Even at the halfway point of the spring training of his dreams, Alex Anthopoulos has restless nights.
"A million things," the Toronto Blue Jays general manager says, when asked what interrupts his sleep now. "It’s almost in a sick and twisted way, that if something’s not keeping me awake something is wrong. Knowing how hard it is to win. Knowing the teams that we’re going up against -- not to say that we don’t have talent and that we don’t have a chance to compete against those teams. It’s not the money and the resources. It’s the brains in those front offices that we’re going up against….
"There’s a ton of performance risk because of the volatility of the youth. We don’t have a bunch of players that have done it five years in a row."
It is part of his job to fret, to take the long view, to bring a bit of perspective into the conversation. But all of that has been tough so far this spring, as the young Blue Jays have been the talk of baseball.
It’s not just the sterling record so far in Grapefruit League play; it’s the depth, the layers of talent, the wealth of players apparently just a year or two away. Only the mild groin pull suffered by Brett Lawrie last Friday while running the bases with wild abandon, qualifies as anything approaching bad news.
Anthopoulos, though, knows the numbers. He knows that even the brightest prospects can take awhile to reach Major League level, and that even once they get there, setbacks are the norm rather than the exception. "80 per cent of players who get to arbitration -- that’s three years of major league service -- are optioned at least once," he says. "Almost everybody goes down. And that’s what tempers my enthusiasm, or makes my expectations a little more realistic."
This past off-season was a tough lesson in the whole area of perception versus reality. The Blue Jays hierarchy seemed caught off guard by a suddenly energized -- and angst-filled -- fan base, and Anthopoulos found himself as the point man, trying to explain how the Blue Jays had handled the Yu Darvish posting sweepstakes, and why they weren’t players in the Prince Fielder auction.
"It was the first time I went through it," he says. "But I’ve been a sports fan. I’ve been exposed to so much of it whether it was general managers in other sports or general managers here. I know it’s par for the course….There are so many times I’d love to just like to come out and say everything that goes into every trade, everything that goes into every roster decision. There’s a lot of times there’s a health concern. I can’t come out and talk about a player’s health. Or there’s a make-up concern or a clubhouse concern. I’m always going to protect the player. I do a lot behind closed doors."
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