $50 million four full seasons before he’s a free agent, he’ll take it. With the Marlins penchant for trading players, the likelihood is that he’s not going to be a Marlin by the time free agency arrives, so a guaranteed contract is a guaranteed contract. As the 2012 Marlins proved, a list of name players doesn’t necessarily mean that the club will contend; another team might not be a better situation than the Marlins are now and in the future when all is said and done. They’ve gotten a lot of talented young players in the trades they made and aren’t as bad as they appear on paper. In fact, how much worse can they be than they were with the 69-93, dysfunctional, patched together band of mercenaries they were in 2012?

There are numerous teams that have the goods to get Stanton, but are they willing to surrender that bounty? For a player like Stanton, who resembles a young Dave Winfield and has gotten off to a faster start in his career than the Hall of Famer, what would be a reasonable return in a trade? The Marlins wouldn’t be out of line to expect three top tier, blue chip prospects; two very good prospects; plus a veteran signed through 2013 and another veteran signed through 2014 for the Marlins to spin off and accrue more prospects. In the aftermath, the Marlins could look at the trading of Stanton as having garnered them 10-12 players they would have locked up long-term in exchange for one, with 7-9 of them being first round quality.

Are there teams that have the goods—prospects and veterans with expiring contracts—to get Stanton? Of course. Will any pay the price? Maybe. But they’d better know what they’re sacrificing and understand that the long-term consequences may not make it worthwhile.

Yes, Stanton’s available. The question, like pursuing a supermodel, is whether or not it’s worth it if they manage to pull it off.

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The R.A. Dickey Trade Part III—Desperation or Progression for the Blue Jays?

Since replacing J.P. Ricciardi as Blue Jays’ GM, Alex Anthopoulos has done many things that garnered him credit for running his club the “right” way by combining old-school scouting with new age stats; for showing aggressiveness when the time called for it; and for being fearless. The Blue Jays, in that time, were rebuilding and reloading; clearing salaries and planning for the “future.” They had John Farrell, a stat-based manager with a sterling reputation; they’d accumulated prospects that were just about ready to take the next step forward and, if everything went well, would contend in 2012.

But again, as is the possibility with a club that doesn’t spend a lot of money and is relying on the development of young players, the 2012 Blue Jays were ravaged by injuries and inconsistency, fell from 81-81 to 73-89 and sat by impotently as the Orioles came from nowhere to make the playoffs. After so many years of building for the “future,” when was that “future” going to come? For so long, the Blue Jays have been frozen in place or moving backwards, shoving the rock up the hill only to see it come tumbling back down again, many times right on top of them.

With a bolt of lightning, the Marlins’ latest fire sale led to the Blue Jays acquiring Josh Johnson, Mark Buehrle, Jose Reyes, Emilio Bonifacio, and John Buck for Henderson Alvarez, Yunel Escobar and prospects. After that, with the decision to try and win now essentially made, they surrendered two more top prospects, Travis d’Arnaud and Noah Syndergaard, to the Mets to get reigning National League Cy Young Award winner R.A. Dickey. They signed Dickey to a contract extension worth $25 million to complete the trade.

This isn’t a spending spree for its own sake nor is it a drastic philosophical deviation from one strategy to the other, but it’s more of a realization that the time to go for it is now. The Yankees and Red Sox are shells of what they were. The Orioles overachieved in 2012. The Rays are still fighting payroll constraints. With the extra Wild Card, the door is wide open for a team like the Blue Jays to move up.

Farrell was the equivalent of a replaceable teen idol—he was there because he fit the suit, the fans screamed when they saw him, and he couldn’t actually do any of the things a manager needs to do well. His results were disastrous in every respect and there’s a palpable relief that he’s gone. He’s been replaced by the former Blue Jays’ manager John Gibbons who was horribly underrated for his strategic acumen and is a sound, unexpected hiring.

Having seen firsthand the risks of trading a star pitcher Roy Halladay and, in the subsequent series of deals, winding up with Kyle Drabek (having just undergone his second Tommy John surgery), Anthony Gose, and d’Arnaud, they are rightfully dubious of prospects and their projections.

They didn’t alter strategies on the fly and make panicky maneuvers for Anthopoulos to try and save his job. Nor did they show desperation and haphazardly try to take advantage of the weakness in their division. They’ve made a natural progression based on opportunity and availability.

