http://goo.gl/zAMWe
2012 record: 73-89
Finish: Fourth, AL East
2012 final payroll: $92.1 million
Estimated 2013 opening day payroll: $115 million
Yahoo! Sports offseason rank: 2
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OFFSEASON ACTION
The AL East is no place for mediocrity. It’s rarely been a place for hope or luck or hang-around champions. Don’t win 90 games? Don’t bother.
The Blue Jays haven’t won 90 games for 20 years. Oh, they fielded winning teams in nearly half of those seasons. Had some good players. Had a few great ones. Even finished in second place once. Second! Ten games behind the New York Yankees.
They bounced through managers. And general managers. And directions. They mostly avoided truly terrible, and rarely attained much more than mediocrity. A generation passed since the back-to-back championships of 1992-93, and the best you could say about the Blue Jays is they were almost always spirited and they almost never embarrassed themselves.
In the AL East, that’s a lot more than some teams could say.
The point is, if part of your organizational philosophy was to hope for a stray recession in New York and Boston (and lately Tampa Bay), then you were inviting mediocrity. Until, perhaps, now.
In his fourth offseason as general manager, Alex Anthopoulos, whose previous occupational highlight was trading away Vernon Wells, found riches in the Miami Marlins’ surrender and an ace in the New York Mets’ indecision. And at a time when, well then, the Yankees and certainly the Red Sox appear to have become vulnerable, the Blue Jays are division favorites
.
Over 44 days this winter, Anthopoulos traded 13 players, many of them bright prospects. In return, he retooled his starting rotation with R.A. Dickey, Josh Johnson and Mark Buehrle. He put Jose Reyes at shortstop and in the leadoff spot, and Emilio Bonifacio into a utility role, or at second base. He brought in the catcher – Josh Thole – who can harness/chase/jab at Dickey’s knuckleball.
He also signed Melky Cabrera, the disgraced San Francisco Giant, to play left field. And he hired John Gibbons, the same John Gibbons who managed all or parts of five seasons from 2004-08, to again man the top step.
In those 44 days, the Blue Jays sold off a good piece of the tomorrow they’d been planning for years. In doing so, tomorrow might finally have arrived.