I haven't blogged in a few days due to a dental surgery I had this week, but this morning I read Jon Morosi's article titled "Did losing Anthopoulos cost jays shot at re-signing Price, too?", and I got annoyed enough to get myself to write this.....
There's just so much wrong with what Morosi writes that it's hard to know where to begin. First, his article starts off saying "We can't say it's terribly likely,...", but yet he STILL wrote an article about it. This article is echoing what a lot of the angry mob Jays' twitterverse likes are saying. Unfortunately this article will validate their very naive opinion.
All of this new regime vs old regime talk is already tired.
Let's say hypothetically the old regime was still in power and AA wanted to offer Price a contract. Well he's stuck with Beeston's 5 year policy so what is the best they offer? 5 years for $150M? And if you are David Price being offered 7 years for $217M from Boston, is that a hard decision? He was reportedly offered 7 years for $180M from St. Louis and turned it down so.... What would even be the point? AA would have spoken to the agent and the agent would have said Price is being offered 7 year contracts. AA would not have bothered to waste everyone's time offering a 5 year deal.
Now let's say AA stayed on as GM under Shapiro. Well everyone is blaming Shapiro for not signing Price now, so how would it have been different with La Cava & Shapiro instead of AA & Shapiro. It wouldn't. It's sort of ironic that people thought we had a chance at Price cause Beeston was out with his 5 year thing, but yet are blaming Shapiro anyway.
But really the worst part of the article is the suggestion that Shapiro determined that the team's rotation dollars should be distributed among multiple starters (Estrada, Happ, Chavez) instead of one (Price). Can we stop and think about this for a second? You need a rotation of 5 starters right? You can't just have Price, Stroman, forfeit game, forfeit game, forfeit game. Hey look everyone we have David Price but we spent all of our money so we don't have any other starting pitchers!!!!
We already know for a fact that AA wanted to re-sign Estrada. He told us so. So that's the same. We also know AA traded away guys like Norris, Boyd, Hoffman who may have been ready to fight for a starting role this year. That depth was traded away and the team desperately needed to replenish that huge void. To now insult Shapiro for doing just that, is simply so unfair. This is the position he was put in. In order to afford to sign Price, the team would have needed a $30M boost in payroll so that they could still address the other needs AND sign Price. You may want to blame Rogers for that but you can't blame Shapiro for deciding he needed a full rotation.
We don't know what else AA would have done this off season different from La Cava. We don't even know what else will happen this off season. But I don't think the Happ deal is out of the realm of what AA would have done. Some team is going to end up paying Jeff Samardzija more than $20M per year, and he was awful last year. Happ is being paid $12M a year and he was one of the best pitchers in baseball after the trade deadline. It's a good deal. And do we really think that AA would have been against trading Hendriks for Chavez to add desperately needed starting depth in 2016?
It's entirely plausible that AA would have done the same things so far. AA left at the height of his popularity with fans, so maybe it takes a while for fans to move on, but at some point you have to. Morosi wrote a trashy article that was catered to the fans that just want to moan and groan. He should know better.
Tip of the day: I see lots of people use the word "resign" instead of "re-sign". "Resign" means like to quit. "Re-sign" is to sign a player again.
@bluejaystwit
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