Yankees lose, Red Sox win.
Both teams at 90-64 with 8 games to go!
Consider this a follow-up to last week's game report. You know, the one that likely cemented my place as a persona non grata within the Jays inner circle.
I thought I should clarify a few things that I didn't make clear in that Game Report. My annoyance isn't with anyone in the Jays organization and it certainly isn't with J.P. Ricciardi. Rather my difficulty is with the entire organization. This isn't a contradiction - business organizations are rarely the sum of their parts. Poor internal policies and communications can turn even the most talented group of individuals into a dysfunctional team. I wouldn't say that the Blue Jays organization is dysfunctional - but as we've seen, there are problems.
Anyhow, if that Game Report did any good (and it wasn't my intention that it do good - I was just getting something off my chest), it seemed to inspire Jordan to write And We End As We Began, which might be the best piece every published on the Box. It's also, I believe, the longest non-Magpie piece of the season.
The focus has been put on J.P., which again, was not my intent, but it makes for a great discussion. My own view is that J.P. did a tremendous job on turning this organization around. The team was burdened by a ton of bad contracts and had been falling in the standings by around 2 games a year since 1998. What did J.P. do? He got rid of the bad contracts, without impacting the performance of the team one bit. In J.P.'s first year the team's wins fell from 80 to 78, which is where the team was headed before he arrived. But the team had shed a lot of bad contracts in the process. As we all know, in J.P.'s second season the team won 86 games.
I don't think the significance of this can be understand. Had JP's cost cutting moves caused the team to crater and lose 100 games a year, I honestly believe baseball would be dead in Toronto. The Jays make an obvious contraction partner for the Expos, and MLB would not raise the ire of Congress if it chose two Canadian teams to contract. Fortunately for Jays fans it did not work out this way - the Jays were decent on the field and drew enough fans to at least approach profitability. For us Expos fans the story did not have a happy ending.
I've disagreed with the Free Agent moves of the last two seasons, and I've usually been right (though often for the wrong reasons). With all the injuries they had last season, the Jays were simply not going to be competitive. However their critical lack of depth, particularly at the high minor league level, became painfully clear. Dave Berg, OF? Chris Gomez, DH? The organization did not seem to learn it's lesson last season, as it failed to sign any minor league veteran/AAAA DH/1B/OF types. It didn't hurt the Jays this year, as their outfield stayed relatively healthy, though the fact the Syracuse hasn't had a winning season in the last four is pretty telling.
I've talked in the past on JP's free agents have performed and I'll post the new figures at the end of the season. Other than Corey Koskie the most recent group of free agents haven't performed too badly, but as a group they come nowhere near matching the output of the free agent who got away: Carlos Delgado. Jays fans seem to finally realize how much he meant to this team, as there has been a lot of talk about the Jays desperately needing a second-rate Delgado imitation, like Paul Konerko or Adam Dunn.
In 1960 Bill DeWitt became General Manager of the Cincinatti Reds, a team that finished higher than 4th only once in the previous 16 years - a third place finish in 1956. The next season, the Reds made it to the World Series, and were competitive almost every season for the next 20. But what does everyone remember about DeWitt? It's not the winning seasons, it's the fact that he traded Frank Robinson to the Orioles because he was an "old 30". I've got a feeling J.P. Ricciardi will be this generation's Bill DeWitt - remembered not so much for turning around a franchise, but rather for letting a superstar slip between his fingers.
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20050925093322618