Matthew's article is a fair summary of Gord Ash's tenure. My one reservation is that Ash's strength in getting along with others led to some productive drafts. While personally he may or may not have been able to identify real prospects, he did, with the assistance of Tim Wilken and others, identify prospects who are now at the core of the Jays' future: Halladay, Rios, Quiroz, McGowan and Gross.

I am not suggesting that he should be given all the credit for these prospects' development since being drafted, nor am I say that all, or even most, of the drafts were successful. But, the cupboard was most definitely not bare when JP arrived, and I suspect JP would agree that this has helped him in making the Jays competitive a little quicker than he initially expected.

Nice article; a very tactful recount of the Ash era, something that is not easy to do.

I think what is often overlooked about Ash's tenure is the cold feet he developed after his trade of Cone to the Yankees didn't work out. After that point, any trade of a quality player had to include "major league quality" players in return, not propspects. Thus, you get Green for Mondesi, Clemens for Wells et al, Wells for Sirotka, Williams for Hamilton, the Pittsburgh deal. He then proceeded to give contract extensions to these "proven" players who had only proven that they weren't very good. The result was expensive mediocrities and an expensive star(Delgado). These trades did not result in one quality young arm in return at a time when the Jays were producing maybe 3 decent pitching prospects (HLH, Escobar and Koch)over the seven years. Consequently when JP takes over the minors are vitually devoid of pitching propects in the upper levels (also due to poor drafting and developing of pitchers - another legacy).

I agree with Mike's comments here. You also need to add Vernon Wells to the list. Rightly or wrongly, my perception is that the Ash regime had a better than average success rate with highly touted high school prospects. It might be small sample size or luck, but I think Halladay, Wells, McGowan, Rios and Quiroz suggest better than average success for that time period.

Contender for worst trade during this era: Woody Williams for Joey Hamilton - right before Woody's game improved big time. Also Green for Mondesi.

I concur wholeheartedly with the television coverge comments - especially the Brian Williams analysis. Living in Edmonton, almost my entire Blue Jays experience has been via TV. I hated Williams - he spent more time talking about the weather than the game chiefly because he had nothing intelligent to say. I first started to like baseball because of Tony Kubeck's (sp?) analysis. Jim Hughson had a nice year in there too as the play by play guy.

I'm not a big Faulds/ Cerutti fan. Cerutti appears intelligent but never really seems to give good insight into what a pitcher might throw in certain situations or what a player/ manager might be thinking. Any word on who will be doing the games this year?

Yanks got KB...for Weaver and a couple of prospects, as yet unnamed...

sigh...

how many games can the Jays win this year??

I wonder if the Jays would still have picked Wells if the signability of Darnell (Donzell? can't remember) MacDonald wasn't in question. Virtually everything I read that year said the latter was the better prospect, but he slipped to the bottom of the first round due to signability concerns. As I recall Vernon signed quickly and for a reasonable bonus.

not an Ash fan by any stretch, but with the Green deal to LA, he had but no choice to take Mondesi in return, if I do remember correctly ... did Green not say he only wanted to play in LA?

I rate Ash's career as like one of those suborbital rockets: he got off to a poor start, did reasonably well during the middle of his tenure, and then poorly at the end.

At the start, he made some poor decisions. Throwing lots of money at Randy Myers was a bad idea, as was signing Santiago and Nixon. The Garcia/Plesac/Merced trade wasn't great, but the Jays would have lost the best of those prospects in the expansion draft anyways.

And, at the end, Ash made some poor decisions too. Somebody didn't do their homework on Sirotka, and letting Tony Batista go right when his new opponents were about to face the Jays was a dumb idea.

But I think Ash needs to be given credit for what he did do. He inherited a team with a bunch of aging stars that were about to bolt, an empty farm system, and penny-pinching owners who neither knew nor cared about baseball. He also inherited a situation where the team's best players (Clemens, Green) wanted out. From this beginning, he built a team that won 88 games at its peak, and was genuinely in contention in 1999 and 2000. And he did this without mortaging the farm - as others have pointed out, J.P. inherited some good prospects.

Ash has also been unlucky. Joey Hamilton could have worked out (at the time of the trade, Baseball Prospectus was high on Joey). Halladay could have developed a couple of years earlier, Carpenter could have become a solid starter, and Escobar could have developed a clue; had these not unlikely events happened, the Jays could have picked up a flag during those years.

And, it should be said, Ash wasn't given the opportunity to rebuild that J.P. has. Interbrew, as I recall, mandated that Ash try to win every year, as they wanted to keep the team's resale value up.

But, in the end, Ash lacked the baseball experience and the ruthlessness you need to be a good G.M. The years of watching talent flee the team left him overvaluing the players remaining to him, which led to the huge contracts for Delgado, Mondesi, and A-Gon. (Though I think they had to sign Delgado and pay him what he wanted, or else the Jays might have been contracted. The writers, that year, were constantly talking about the team being in "free fall". The Delgado signing stopped that.) And the players knew that the Interbrew budget and Ash's niceness meant that they were secure, which led to the notoriously laidback clubhouse of the final Ash years.

And, I've said it before: while I think J.P. is a much better GM than Ash was, J.P. still has the hard part of his job to do. It's easy enough to build a team that collects 85 wins or so; heck, even Gordo did it. Now, J.P. has to take the team one step further. (If he signs Batista, he might just do it - the Jays won't have many discernible weaknesses at that point. But that's another topic.)

I think in a few years it will be an interesting comparison when looking at the Ash era vs the Riccardi era. Ash with help drafted predominately high school players and Rios, Magowan,Wells, Phelps, Halladay and others all seem to have higher ceilings than the college draft choices yet JP has established a much deeper system. It bears an interesting contrast of philophy and yet to be determined success. Magowan according to scouts had a #2 or even higher ceiling and this year he really starte to show that. Arnold is pegged as a reliever by some yet adds depth and has come quickly thru the minors.

Just want to have something on record here - I originally wrote this in the '01-'02 offseason (I think) and posted it to the message board of another website. I was pretty proud of it, though, and asked Darryl if he'd preserve it for posterity somewhere on Blue Jay Way. There's another such old message-board posting that I passed along to him at the same time, and I imagine that'll be showing up on Blue Jay Way sometime this off-season, in addition to whatever else I write.

As "expensive" as the Delgado signing quickly proved to be (remember this time last year when us Bauxites was desperate to trade him, to find a loophole in that no-trade clause?), at least Ash had the good sense to only make it a four year deal.

The Rockies have Helton until he's 39.

gord ash did have a ton of pitching talent in the system. he had halladay, escobar, carpenter (he was a really good pitcher for stretches, escobar syndrome), koch, crabtree, a 99 mph flamethrower, but i am not quite sure if that was gord ash who got him.