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AL East Preview: Toronto Blue Jays: Fifth Place

When Stubhub.com was created several years ago, it changed the sports landscape forever. Whether that was for or good or bad, I’m not sure.

On one hand, the website provides a safe and easily accessibly alternative to scalping. No one wants to fork over $300 to some guy on 161st Street in front of Yankee Stadium and have to be wary of him giving you a ticket for a game against the Expos in return. It also has taken a sizeable portion of the market share from Craigslist thanks to Stubhub’s admittedly amazing anti-scam guarantees, of which I was a grandstand-to-field-level benefactor several years ago when I was upgraded after buying from a fraudulent seller for a playoff game.

By serving as a marketplace for spectator wants and needs, it also eliminates the futility of hoping against hope that some acquaintance offers you tickets for Monday Night Football. Assuming you can afford it.

That’s the problem. It’s entirely natural that resold tickets for a big game are going to be vastly more expensive than face value, but seats for a November Giants-Redskins game often go for quadruple or quintuple their actual worth. I wouldn’t have a problem with this if a) the Redskins didn’t suck; b) I could avoid cringing as I watch John Beck "play" quarterback; and c) if you didn’t always need to wear four layers and a parka to go to the Meadowlands in November.

Most blame the greed and increasing popularity and profitability of American sports for the drastic hike in ticket prices over the past few years, and that certainly is true. But I’m not sure if the increase would have happened without Stubhub.Hank Steinbrenner saw people were actually willing to pay $600 for mezzanine seats for a playoff game, which he extrapolated to mean that they would be willing to drop 130 for the same seats for a Royals game in May. He was right. I have those seats, and my father and I had tickets for that game last week.

The Steinbrenners, Jerry Jones, James Dolan and every other owner of a popular franchise wanted to take advantage of our passion for our teams and they succeeded. The demand was there. Econ 101.

So when my friends and I, bored with the "monotony" of summer, wanted to attend a Yankees game on a moment’s notice early last September, I was skeptical. “I’m not paying 50 bucks to see Ivan Nova pitch against the fucking Blue Jays,” I said.

“How ‘bout three bucks?” Asked one of the friends I was going with.

Ah, the beauty of Stubhub.

We ended up sitting in the right field bleachers that day, an experience that I talked about at length in my recent take on the effect of billion-dollar venues on the atmosphere at sports events.

(Yes, I’m going to use the same game I wrote about yesterday to frame today’s piece. “Big bleeping deal,” some might say.)

On display on that early September afternoon was old and new, past and present. Not just for my Yanks, but the long-lost rival Jays. Veteran manager Cito Gaston sat in the dugout, helming the final few weeks of his Blue Jays career. Lyle Overbay was still giving us seven million damn-good reasons why it’s really nice to be a league average first baseman.

Jose Molina stood behind the plate as well as next to it, continuing his lengthy quest to have any player with a sub-.300 OBP referred to from now on as “batting below the Molina-Line.”

Gaston’s since been replaced by Red Sox pitching coach John Farrell. 2009 Silver Slugger Adam Lind has replaced the departed Overbay at first, and he seems to have put his horrid 2010 campaign (during which he was well under the M.L.) behind him.

Young JP Arencibia has taken over the bulk of the catching duties. Although he has struggled mightily, he is still an improvement at the position just by virtue of the fact that, you know, he isn’t Jose Molina.

But, for the one franchise remaining in the land of universal health care (or as Rush Limbaugh would call it, oppression), perhaps the best metaphor on the field for progress was longtime Blue Jays center fielder Vernon Wells.

Jose Molina tries to convince Jon Rauch that he belongs in the lineup.
Otto Greule Jr/Getty Images

Wells gave the fans in the bleachers a nice laugh that day, firing back with gregarious obscene (is that a paradox?) gestures and comments as we heckled him incessantly. But it was hard to forget what he signified for the Toronto franchise. Wells had received a seven-year, $126 million contract extension following a stellar 2006 campaign, but the move raised more than few eyebrows for more than a few reasons. Even though Wells was a young five-tool center fielder entering his prime years who had already put together two All-Star seasons (as valuable a commodity as there is in today’s game), there were a number of concerns

In ’06, the Jays had finally slayed at least half of the two-headed AL BEast beast by finishing second, and felt the need to lock up Wells to forestall themselves from falling off. But they had a number of valuable players approaching free agency, including Bengie “Don’t Call Me Jose” Molina (who has contributed to his brother’s efforts to establish “The-Molina-Line” in recent years by becoming a casualty of it himself), a still valuable Troy Glaus and left-hander Ted Lilly.

