Dave Naylor: Assessing money matters for the Blue Jays

[polo007]

Hey guys,

According to Dave Naylor of TSN, the Toronto Blue Jays shouldn't necessarily to be prepared to spend more going into next season. It's just that pointing to payroll as the reason why this team has missed the post-season for more than two decades is short-sighted and misses the bigger issue with this team, which is the ability identify and develop major league talent and sign players to contracts that provide the best return on investment.

http://www.tsn.ca/naylor-assessing-mone ... ys-1.91353

This season, the New York Yankees, Philadelphia Phillies and Boston Red Sox had the second, third and fourth-highest opening day payrolls in baseball, at $202, $180, and $162 million respectively. And as of today, those teams sit 14, 21, and 26 games respectively out of first place within their divisions. In the case of the Red Sox and Phillies, both teams will finish in last place this season.

That's $544 million spent on players to finish a combined 61 games out of first place.

Which isn't to suggest that spending in baseball doesn't affect overall performance. Of the six division leaders in baseball right now, only the Cardinals and Orioles are in first place without outspending all of their division rivals based on opening day payrolls.

But among the four wild card teams in place now - Kansas City, Oakland, Pittsburgh and San Francisco rank 19th, 25th, 27th and seventh. That tells you that baseball's intent to make the post-season accessible to teams that couldn't spend their way to the top of a division is working.

It's just not working for the Blue Jays.

The Blue Jays shouldn't necessarily to be prepared to spend more going into next season. It's just that pointing to payroll as the reason why this team has missed the post-season for more than two decades is shortsighted and misses the bigger issue with this team, which is the ability identify and develop major league talent and sign players to contracts that provide the best return on investment.

The Blue Jays opened this season with a payroll $21 million more than the St. Louis Cardinals, $25 million more than the Orioles, $40 million more than Kansas City, $49 million more than Oakland and $64 million more than Pittburgh. All of those teams are currently in a playoff position.

The Washington Nationals - with the best record in the National League and a 16-game lead in the NL East, have done so with a payroll just over $2 million more than the Blue Jays.

The bottom line is this: focusing on payroll in fact obstructs the flaws in how this team has been built. So if you're a fan fed up with the Blue Jays' mediocrity, what this team is willing to spend should be well down your list of concerns.

[Sifu]

While I agree to a large extent, it does not help that the Jays play in one of the most competitive divisions in baseball and the unbalanced schedule emphasizes this. This year is a down year for the division but overall still managed to win more games than losses combined in the division. And that's a down year!

Jays in any other division would have resulted in multiple playoff appearances in the past two decades instead of a prolonged playoff drought.

That's not to say the team isn't flawed. It is. But let's look at all the factors and not just cherry pick the ones that support a particular narrative.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using RealGM Forums mobile app

[satyr9]

This isn't an article. He literally could've written 1,000 words of, "The sky is blue. Fire is hot. I like cookies" and it would've had more insight and actual information than this strange piece of redundancy. Sports involves money. Lots of money. The Jays have and spend money. So do other teams. Sometimes teams that spend money win games. Sometimes they lose games. Wow.

[Schad]

This isn't an article. He literally could've written 1,000 words of, "The sky is blue. Fire is hot. I like cookies" and it would've had more insight and actual information than this strange piece of redundancy. Sports involves money. Lots of money. The Jays have and spend money. So do other teams. Sometimes teams that spend money win games. Sometimes they lose games. Wow.

Or he could've skipped all of the fancy word talkin' and just posted one of the many, many graphs made every single season showing the correlation between wins and payroll, which invariably breaks down to "more money helps, kinda".

There is an interesting angle there: the correlation between wins and payroll has been declining, partially thanks to a couple outliers on either end, and partially because smaller-market teams have a blueprint for the financial metagame courtesy of Beane, Friedman et al. But Naylor doesn't touch on that, because Naylor has a potato what where his head oughta been.

[Dan2087]

Yea, lack of player development is a big problem with this team, we know that. But we have championship caliber players here right now, so rather than surrounding them with scrubs, and due to our limited options on the farm, we need to spend money. Otherwise we are wasting our best players' primes

We decided to go all in last year, holes have been identified, why not spend to fill them rather than abandon ship prematurely and hope for the best