DALLAS — The previous time Major League Baseball’s owners convened, in Chicago last August, the Blue Jays were represented by Alex Anthopoulos, their general manager whose aggressive trades for David Price and Troy Tulowitzki had sparked the club into a blazing-hot streak that catapulted them well past the Yankees.
This week, here at a ritzy hotel in downtown, you couldn’t find Anthopoulos, who looms as a front-office free agent after declining to sign a contract extension. The man who would have been his new boss, Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro, attended these quarterly meetings as the club’s delegate. The responsibility of building on the franchise’s best season since 1993 falls on him.
He will take on that challenge, officially assuming his Blue Jays post after 25 years with the Indians, having to pay the tax for the huge deals that preceded him. The bad news for the Yankees is that the Blue Jays still own the offense that bludgeoned the rest of baseball. The good news? The Blue Jays don’t own the young talent they surrendered in those high-profile deals.
“We’ve got a very unique situation with a lot of really talented players that are in place this season, and we need to try to maximize that opportunity to win,” Shapiro said last week. “It doesn’t take a lot of study or a lot of time to realize where the voids are. Our position-player club is one of the most dynamic in all of baseball, but there are clear starting pitching needs. We addressed one by bringing [Marco] Estrada back [on a two-year contract], and we’ll continue to work on addressing the pitching.”
They addressed another on Friday when they acquired right-hander Jesse Chavez from Oakland in a trade. Chavez made 26 starts and four relief appearances for the A’s in 2015 and put up a 4.18 ERA.
“The other issues are going to be more depth because there’s a challenge with Triple-A,” Shapiro continued. “There are not a lot of players there. Which, with an aging major league team, is going to make depth [important]. How we structure the roster to provide some depth is going to be important. Because we’re susceptible. It’s a fragile major league team if something happens.”
Shapiro understandably held zero interest in reliving Anthopoulos’ stunning departure, and having covered Shapiro for more than half of his Cleveland stay, I find it hard to believe the widely reported notion that he ripped into Anthopoulos for giving up so many controllable players in order to complete those mega-deals. Anthopoulos himself has denied this publicly.
Yet no one would dispute Anthopoulos is more of a riverboat gambler while Shapiro, having been raised in budget-conscious Cleveland, is more a proponent of the long game. Anthopoulos obviously didn’t feel comfortable moving forward with Shapiro. So now Shapiro conducts a search for a new general manager — longtime deputy Tony LaCava is the interim general manager and will be a finalist for the full-time gig — while trying to build on the Jays’ first AL East title in 22 years.
Price is a free agent, and the Blue Jays have little chance of retaining him — the Cubs are regarded as the favorites to land the left-hander. That must ring a bell for Shapiro, who couldn’t compete with the heaviest financial hitters as he ran the Indians.
His new job, though, while carrying some similarities to his old one, also is quite different.
“It still doesn’t feel unfamiliar because we’re managing against two behemoths that can start with anywhere from a 4-to-10 win advantage on us based on dollars,” Shapiro said, referring to the Yankees and Red Sox. “So we still have to be finite with our resources. We still have to manage risk. We still have to find competitive advantages and bridge big resource gaps. That’s familiar to me.
“I think the biggest difference is the upside in the Toronto market is real. Cleveland, you’re just limited to a population base and a wealth base. Toronto, you don’t really have a limit in that population or wealth, and you have the entire nation [of Canada]. Winning, I think, has exponential potential impact there. Especially if you build [something] sustainable.”
Can the Jays sustain Anthopoulos’ creation while restocking their cupboard of young talent? The Yankees’ 2016 fortunes could rest on Shapiro’s ability to do just that.