This website was born at around the time the Blue Jays introduced new General Manager J.P. Ricciardi. Most of us remember the dark times of the Ash regime, particularly how the team spun its wheels with overpaid veterans and mostly disappointing young players. J.P.'s arrival from the Oakland Athletics front office lifted our hopes. We believed that J.P. would rebuild the organisation utilizing "sabermetric"-inspired ideas, as his mentor Billy Beane had done in Oakland. The immediate future would be a tough transition due to budget cuts, but the following years would be glorious.
We turned out to be wrong. We were wrong about when the Jays would turn it around and challenge the beasts of the East. And we were wrong about Ricciardi.
We now know that J.P. Ricciardi is not the would-be "sabermetrician-king"; he is the super-scout who reached the top of the management pile. Unlike Beane, Ricciardi has been unable to transcend the perspective of the scout. J.P. relies on his own observations and the observations of men he trusts when it comes to making decisions about ballplayers.
It did not always appear to be so. Ricciardi hired Keith Law, who was not a baseball man, to crunch numbers. Law was to personify the analytical side of the organisation, much as Paul DePodesta and then David Forst did for the Athletics. But the longer Law held the job, the more he took on the perspective of a scout. He became an analyst-scout hybrid, not an independent counterweight to Ricciardi's bias towards traditional scouting methods.
Law and Ricciardi eventually had a falling out. Law has intimated that one reason for the parting of ways was that Ricciardi did not pay sufficient heed to the opinions of others in the organisation, trusting instead his own observations (most famously in the decision not to draft Troy Tulowitzki).
The Athletics have continued to pursue innovative methods to compete within severe payroll restrictions. The Red Sox hired the most famous baseball analysts of them all, Bill James. The Blue Jays remain committed to traditional scouting methods. If you look at the Blue Jays today, you will find that most of the key players are farm products left over from the Ash era, or free agent talent, some modestly priced, some expensive. The drafts presided over by Ricciardi, after some early successes, have not produced the talent we had hoped they would.
We know that J.P.'s legacy will not be an ode to Moneyball. Ricciardi thinks that this is the best team he's put together in Toronto. It's time to win.
We turned out to be wrong. We were wrong about when the Jays would turn it around and challenge the beasts of the East. And we were wrong about Ricciardi.
We now know that J.P. Ricciardi is not the would-be "sabermetrician-king"; he is the super-scout who reached the top of the management pile. Unlike Beane, Ricciardi has been unable to transcend the perspective of the scout. J.P. relies on his own observations and the observations of men he trusts when it comes to making decisions about ballplayers.
It did not always appear to be so. Ricciardi hired Keith Law, who was not a baseball man, to crunch numbers. Law was to personify the analytical side of the organisation, much as Paul DePodesta and then David Forst did for the Athletics. But the longer Law held the job, the more he took on the perspective of a scout. He became an analyst-scout hybrid, not an independent counterweight to Ricciardi's bias towards traditional scouting methods.
Law and Ricciardi eventually had a falling out. Law has intimated that one reason for the parting of ways was that Ricciardi did not pay sufficient heed to the opinions of others in the organisation, trusting instead his own observations (most famously in the decision not to draft Troy Tulowitzki).
The Athletics have continued to pursue innovative methods to compete within severe payroll restrictions. The Red Sox hired the most famous baseball analysts of them all, Bill James. The Blue Jays remain committed to traditional scouting methods. If you look at the Blue Jays today, you will find that most of the key players are farm products left over from the Ash era, or free agent talent, some modestly priced, some expensive. The drafts presided over by Ricciardi, after some early successes, have not produced the talent we had hoped they would.
We know that J.P.'s legacy will not be an ode to Moneyball. Ricciardi thinks that this is the best team he's put together in Toronto. It's time to win.
