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Anthopoulos is buying now, as tough as the season was. People can throw up trial balloons about trading Jose Bautista while he’s still dominant or trading Mark Buehrle or Jose Reyes to shed the salaries, but that’s not the plan. The Blue Jays aren’t planning to disassemble this group, failures and all. Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion are under contract for two more seasons, for a preposterous combined cost of $24 million. The consensus is Anthopoulos is safe for now, so he thinks the window stretches that long, at least.

“At least two. At least two,” says Anthopoulos. “A big part of why we did everything was to capitalize on players like Jose and Edwin, and that hasn’t changed. Two years is a long time . . . there’s no reason why we wouldn’t want those guys around, and I’m hopeful and optimistic that they would want to stay around, too.”

For that to happen, Alex Anthopoulos has to succeed within the box. The Jays have bats and they have young arms, and that’s something. Marcus Stroman is already a pro; Drew Hutchison has unexplored ability; Daniel Norris has that pretty curveball; Aaron Sanchez has room to grow, too.

“I think Aaron Sanchez could come into the rotation next year, health permitting, and be a very effective starter, because I believe he’s going to throw strikes and put the ball on the ground, and that’s going to allow him to pitch deep into games with tremendous stuff,” Anthopoulos says.

The Jays think they added some things that helped their pitchers stay healthy this year; they only used eight starters, and hope it can be replicated. There’s upside, sure.

And then there’s the box. The team’s central money issue has been well-documented; the Jays have a top-10 payroll, and Anthopoulos likes to point that out. He never complains.

But there’s no extra money. They had to get players to defer money to sign Ervin Santana at the start of the season, and then Santana bolted for Atlanta anyway. The Toronto Sun’s Bob Elliott, citing eight players, reported that Edward Rogers, the scion of the Rogers empire, told the team there would be money available at the deadline if the team was close. The team was close. Nothing happened.

Anthopoulos, for his part, insists the deadline wasn’t about the money.

Michael Bradley wrote:The part about Sanchez in the rotation is interesting. My gut feeling is that they will use Sanchez as closer due to financial restraints and lack of options, but if AA is being sincere about putting him in the rotation, then I'm glad he has some foresight rather than playing for 2015 only. With that said, I don't think it's wise to start him in the big league rotation right away, as 30 innings of great relief work doesn't change the four years of mediocre SP performance and troublesome command issues he had in that role. Let him earn his way on.

Lateral Quicks wrote:If they're out of it by the all-star break next year, they'd be stupid not to trade them. Arguably they're foolish not to blow it up right now and go for a quick rebuild with all these young arms and a return haul of young position players.