The Rookies

The classic PC game Scorched Earth provides an instructive model for the Blue Jays.

The Sports Illustrated report this afternoon that the Toronto Blue Jays have dealt Roy Halladay to the Phillies in a three-team deal confirmed what most Jays’ fans have known since the team’s early hot start last year fell apart; the team’s officially gone into rebuilding mode. However, the question remains as to just what that will entail, and the Jays’ recent history is not auspicious in that regard.

Much like his namesake, former Blue Jays general manager J.P. Ricciardi made lots of speeches, but never actually began to fight. He promised five-year plans (because those have never had any bad historical connotations!) that would see the Jays contending for the AL East title, but never actually accomplished much of anything. In his tenure from the 2002 season through 2009, the Jays won 78, 86, 67, 80, 87, 83, 86 and 75 games. They finished third in the AL East four times, fourth twice, fifth once and second once, and never made the playoffs.

However, in my mind, the key problem with the Ricciardi era was that the Jays never settled on an identity. They boosted payroll to a middle-of-the-road $100 million, which wasn’t enough to compete with the Yankees and Red Sox but was enough to prevent them from going into a full rebuilding mode. It carried unrealistic expectations. Now, Ricciardi made many stupid individual decisions with that payroll (Vernon Wells? B.J. Ryan? David Eckstein?), and it’s possible that a better general manager could potentially have pulled off a playoff berth in one of those seasons with smarter use of his limited resources. A World Series title still would have been very unlikely, though, as the Jays didn’t have enough stud prospects coming up through their system and didn’t have the resources to sign the best free agents or trade for expensive stars.

The problem with being a middle-of-the-road team in any sport is it accomplishes nothing. You win enough games to give fans a false sense of hope, but you never really contend for a title and you never really rebuild for future contention. Ask fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs, who went through the same experience in the late 1990s and early 2000s before starting their current rebuilding campaign. As sports fans raised on Hollywood dramas and heroic tales of underdogs, we’re largely conditioned to think that everyone has a chance, and to a degree, that’s true. There are improbable playoff runs and champions in every sport, but the point is that they’re improbable. By and large, it’s the top teams that win, and baseball’s grueling 162-game regular season perhaps makes it more difficult than any other sport for unlikely teams to go on a run and win it all; the larger sample size of the regular season tends to correct for brief hot streaks like the one the Jays had at the start of last season. Every team has a winning window, and it’s almost impossible to contend every year, particularly with limited financial resources. You’re often better off picking a three-to-five year window and focusing all efforts on it, even if this hurts your team for a few years.

The teams that actually are making progress towards becoming good are frequently closer to the bottom of the standings. They’re more concerned with developing talent than winning games, so they give young guys a chance instead of signing overpriced veterans and invest that money into scouting, signing draft picks and developing prospects. This means they don’t win for a while, which also has the side benefit of giving them higher draft picks. Now, that means less in baseball than in most other sports thanks to the size of the draft and the high rate of washouts (in a study of the 2002 draft I did last summer, 26.7 per cent of the MLB first-round picks never played a major-league game, much higher than any other league), but high picks can still be very helpful, as the Tampa Bay Rays have shown. If you regularly draft high, invest the money to sign top draft picks, build a strong developmental system and let your young players collect major-league experience when they’re ready instead of blocking them with overpriced veterans, you’re generally in better shape for the long haul than if you do just enough to narrowly miss the playoffs or exit in the first round every year.

The amazing thing is how few teams really go into serious rebuilding mode, though. Rebuilding’s become a dirty word that many executives seek to avoid at all cost, promising to “contend” every year. The thinking seems to be that fans won’t go to watch a rebuilding team. However, I think this underestimates the intelligence of sports fans in our day and age. Especially in baseball, many fans know before the season even starts if their team realistically has a shot at the playoffs or not, but many of them still devotedly follow their team even if they know they won’t win before hell freezes over (see Minda and the Royals). In fact, now might be a better time than ever to be clear about rebuilding efforts; there’s more information out there about minor leaguers and prospects than there has ever been, and many fans will gladly keep tabs on those guys as they rise through the organization in hopes of their future stardom. You can make a good argument that it’s more exciting to watch a developing player who has the chance of being really good than a mediocre overpriced veteran.

A few organizations have taken this into account. One is the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings, who have been thinking for the future for a while now; general manager Dean Lombardi talked about his plan to tear the team down to the bare bones and then build them up from scratch in this piece from the team’s website. It’s worked pretty well so far; they’ve drafted high and well, and have given plenty of playing time to young stars like Anze Kopitar, Wayne Simmonds and Jack Johnson, and they’ve gone from being a perennial doormat to leading the Western Conference without the intermediate stage of doing just enough to get into the playoffs, but not enough to win anything. Similar stories have happened in baseball with the Rays and the Florida Marlins, with years of being horrible while developing talent followed by years of title contention. In fact, Chuck and TDD mentioned in the Rookies’ chat earlier that they’d rather be fans of the Marlins than the Atlanta Braves, a team which operates in the traditional mode of doing enough to hang around the playoff picture but not enough to actually contend.

How does this all apply to the Jays? Well, they have the choice of several different options coming up. They won 75 games last year with Halladay, so they could try to replace him with a middling free agent pitcher and hope for a 70-win season, maybe slightly better if they get a few breaks. They could go into moderate rebuilding, replacing Halladay in the rotation with one of their young pitchers, and probably win 60 to 65 games. However, what I’d really like to see them do is the scorched earth option to prepare for contention down the road. In my mind, they should get rid of every veteran player who isn’t likely to be around in three to four seasons, either via trades for prospects or draft picks or just releasing them (this means you, AL Least Valuable Player Vernon Wells!). They could then give that playing time to minor-leaguers and prospects in the hopes that some of them will become capable major leaguers with time. This will lead to an atrocious 2010 season, maybe with 40 or 45 wins, but it will be much more interesting than either of the other options.

The Jays will be bad, but winning isn’t the point, player development is, and a savvy marketing campaign based around the young prospects could help the bottom line regardless of the final W-L totals. Moreover, this will let the team see which of their prospects might eventually pan out, and it could lead to some diamonds in the rough who might normally fall through the cracks. It also should lead to good draft position and provide money (in salary savings) to sign high draft picks and improve the scouting and minor-league systems. If they repeat this for a few years, they might actually become championship contenders despite their brutal division, and that’s much more appealing in the long run than continually mediocrity.