Wells' contract put the Jays in a financial straitjacket for the foreseeable future. It is at least conceivable that they would have been able to hold on Roy Halladay last year had they built a team that resembled a contender by not devoting a huge portion of their payroll to Wells.

But, as they say, hindsight is 20-20.

Problem is, hindsight was just as viable an option in 2006, and the Jays didn’t seem all too interested in its application to their management decisions. Interspersed between those two strong seasons were two much weaker ones: an injury-plagued 2004 where Wells put up 23 HR, 67 RBI and a .272/.337/.472 in just 134 games; and a healthy ’05 with 28 HR, 97 RBI and a .269/.320/.463.

Not horrible by any means, but hardly the perennially gaudy statistics that you would expect from someone who would become the seventh-highest paid player in the entire league.

Even stranger were the parameters of the contract, which called for a deal so incredibly backloaded that it left Kim Kardashian wondering how someone could possibly make that much money off a rear end.

From ESPN’s 2006 piece announcing the deal:

Wells is due $5.6 million next season in the final year of his old contract. The extension calls for a $25.5 million signing bonus, payable in three $8.5 million installments each March 1 in 2008, 2009 and 2010. He will receive a salary of just $500,000 in 2008 and $1.5 million in 2009, but his salary jumps to $12.5 million in 2010 and $23 million in 2011. Wells receives $21 million in each of the final three seasons.

Wow. In terms of pure salary, Wells would make just $7.6 million from 2007-2009, his age 28-30 seasons—or in other words, the seasons that one would think would provide the impetus for the Jays to lock him up long term. With the signing bonus, that number jumps to $24.6 million. From 2010 to 2014, when Wells would be 35, he would make a combined $107 million.

85 percent of his nine-digit contract was meant to compensate his post-prime years.

Let that sink in. Eighty-five percent. Indefensible, right?

Even for a bonafide, slam dunk superstar, that doesn’t make much sense. Perhaps this was then-GM JP Ricciardi’s way of freeing up financial space to make the team a legitimate contender. This failed not just because Wells posted numbers akin to his paltry ’04 and ’05 seasons in his remaining five years roaming center field at the Rogers Centre; Ricciardi also failed to resign any of the aforementioned players and made exactly zero impact signings over the remainder of his tenure.

He was fired in September of ’09, but not before he accomplished the incredible feat of dumping Alex Rios’ just-as-ludicrous $70 million contract on the ChiSox, even though the rightfielder had posted a sub-Molina-Line season the year before and had hit just two HR in 436 ABs prior to the move.

When Alex Anthopolous took over, it appeared he was undertaking perhaps the most transformative—and for now, at least, savvy—pair of seasons by a GM in Toronto history.

He completely tore up the Ricciardi playbook, trading Roy Halladay (who only had one year left on his deal, and was unlikely to be resigned for myriad reasons) for three top 100 prospects: outfielder Michael Taylor, catcher Travis D’Arnaud and top starter Kyle Drabek—who, as a both a high schooler and a quality pitcher, was the type of player that Ricciardi seemed to go out of his way to avoid.

He managed to deal a middle reliever (Brandon League) for young righty Brandon Morrow, who has excellent stuff and is likely a quality four-starter at worst in the long term.

Then, the new Jays GM pulled a Bizzaro Ricciardi move, refusing to be seduced by small sample sizes and power numbers and instead using them as bait. The Jays had acquired Alex Gonzalez for the 2010 campaign, and over 85 games, the 33-year old shortstop had 17 home runs and 50 RBIs—but only a .259/.296/.497 line.

Anthopolous remembered that his shortstop had been mediocre for over a decade and was much more likely to hit like Alex S. Gonzalez than Alex Rodriguez or Adrian Gonzalez, so he flipped him for promising young—and struggling at the time—shortstop Yunel Escobar as well as pitcher Jo-Jo Reyes, who retains some value but has yet to string together quality major league innings.

This winter, he tore a page out of the Ricciardi playbook and ripped it to shreds, doing something that not even the much-maligned former GM could have thought possible. In perhaps the greatest trade in recent memory, Anthopolous dealt Vernon Wells to the Angels with $86 million remaining on his deal. JP’s folly had morphed into Alex’s defining moment, a massive coup for the Jays.