There’s a difference between the Blue Jays’ winter refurbishing and a Marlins-type spending spree designed to validate a beautiful new ballpark with an owner, Jeffrey Loria, elusively hovering in the dark ready to pull the plug and backtrack on promises and commitments.

There’s a difference between the Blue Jays’ flurry of acquisitions and the Angels signing Josh Hamilton, reportedly on orders of ownership, in order to take some of the spotlight away from their crosstown rivals, the Dodgers.

There’s a difference between the Blue Jays being decisive and the Dodgers new, endless amounts of cash netting Zack Greinke as a free agent and providing them the ability to absorb the contracts of Carl Crawford, Adrian Gonzalez and Josh Beckett from the Red Sox.

What these clubs and the Blue Jays have done are totally independent of each other.

The simple narrative is that the Blue Jays have chosen to spend with the big boys, but the reality is that they built up the farm system to give themselves the assets to acquire players when they were ready to win. Did they expect it to happen this quickly? Probably not, but Athopoulos was allowed to take on those contracts—many of which are heavily backloaded—and for the first time in 20 years, they have a viable chance to win. The waters parted to open a path and they took it. It’s not a change in the blueprint, but adapting to the situation. Now they’re ready to contend.

The Blue Jays haven’t made the playoffs since their second straight World Series win in 1993. They have a rabid and loyal fanbase and now they now have the goods to make another run—with similar star-level talent to their title-winning teams—two decades later. If they pull it off, the only people who are going to care about the money they spent are the same constituency whose metrics aren’t about winning, but about doing it cheaper than the other guy to prove how smart they are. That faction has become increasingly marginalized into what it truly is: a small, fringe group that shouts loudly into the wind. If the Blue Jays play up to their potential, the money they spent or the prospects they surrendered will be irrelevant because, in the end, it’s about winning. Now the Blue Jays have the goods to do it not just on paper and with best case scenarios, but with superior on-field talent.

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Link to Radio Appearance On Breakin’ the Norm

My recent appearance with Les Norman on Breakin’ the Norm is now available to listen to via podcast on Les’s site here.

Miraculously (or not) I wound up being right about Mike Napoli winding up with the Red Sox. We discussed other goings on in Boston, the Blue Jays trade with the Marlins for Josh Johnson, Jose Reyes, et al., the Marlins mess, the Mets, Zack Greinke, the Angels, free agents, trades and much more. Click on the link and check it out.

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The Marlins: Promises, Lies and Complaints

The Marlins name should be changed to the Merlins given how quickly and completely they made their entire 2012 roster disappear. In the aftermath of the trade (still pending approval) that sent Josh Johnson, Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle, John Buck and Emilio Bonifacio to the Blue Jays for Yunel Escobar, Adeiny Hechavarria, Henderson Alvarez, Jeff Mathis and prospects, Giancarlo Stanton said the following on Twitter:

Alright, I’m pissed off!!! Plain & Simple

Stanton’s understandable reaction turned viral and has been analyzed, dissected, and repeated as an entity unto itself. He’s said nothing since.

Now Reyes and Buehrle are saying that the Marlins broke a verbal promise that they wouldn’t be part of a housecleaning as has happened in the past.

Do they have a right to complain, or is this a combination of self-importance, naiveté, blissful “don’t ask/don’t tell” ignorance, and after-the-fact allegations?

Stanton’s tweet was a reaction and nothing more. As a player entering his fourth year in the big leagues, he has zero recourse. He can ask to be traded and the Marlins can say no. He can express his unhappiness—as he did—and the fans and media can use it as Exhibit A as to what the Marlins players think, but under full team control, Stanton has no options. In fact, the Marlins might sign Stanton to a long-term contract as a conciliatory gesture to placate MLB and their few fans by putting forth the impression of “trying”. Of course that doesn’t mean Stanton won’t be traded once he starts making big money, but it’s slightly more palatable to Stanton and everyone else than Stanton’s visceral response and the Marlins saying, “Yeah? So?”

Big money and contracts are the keys to the silly laments made by Reyes and Buehrle. Did they really—really?!?—believe Jeffrey Loria and David Samson when they promised that they wouldn’t trade them if they signed with the Marlins? You can say anything you want about Loria, Samson and the manner in which they’ve used technicalities and gray areas to behave as baseball robber barons and get a new ballpark; convince players to sign with them under the pretense that this time it would be different; that they’re in it for the long-term; but don’t be surprised when they’re exposed as having said what they needed to say to get the girl in bed, promised to call the next day, and never did.

