Rogers will begin spending the day the media in this market calls them
Rogers will begin spending the day the last person who was willing to be patient for 19 years calls them on it
Rogers will begin spending the day everyone realizes that it won't be any easier and certainly not any cheaper to sign big name free agents in two, three, four years time
Rogers will begin spending when it realizes the entire Toronto market is fed up with its refusal to give one of the brightest general managers all the tools he needs to give us a contender
In the meantime, I give you how it's being done in Washington. When our pansy media stops playing nice with Big Daddy Rogers, and lays it out for the city this way, we'll get action. Coincidence, I'm sure, but action followed in Washington just hours after this was published.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/na ... tml?sub=AR
Thomas Boswell
Columnist
Nationals have more cash coming in, but refuse to spend it
The Washington Post - After making the Nationals respectable in two seasons, General Manager Mike Rizzo said the team was a player or two away from contention. But it seems ownership has not opened the purse strings to sign any significant players.
Now, half the winter merchandise is off the shelves, Rizzo is empty-handed, and the Nats could end up with one of game’s worst offseasons.
Other teams act when fresh cash is coming — either because of a new ballpark, such as the Marlins, or a new TV deal, which helped the Angels and Rangers justify their current big spending on Albert Pujols and Darvish, respectively.
Three weeks ago, the Nats had so many possibilities for improvement in so many areas and through so many different methods. But until you make your first moves, you can’t get to the rest of the puzzle.
Instead, they’ve done nothing except sign washed-up center fielder Mike Cameron, 39, to a minor league deal. Was that a flare from Rizzo? Venezuela rescued Wilson Ramos in two days; who’ll free the Nats’ GM?
In baseball, no pitfall is more common than becoming infatuated with your own young, unproven, inexpensive players. For example, you look at Ross Detwiler, Brad Peacock and Tommy Milone and figure one of them most likely will become a 100-game winner. Sorry, tilt! Not how it works. They’re nice prospects. But odds are that none ever has a 15-win season. Buehrle and Oswalt already have won 161 and 159 games, respectively — and each may win 50 more.
The other classic snare for owners is to delude themselves that spending huge sums will be much easier — so much “clearer” — in some vague future year when the free agent grass is greener. Most years, the Nats blundered both ways. They’re halfway to doing it again.
When your GM, in two years, has taken your pitching staff from the 28th-best ERA in baseball (5.00) to seventh-best (3.58), and he says, “We need a top-of-the-rotation starter to go with Strasburg and Zimmermann,” the only correct answer is, “Thank you for turning our hideous pitching into a strength so quickly — all pre-Strasburg — while also developing such a promising pipeline. Looks good to us, but if you think we need even more pitching, what do we know? Go do it.”
However, here’s what’s worse that not opening the checkbook for free agents — and it’s what I suspect is happening now. If your baseball people say: “We finally have the prospects to trade for a key piece. We’ll have to give up lots of promising cheap labor and we’ll have to pay the new star immediately. But it’s the right move,” then the owner should say, “Yes!”
A timely “yes,” a strong predisposition to trust the recommendations of top executives, is exactly what the Lerners have never provided the Nats. It remains their flaw. It’s always the same: Start from zero and build an ironclad logical case, full of slides and graphics, so Ted will cut the check. Many who’ve worked for the Nats say the same thing, in the same words: Their toughest negotiation isn’t with agent Scott Boras but with Ted Lerner.
Perhaps Nationals fans should apply a similarly high threshold of proof before they sign their checks to the team. Make the club demonstrate its case. Enact the winter strategy they so clearly laid out. And, with tens of millions of new TV dollars a year about to rush through the front door, it’s a plan the team can obviously afford — but, so far, has done absolutely nothing to execute.
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