Blue Jays now purely a Business?
Quotes like this (hat tip to the Drunk Jays Fans) make things pretty clear to me.
Beeston: “I don’t think necessarily it’s in terms of profitability, it’s in the basis that you wouldn’t want to lose money…”
The Jays appear to be gearing their roster (ie the lower the payroll the better) towards earning maximum revenue sharing inflows in the coming seasons. The poster child’s for this system, the Florida Marlins, have received $25+ million in rev sharing in each of the past two seasons.
Fellow writer Callum shared with me that the Jays have used a portion of the Given savings to hire five new scouts. While I love the idea of hiring new scouts, this could also be seen as strictly a business move, as we all know the benefits of controlling a players contract vs dipping into the free agent pool. This lack of any free agent activity could be seen as a prime example of belt tightening. The staff cuts at the beginning of the off-season and the recent Given firing just offer more proof of the cost-cutting bias.
This may not be entirely a bad direction for the Blue Birds. The past regime of $100+ payrolls got the club to .500 and that was about it. Recently the O’s and Rays have taken the low cost route and both appear to be well positioned heading into 2010, both from an on-field and revenue sharing perspective. It’s becoming clearer by the day that this is also the goal in Toronto.
It seems like the Jays are always just a little too late for the party. First they tried to get on the Oakland A’s Moneyball model when it was hot and trendy. This involved slashing payroll, scouting, and drafting college players but that didn’t work out. Then as you say they tried to plug their holes with free agents and bump the payroll up to $100 million but… their holes were too big and the plugs were just that… plugs who had to be let go. In this phase they decided to draft high schoolers but without the scouting they lucked out with Travis Snider and thats about it. Now the trend is building with young players a la Tampa Bay Rays and manipulating the arb-clock while milking the revenue sharing and perhaps getting some currency equalization payments while they are at it. Beef up the scouting and maybe get some Japanese pitchers too. The problem is everyone else is already all over it too. By the time they get where they think they should be, will it be too little too late?