If there were clear indicators as to what the Marlins planned to do, it was: A) that they made these promises, yet refused to put the language into the contracts to guarantee they stuck to it; B) that they backloaded the contracts to the degree that they did.

Reyes’s contract is as follows: 2012: $10 million; 2013: $10 million; 2014: $16 million; 2015-2017: $22 million; 2018: $22 million option with $4 million buyout.

Buehrle’s is similar: 2012: $6 million; 2013: $11 million; 2014: $18 million; 2015: $19 million.

Huge escalations of salaries, no no-trade clause, and the Marlins history place the onus squarely on the players for believing the “guarantee” for which there were no legal means to make sure it was adhered to. If there was this guarantee that they wouldn’t be traded, why couldn’t it be written into the contract? Here’s why: the Marlins had it in mind that they were going to do this at some point. It might not have been this quickly, but there was always that overwhelming likelihood. The Marlins policy of not giving out no-trade clauses is an excuse, not a reason. Players with multiple options and the ability to tell the interested clubs that the no-trade clause will be in the contract or else they’re not signing get the no-trade clause. Both Reyes and Buehrle knew or should have known precisely what they were signing up for. They got their guaranteed money, but invited the risk that the Marlins could turn around and trade them to a place like Toronto where they had no interest in going. It was a gamble against the house and they lost. The promise isn’t the relevant factor. That the players were stupid enough to believe it is.

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The Marlins-Blue Jays Trade, Part III—Sidelights

Let’s look at the the Marlins-Blue Jays trade from the perspective of those affected by it, positively or negatively, and those who insert themselves into it.

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Social media experts and critics

The self-proclaimed experts on social media reacted with shock and disdain not only that the Marlins did this, but that they didn’t get Travis d’Arnaud from the Blue Jays in the deal as if they knew who he was. He’s a recognizable name to them and nothing more; if they did see him, the vast majority of them wouldn’t know what they were looking at, nor would they be able to interpret his statistics to determine how truly viable a prospect he is. Perhaps the Marlins asked for him and the Blue Jays said no; perhaps the Blue Jays preferred the lower level players they got in the deal; or maybe the Marlins are happy with the young catcher Rob Brantly whom they acquired from the Tigers in the trade that also netted them Jacob Turner in exchange for Anibal Sanchez and Omar Infante.

To a lesser degree, it falls in line with fans watching games and reacting to strategies with descriptive histrionics like, “*FACEPALM*” when Jim Leyland plays Delmon Young regularly; or Joe Girardi and Larry Rothschild choose leave Boone Logan in to pitch to a righty; or during the NFL draft when a guy sitting on his couch wearing his team’s jersey declares that he’d take Robert Griffin III over Andrew Luck and throws a fit when the opposite happens—the people actually doing the jobs know more than you do. For the guy on his couch, it’s a diversion; for the ones running the clubs, if they don’t make the correct (or at least explainable) decision, they’re going to get fired.

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The media and the Marlins

The glaring response amid the outcry came from Joel Sherman of the New York Post. Unlike the Red Sox-Dodgers trade when Sherman made a fool of himself by turning that blockbuster salary dump by the Red Sox into another indictment of the Mets, he actually made some legitimate points with the following:

Yet this was a deconstruction the Marlins needed to enact. Their roster, as constructed, was a science project gone wrong. Now they have created a layer of young talent with all of these trades — in this latest deal, executives particularly like center fielder Jake Marisnick (some Jayson Werth comps) and lefty Justin Nicolino, and anyone who saw Henderson Alvarez pitch against the Yankees knows he has a big arm.

How much of this is based on deeply held beliefs and how much is another, more subtle shot at the Mets to be true to his narrative is known only to Sherman, but given his history it’s a contrarian viewpoint with a winking dig at the Mets more than a true belief that the Marlins did the right thing. But the fact remains that, overall, he’s right. They did do the right thing.

