Tanner wrote:Trading Donaldson at the deadline along with Smoak and Happ like practically everyone wanted to would not have been tanking? Unless they were getting back big league talent that could fill multiple holes at once, trading those three would have nuked the team short term. Even trading them this winter would do that, especially if Smoak's transformation extends beyond this season.
Tanking has a very specific meaning: attempting to be as bad as possible, and generally intentionally avoiding bringing in talent. That is not what anyone is suggesting. Rather, it's moving Donaldson, Happ and Smoak before they walk and we get a big pile o' nothing. That can be accompanied by efforts to get more talent, either short-term talent that can be flipped, or longer-term talent who'll be around during our next peak.
The right thing to do this trade deadline was what they did; unfortunately they didn't have enough expendable/expiring vets that were worth anything to do more of it. They added depth to the farm system while keeping their best controllable talent. Do that every season and that's how you maintain competitiveness to at least a reasonable level.
That added a little depth. A guy who has a solid chance of becoming a second division starter in the OF, a guy who might have a shot to be a #4/#5 starter, and a low-minors flier. I'm very happy with what they did, but it doesn't move the margins in any substantive way unless one of the three vastly exceeds expectations.
I brought up the Yankees a while back and it was dismissed, but they did exactly what I am suggesting above. The only exception was the Andrew Miller trade. They practically traded no prospects until this season when they saw a window, and even then they kept all their good prospects while doing it. Look at the Yankees from 2013-16. They were the definition of what you don't want the Jays to be; a middling veteran laden team whose best prospects were years away. They acquired Didi, Hicks and Castro in trades. They saw an opportunity to trade practically nothing for Chapman because of circumstances. I'd honestly rather the Jays do that with this roster, find ways to add talent when they can while waiting for prospects to come up, rather than build a talent base around the arrival of two players in A-Ball.
They did trade for Didi et al...exactly as I said we could while rebuilding! As I said in the very post to which you are responding, the idea is to move players whose years of team control are coming to an end, and acquire players with more team control. Sometimes, that means trading vets for prospects; it can also mean moving some prospects for young major leaguers.
I'm not saying anyone is suggesting that a rebuild is guaranteed to work, just like chugging along is not guaranteed to work either. I just find that saying one avenue definitely won't work while the other has a greater chance to, when the three teams people point to as being littered with young controllable talent happen to be teams that never took a step back intentionally (Dodgers, Yankees, Red Sox) to be misleading.
I don't see why the Jays can't extend Donaldson after 2018 (nothing more than five years, less if possible) and still be able to integrate Guerrero, Bichette, Alford, and others onto the roster. It's not like one is going to prevent the other.
Donaldson will be 33 and will make $30m a year if he rebounds, probably through his age 38 season. He will likely be a terrible contract within 2-3 years of signing. We should have learned something about waving massive sums of money around at old players...we're incredibly lucky that Bautista aimed for the moon when he was seeking an extension pre-2016, because otherwise we'd be paying him a fortune for years to come. And even then, there were plenty on this board that thought that he'd be good value for $25-30m through his age 40 season.
Do not pay for past performance.
