The Natural
After a turbulent decade, the Jays (and Jays fans) are slowly coming back to life, thanks to the shrewd moves of wunderkind GM Alex Anthopoulos.
BY: Danielle Groen
A sleeping baseball field is an eerily beautiful place. Two hours before the Blue Jays’ 35th home game of the season starts, a mower languidly traces circles near the warm-up pen, the sound of its motor washing over the vacant stands and echoing down from the closed dome. The AstroTurf looks like velvet, the bases like pearls, and the dirt is impeccably clean, without the whisper of a heel print.
The stadium’s management box, on the other hand, is a considerably less beautiful place. Nestled in the 200 level, smack-dab behind home plate, it is a study in grey—grey carpet, grey walls, clunky grey phones—and roughly the size of a condo balcony. A single bookshelf holds assorted tupperware full of different nuts, media guides to most of the 29 other teams and, intriguingly, a thick 2009 edition of Martin’s Annual Criminal Code. The mini-fridge contains pop, a pyramid of Bud Light cans and an impressive array of condiments.
When Alex Anthopoulos, the Jays’ 34-year-old general manager, steps into the room (putting a prompt end to my mini-fridge snooping), he immediately fills its grey confines. Decked in a blue button-down and black pants, Anthopoulos is not a huge guy, but his gesticulating hands and restless legs take up a lot of space, and his words, which pour from him at a prodigious rate, seem to spill out of the box and descend upon the empty field.
It’s not going to happen overnight. Baseball is a slow game—it takes a long time for those nine innings to unfold, and it takes a long time for a player to develop. LeBron James was drafted in 2003 and debuted with the Cavaliers approximately 14 seconds later; Nazem Kadri made his first appearance in a Leafs uniform a year or so after he signed with the team. There aren’t nearly as many teenage phenoms in baseball, where a player might spend seven years in the minors before his major-league call-up.
So Anthopoulos is prepared to be patient. “I’m not going to go crazy with Band-Aids, spending $40 million for two years on Joe Blow, who’s 34 and not that good but sounds like a star player,” he says. “If you have a great 25-man roster that’s only built for a year or two, at some point it’s going to collapse. And we’d be better allocating those resources to signing a draft pick or a player in Latin America that we could have for six years.”
At some point, of course, the future for which Anthopoulos is building must arrive. Though he won’t put a date on it, he is very aware of the need to produce. He keeps a close eye on Jays prospects like third-baseman Brett Lawrie and outfielder Eric Thames, making sure they’re developing solidly, and hands out contracts so star players like Bautista, Lind and shortstop Yunel Escobar are committed to the team for several more years. “The biggest thing is making sure we time it right. If we don’t have a competitive team until Bautista’s in the last year of his contract, then what did we do for those years he was great?” Anthopoulos’ voice rises slightly here. “We wasted those years. So we’ve got to go through our growing pains now.”
And fans have, by and large, shown their willingness to wait it out. Chalk it up, perhaps, to the novelty of a Toronto sports team focusing on youth and ascendancy, or to the fact that watching Bautista right now is still ridiculously fun. Or it might be that this strategy has already worked plenty well for the Tampa Bay Rays—a Jays division rival who built young and smart and managed to win the division twice in three years, knocking off those bloated dynasties, the Yankees and the Red Sox.
http://www.thegridto.com/city/sports/the-natural/
Read the whole article, I'm not even quoting the best parts.