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No one with a brain is shocked by this Marlins housecleaning

Ignoring the litany of lies and managers hired and fired by Jeffrey Loria, that the Marlins gave heavily backloaded contracts to Jose Reyes and Mark Buehrle made them mid-season trade candidates in 2013 since their escalators kicked in by 2014. They chose to trade them now rather than wait and see. John Buck and Josh Johnson are both free agents after the 2013 season. Buck isn’t very good and Johnson was going to cost a fortune to re-sign. The charade of being built for the long haul was obvious with the Marlins from the start. The players knew what they were walking into when they didn’t get the valuable no-trade clauses and received guaranteed money they probably wouldn’t get elsewhere in exchange for the likelihood of being sent to a locale they would not have selected if they’d had a choice. Buehrle and Reyes are going to get paid; Johnson, if healthy, will receive a massive contract for his services.

The perception of chicanery and Loria’s blatant disregard for anyone other than Loria is what’s grating the masses. It would’ve been more palatable for observers—chief among them the politicians in Miami who pushed through the stadium deal and baseball itself—had the Marlins tried to win in 2013, but rather than further the sham, they pulled the trigger now. That it’s going to make/save more money for Loria is part of the equation.

The Marlins baseball people have always gotten the right names in their housecleanings. In some cases, it succeeded when they received Hanley Ramirez and Sanchez for Josh Beckett; in others, it didn’t as they received Cameron Maybin and Andrew Miller as the centerpieces for Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis. This is the risk when trading for prospects. Getting talent is controllable; developing that talent is the variable. The Marlins foundation is young, cheap and quite good once we get past the messy way in which it was laid.

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The rest of baseball

The balance of power has shifted drastically. The NL East was a monster before the 2012 season started, but the Phillies age caught up to them; the Mets weren’t as bad as expected; the Nationals took their leap faster than most anticipated; and the Marlins were a disaster. Now that they’ve gutted the place, the Marlins are widely expected to be a punching bag in 2013, but truth be told with a group of young players fighting for playing time and jobs, they’ll be at least as competitive as the 69-93 apathy-tinged monstrosity that played out the string for most of the summer.

The American League saw the balance of power shift East to West. While it was supposed to be a two-team race for supremacy between the Angels and Rangers, the Athletics stunned both by winning the division. The Mariners young pitching and money to spend will make them a darkhorse in 2013. The Tigers just signed Torii Hunter for their star-studded lineup. There’s no longer a waltz into the playoffs for 2-3 teams from the AL East.

The Yankees and Red Sox are in moderate to severe disarray with the Yankees having limited money to spend and now three teams in their division that have a rightful claim to being better than they are. The Red Sox purge excised the contracts of Beckett, Carl Crawford, and Adrian Gonzalez. At the time it was an acknowledgement that the construction of the team wasn’t going to work and they intended to start over. It’s eerily similar to the situation the Marlins found themselves in, but the Marlins didn’t give it another try as the Red Sox did following their winter of 2010 spending spree and subsequent 2011 failure, and the Red Sox are going to take the money they saved and put it back into the team while the Marlins aren’t.

The Yankees have done nothing thus far in the winter and are trapped with contracts like that of Alex Rodriguez clogging up their arteries. Brian Cashman is getting what he wanted and learning that being the would-be genius isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. He chafed at the notion that the Yankees teams he helped build were creatures of financial might and longed to be seen in the industry in the category of Billy Beane and Theo Epstein as architects of winning franchises under a budget and with intelligent acquisitions rather than raiders of resources for those that could no longer afford them. Well, he’s getting what he wanted and the results are not good. Under the mandate of getting the payroll down to $189 million by 2014, he can’t take on the contracts that the Blue Jays and Alex Anthopoulos just did. The pitchers he’d hoped to develop to provide low-cost production have either been mediocre or busts entirely. They’re waiting and hoping that Andy Pettitte returns and has another year in him; that Derek Jeter can recover from his ankle injury; that they get something from A-Rod; that Mariano Rivera can rebound from knee surgery at age 43; that Hiroki Kuroda will take a one-year deal to come back (he won’t); that they get something from Michael Pineda.

Do you really expect all of this to happen in a division made even tougher by the Blue Jays’ trades; the Orioles’ improvement; the Rays’ talent; and the Red Sox money to spend and determination to get back to their basics? The Yankees are in a worse position than the Marlins and even the Phillies were because if the season is spiraling in July of 2013, they’ll be trapped by those contracts and the fan anger that they won’t be able to make those conceding trades for the future. This is the team they have and the division they’re in and neither bode well.

Cashman wanted it and he got it. He’s so arrogant that it’s doubtful that he regrets it, but he should. And he will.

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