torontoaces04 wrote:The way our roster stands currently, we'd be lucky to go 81 and 81 again. The Jays over-achieved last season. The Yankees have certainly improved, and the Rays nucleus is a year older. The Red-Sox vastly under-achieved last season, and the same could be said for the Orioles.
Forget about being the 4th best team in the division, I'm just hoping we don't end up 5th. My guess as our roster stands currently, 75-87.
First, if that's your stance on the current roster, why would you want to spend FA money on Prince and/or Darvish? What is the absolute best you could hope for out of those two combined? 10 wins? So now you've spent an extra 40m per year and you have, by your reckoning, an 85 win team. Okay, so now they just need a 130-140m payroll to get to 90 wins and 150-160 to really compete, especially since you've already set a pretty firm bar on how much you're willing to spend for an extra win or 5. You think maybe if Rogers actually opened up the purse strings and that outcome occurred, they might regret it to the long-term detriment of us Jays fans?
Second, do you remember our opening day roster a year ago? The one that ended up 81-81? A quick refresher:
Arencibia
Lind
Hill
Encarnacion
Escobar
Snider
Davis
Bautista
Encarnacion
Molina
McDonald
Nix
Patterson
Romero
Drabek
Cecil
Litsch
Reyes
Rauch
Janssen
Frasor
Camp
Villanueva
Rzepczynski
Purcey
DL
Morrow
Dotel
Francisco
Compare that to what is projected already for this year and you'll find, at a minimum, 10 upgrades without factoring in internal stuff, like Arencibia continuing to improve or Lind bouncing back or Morrow putting it all together. There's a long time between now and October is all.
Granted, not all upgrades are equal by any stretch of the imagination (Pujols over Trumbo is obviously a lot bigger than Santos over Rauch), but you'd be incredibly hard-pressed to find other clubs with that amount of widespread and consensus improvement. That's one of the reasons AA has been jokingly (at least when I do it I'm kidding...mostly) revered as some sort of demigod until recently.
Still, I can see this club going 75-87 under the right conditions. Unlike the biggest spenders the edge of success will always be thinner for small and mid-market clubs. TB for example has had fantastic health and results, but they straddle a razor thin line to maintain their success (and do a remarkable job, I'm not knocking them by any stretch).
One thing that the money most definitely buys is insurance. To me, the benefit of the extra 50-100m is not a higher ceiling (okay that's inaccurate, but that's not what they're spending for) it's the dramatically higher floor. If the Yanks all had career years they'd be the best baseball team in the history of sports and would struggle to lose 30 games, but that's never going to happen. What 200m gets them is a ton of wiggle room. No ARod for 50 games, no sweat. Same for anybody else on their team. Take off 3 guys from the rotation for a month at the same time, they'll still hang around.
So sure, the Jays hit a few extra bumps, not even statistically super improbable ones, and they're looking at a rough season, but equally if those bumps turn into positives and you've just swung a 75 team into a 90 team easy, at least that's how I see it. It would take a colossal confluence of bad juju for the Yanks or Sox to fall to 75 games, but 90 is well within their margins. Your projections seem to forego even the possibility of 90 being in this team's grasp as currently constructed or even as it's improved the way it has the last two years. If that's the case, I don't understand why the call for Rogers to pony up on a loser.
