Our "Core Values" series marches on with the Toronto Blue Jays, who underwent baseball's biggest facelift this winter. Injuries played a major role in their 89-loss season last year, and the response was to go out and make one of the largest trades in recent history. That wasn't enough, so they then acquired the reigning NL Cy Young Award winner as well.
The roster overhaul was accompanied by a new manager. John Farrell was essentially traded to the Red Sox after two years of running the Blue Jays and his replacement, John Gibbons, is a familiar face. Gibbons managed the club from 2004-08 and general manager Alex Anthopoulos preached the need for accountability when discussing the hire. The inmates had begun to run the asylum under Farrell in 2012.
If you haven't been with us throughout the series, I recommend the following explanation of our methodology. For those who have been with us all along, feel free to skip ahead.
What's a core? For our purposes, a team's core comprises a "cornerstone player," a "face of the franchise" and then the "future face of the franchise."
So what's a "cornerstone player"? For starters, it's one of the best players on the roster and perhaps the very best player on the roster. Beyond that, though, it's the player whom the organization has identified as the talent around which to build by signing him to a long-term deal. In other words, they've backed their faith in the player's abilities with the most powerful statement of all: lots of redeemable U.S. currency. Not only do they see this player as central to their current aims but also to their designs on future contention.
What's a "face of the franchise"? He -- and we're getting subjective here -- is the player who most prominently embodies the franchise in question. He's that player whom you think about when you think about this team. Is he the same guy as the "cornerstone"? Sometimes. But the cornerstone is primarily a financial designation. The "face" is, for lack of a better term, a cultural identifier. They're not mutually exclusive, but they're not not mutually exclusive, either. What about the word "values" that you see in the headline above? After we identify and evaluate the three elements of the core, we're going to slap a letter grade on the whole thing.
And now, on to the core of the Blue Jays.
http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/blog/eye-o ... -blue-jays