Anthopolous essentially nullified Ricciardi’s colossally daft move, using the jettisoned GM’s stupidity to his advantage. The Jays would only end up paying $40 million dollars for Wells’ service over four years (hardly outrageous in today’s MLB economy), plus the fraction (a surprisingly small $5 million this year) that they will have to pay for the remainder of the deal.

I think Anthopolous would have been content with dropping Wells’ contract in Arte Moreno’s mailbox and hoping he wouldn’t notice when the centerfielder showed up for work in Anaheim the next day, but he actually managed to wrangle some value out of what seemed like one of the most untradeable contracts in recent memory.

The Jays picked up Juan Rivera, a decent enough player who can serve as a holdover until a younger, fresher, better player comes along. They also traded for catcher Mike Napoli, who they immediately sent to Texas for reliever Frank Francisco.

Considering that the GM had done something similar the year prior by trading Taylor to the Athletics for Brett Wallace, then sending Wallace to the Astros, Anthopolous seemed like that one guy in your fantasy league who spends an inordinate amount of time trying to make improvements to his team, to the point that you wonder if he realizes that there’s only 200 dollars on the line for first place. And no, I wouldn’t know anything about doing anything like that.

Anthopolous’ pursuit seemed futile; how could he possibly compete with the massive checkbooks of the Yanks and Sox, the unparalleled player development capabilities of the Rays and the burgeoning depth of the O’s farm system? Every prognosticator in the field had the Jays finishing last for the next five years or more.

But then something interesting happened. All of a sudden, the Jays had a formidable young rotation, headlined by young lefty Ricky Romero and the aforementioned Drabek, giving them a potentially lethal one-two punch they can throw at the rest of the division for the next decade. Morrow’s ERA is currently well over four, but his 12.4 K:9 and 2.90 K:BB ratios suggest there is still plenty of time for him to put it all together.

They also have one of the league’s deepest bullpens. Although devoid of a big name closer, Jon Rauch, Francisco, Shawn Camp, Jason Frasor, Mark Rzepczynski and Carlos Villanueva comprise a bullpen that gives Farrell plenty of viable—albeit lesser known—options.

I haven’t even mentioned Jose Bautistia. For the umpteenth time, God bless hindsight.

If I had wrote this column a month ago, it would have included a sentence along the lines along the lines of: “…and then Alex Anthopolous nullified all his excellent work by giving $65 million dollars to the latino baseball equivalent of Vanilla Ice,” writing off his 2010 54-HR season as the biggest anomaly since Brady Anderson turned into Thor. But if I did, it seems that my proverbial foot would have been permanently lodged in my proverbial mouth.

It defies all logic, but Bautista is currently leading the league HR, BB, OBP, SLG and OBP+. He has a .525 OBP. Five-twenty-five! I know I preach the minimal value of small samples like few others, but that is otherworldly. All this from the same guy the Mets once traded for Kris Benson’s wife.

God bless hindsight.

The length and value of the contract may still very well come back to bite the Jays, but at just $8 million this year and four years remaining after for $14 million, it shouldn’t kill them the way the Wells deal did. And hey, if it does maybe Anthopolous can trade him back to the Mets for David Wright.

Even with the positive progress, it’s hard to see the Jays contending anytime soon. They still have massive holes in their lineup and stiff competition in the division. Nevertheless, it’s hard to argue with Anthopolous’ stunning progress over the past 18 months, as he has given hope for the future that simply wasn’t there under Ricciardi. It won’t happen, but simply by virtue of managing to unload Wells, he should be the unanimous choice for the executive of the year award.

Mr. Anthopolous: If you do manage to make it up on that podium at the BBWAA dinner to accept the award, just make sure you thank Arte Moreno and JP Ricciardi. Because you certainly couldn't have done it without their blatant stupidity.

Meanwhile, Wells was hitting well below both the Mendoza and Molina Lines before he hit the DL yesterday.

God. Bless. Hindsight.

PREDICTION: 72-90, fifth in AL East

Jesse Golomb is the creator and writer of SoapBoxSports byte. If you enjoyed this article, or want takes on the rest of the Major Leagues, the NFL and more from the Opinion Guy, visit soapboxsportsbyte or follow  @SoapBxSprtsByte