Michael Bradley wrote:Yes, I think so.
So let me get this straight; you think the Yanks would have made the playoffs if the Rays hadn't improved, but there was no appreciable difference between the record the Yanks had against the Rays was actually better than the year before. So how did the Rays improving hurt the Yanks when the Yanks as a team fared worse than they had on the years on either side of that season?
If the Yanks had won 89 games, as they did (the Rays' improvement meant nothing to NYY), then they would still have been behind the 95-win BoSox, so they wouldn't have won the division. They'd also still have been behind the division leaders, so they'd have contended for the wild card... but those losses would have gone somewhere. They didn't come at the hands of the Yanks, so it's just as likely that the Twins (who had one less win than the Yanks) could have taken it.
There's absolutely NO guarantee that the Rays improvement was the cause of the Yankees failing to make the playoffs. It certainly HURT, but New York was bad enough that they'd have barely made it if they did in fact make it at all. What if the Jays' record was better against the Rays that year? We had 86 wins, we could maybe have made up those 3 wins as easily as the Yanks.
Suggesting they only made the playoffs because the Yankees and Red Sox did not play up to par is very convenient. Winning 97 games with a minuscule payroll, even if the Yanks and Red Sox had some issues, is pretty significant.
Nah, I'm not suggesting that's the primary reason. Again, since their record against the Yanks was the same as in a strong year, it didn't impact them that much. It's still significant that the Yanks weren't playing well, though; I was responding to the notion that the Rays went as far as they did and so too can the Jays on a middling payroll. I don't think the Rays would have beaten the 07 Yanks in the playoffs, and certainly not this year's edition.
Yeah, when they drafted Carlos Pena.....oh wait, they got him for nothing as a free agent that no one wanted. But of course, there was Kazmir.....nope, that was a trade. Bartlett? Throw-in via the Garza trade. James Shields? 16th round in the draft. Their 3 best relievers in 2008 (Howell, Balfour, and Wheeler)? Trade, trade, and trade. Edwin Jackson? Trade. Navarro? Trade. Ben Zobrist? Trade. Matt Garza? Trade. You starting to see a trend here?
Your point?
Longoria and Crawford and a bunch of other significant talent came from draft picks that the Jays never had a chance to make. That ends this part of the discussion. Yes, their organization made very good moves, but they still had a huge chunk of their team built from draft positions we never reach. Yes, unlike Kansas, they happened to draft well and that reflects well on the organization. Maybe if we had similar picks, we'd have ALSO drafted well. But the draft excuse is not "weak" by any means. Yes, as an expansion team 11 years ago, they were expected to be dismal and that gave them an advantage...
But it's still AN ADVANTAGE. Drafting higher is better than not, all other things being equal. You have access to more talent and your choices are less limited by the selections of other teams.
Ricciardi inherited the best pitcher in baseball. He inherited Carlos Delgado, Vernon Wells, Kelvim Escobar, Chris Carpenter, Alex Rios, Dustin McGowan, Orlando Hudson, etc, etc. If he was as creative/successful with trades as the Rays GM is/was, then maybe the talent pool on this team would be a lot deeper right now. Not to mention when he had a top 6 pick he chose Romero, who while turning his career around is far from a Tulowitzki, Maybin, Bruce, etc, type talent.
Maybe. Of course, the finances of the team haven't been consistent during the entirety of Ricciardi's career, and our ability/willingness to pay draft picks hasn't been there consistently. Again, money isn't the ONLY issue, but it IS an issue. Failing to recognize that is foolish.
I find the excuse making to rationalize Toronto's failure in this division to be sickening, personally. Ricciardi has made a lot of mistakes over the years but we just gloss over that and go back to the division excuse. Let's hold the right people accountable here. It's not Major League Baseball that is screwing Toronto, it's the people Toronto has running their franchise.
I don't gloss over Ricciardi's mistakes, which you should know by now.
But just as you say ignoring the mistakes Ricciardi makes is wrong, ignoring that we are in the worst position in baseball to be in as far as division opponents is similarly wrong. We have two of the three most successful teams in baseball ahead of us annually. That means we're almost guaranteed to be fighting for the wildcard. We're not going to beat the Yankees unless we a) match them in payroll or b) catch them in a perfect storm situation the way the Rays did (high draft picks, clever trades and a Yanks down year all coming at once).
So that leaves us fighting with the Red Sox, who are annually superior to us and carry a better management team and a higher payroll. If you can't see how that negatively impacts us, and how that puts us in a hole that only other AL East teams has to contend with, then you're blind.
Yes, absolutely, the Jays could contend with Boston more effectively without the decisions that the management team has made. We should have sent Godfrey out to pasture for demanding Wells be paid that way, and the Ryan mistake was a big one. So too the Frank Thomas one.
But would we have been a 95+ win team on a regular basis? I doubt it pretty strongly.
Delgado was a FA we didn't re-sign because of our payroll; could we have traded him? Maybe. Right when he had max value, it made no sense to trade him because we were building AROUND him. Then after that period ended, he started getting injured, and that always makes people worried, especially if the guy's making 18, 19 million the way Delgado was back then. You talk about creativity in the abstract and that's fine, but it's not always easy to move players with that kind of money involved, especially if they're not 100% healthy, certainly not for a return that would have been especially meaningful to us NOW.
We low-balled Carpenter with a minor-league offer and he said no. Then he sat out an entire season, then missed the WS in 2004 because of more health issues. Then he was done in 2007. Etc, etc, you know the story, but the point is, getting value out of him would have been difficult to handle effectively. He's played 4 seasons in 7 years, wasn't very good with us to begin with and was injured in his final season with us.
What did Carpenter do as a Jay that would have brought us significant value? As a Jay, he got smacked around routinely, he was a totally different pitcher than he's been in St. Louis. Some of it is from the Roid Era, certainly, but he got hit a lot, not just homers, but 10+ H/9 isn't a friendly thing to see, nor were his walk rates, etc, etc. He wasn't a guy you could turn to and get significant value from. He had a solid season in 2001 that had him pegged as the "starter of the future" with Halladay, but that's not actually a ringing endorsement.
I don't have anything to say about Escobar, that one definitely works for you, the same way Ryan, Thomas and Wells do (not that Wells was JP's fault, though).
The point is, though, a few moves would have given us a little bit more financial flexibility, maybe some prospects to fill out our comparatively weak system, perhaps a mid-impact player or two... But would we really still compete with Boston that well?
There were a couple of seasons where, if we were healthy, we'd have looked a little different, but mostly, those weren't the seasons where we were around 85 wins, so that's less important.
I can see how we could have done things to put ourselves into a better position financially NOW, but I stil don't see how we would revise our history to make the Jays seriously competitive in the division without a significant payroll.
