The Toronto Blue Jays once ruled in Latin America, using their people and resources to regularly sign or trade for the best and brightest the talent-rich region had to offer.
Players like Alfredo Griffin, Tony Fernandez, George Bell, Damaso Garcia and Manny Lee were key pieces in the foundation of the franchise's glory years, with Roberto Alomar, Juan Guzman, Carlos Delgado and Alex Rios, among others, picking up from them down the road.
It was a remarkably productive pipeline, one that was pivotal in the Blue Jays' transformation from lowly expansion club to back-to-back World Series champion. But that critical connection was severed during the eight-year regime of former general manager J.P. Ricciardi, primarily for financial reasons.
Now, in a return to the organization's roots, successor Alex Anthopoulos and president Paul Beeston have made it a priority to re-establish the link. And they've been aggressive in making it happen.
"It was clearly one of our core strategies to be big in Latin America right from 1977 right until the time that I left (in 1997)," says Beeston. "There was just a different philosophy that was being used by the previous regime and we kind of moved back to looking at players around the world and believing that we have to stockpile our organization."
The decision to withdraw from Latin America under Ricciardi was driven by the lack of resources that plagued the club during the start of his reign. There is no substitute for connections, relationships and deep, deep pockets in baseball's wild west, and with tight restraints on his budget, he chose to save his bullets for the draft, focusing on lower-risk picks that better control costs and don't take as long to develop in the minors.
For a team on a budget it was a defensible approach, but it essentially shut off its access to the world's most significant talent pool outside North America. Competing against the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox in the American League East, that simply wasn't going to work.
Consider that under Ricciardi's watch, the division Goliaths incorporated or used as trade chips such players as Robinson Cano, Hanley Ramirez, Melky Cabrera and Jose Tabata. Over the same time period, the Blue Jays didn't produce a single big-leaguer signed and developed from Latin America, and the only legitimate prospect from the area remaining from his time is pitcher Henderson Alvarez, a Venezuelan signed in 2006 who pitched at single-A Dunedin this season.
That gap illustrates itself at the big-league level. Opening day rosters across the majors featured 195 Latin Americans, or 23.4 per cent of the 833 players in the majors, with the Blue Jays featuring just five of them, all obtained from outside the organization. They'll close out the year with four, including home run leader Jose Bautista, acquired in a trade with Pittsburgh in 2008.
Long read but well worth it.
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