whysoserious wrote:Fair points, I just hate the Jays (and both other Toronto teams have been guilty of it in the past) for saying they want to compete but won't take the extra steps to get there.
I give Rogers credit for jumping the payroll from 80 million to 130 million and AA effed up especially targeting older guys in trades. The Jays could have pretty much kept the prospects and just signed a big time starter for the money and term they tend to not want to give out and done just as well with 105-110 million payroll plus some other minor spending.
They gave the fans so much hope with the increased payroll, then it didn't work and they are close to being a playoff team but aren't willing to spend just slightly more to get there it's disappointing.
We'll see what happens this off-season.
My issue with a long-term deal for Melky is that it doesn't strike me as being 'the extra steps'...it's the sort of short-term-oriented, not-enough-yet-too-much choice that we have specialized in of late. There's a general consensus that we should not be shipping off the top tier kiddies again, but there's also a desire to Go For It in a big and meaningful way. But we simply do not have the financial flexibility to do that via free agency alone, certainly not in a manner that doesn't leave us in a similar position to this season, where we're kinda in it if everything breaks right.
And that's where, even in the short term, Melky's money becomes a bit tricky. Melky at, say, $13m next year is just about right in terms of value. But we may not need 'just about right'...we may need 'radically above-market performance', because some of our good fortune (and overall, we were fairly fortunate) may not return, and we still need to make up several games.