Alright so if your a Jays fan, or just a baseball fan in general you'd know that Alex Anthopolous, the Jays GM, made next to no moves during the offseason, which in all honesty is likely to hamper the teams progress this year and let's face it if your in win now mode you have to spend money to improve the team otherwise you could fall a couple steps behind and make it more difficult the next year or two. Anyhow lets see what I would have tried to spin in order to make the offseason successful
1.) Signing Dioner Navarro - Now I did not think this was a bad signing by any stretch of the imagination, it seemed like a very AA type signing, taking in a player who has shown promise in a part time role and convert him to the position full time and see how he does. All in all Navarro has the chops to pull off a good year behind the plate offensively and his solid defence is a HUGE upgrade from what we had last year.
2.) Sign Masahiro Tanaka - Now I know plenty of people would say 'But The Jays Don't Have That Kind Of Money'. WRONG that is bullshit. And you know why? Well it's because Rogers Communications, the owners of the Blue Jays, have one of the highest incomes for baseball owners (right up there in the top 4 or 5), which means they DO have the money the ownership just needs to step up and offer it. As for what I'd offer I'd go for a similar contract to what the Yankees offered him because you need to indicate to him that the team is serious about winning and that spending spree by the Yankees likely attracted him there but on the other side if he got the same offer from Toronto and saw all the big name players we acquired last year he might've changed his tune a bit. Additionally I believe that AA made a HUGE mistake by not going beyond 5 years, and that is because Tanaka is only 25 and a 7 or even 8 year deal would only take him to age 32-33, which is pretty much statistically the end of a players prime, which means you wouldn't really be eating any of the players downhill performance from getting 'over the hill'. Now I'm not writing any other pitchers in case we lose Tanaka because in my mind it's Tanaka or bust, because time and time again we heard over the offseason we need a front of the rotation starter, but outside of Tanaka every other FA pitcher was at best a 3rd spot in the rotation player.
3.) Trade For Chase Utley/Sign Mark Ellis - Ok so early in the offseason the Phillies re-signed Chase Utley along with some of their other aging players, which was confusing as all hell. But given the size of Utley's salary it would have been easy to try and acquire him by offering up some of our major league ready position players since the position players (nearly all of them) on the Phillies were getting to the point where they wouldn't be able to drive the team anywhere close to the post season and Utley was still able to produce at an offensive level that was a fair bit above the average for second baseman and his defensive prowess was still pretty high level as well. As well considering that we traded Brad Lincoln to the Phillies later in the offseason for Kratz and we still have a surplus of relievers we could have likely put together a package of relief pitchers as well. On the other hand if Utley still optioned to resign with the Phillies for whatever ungodly reason I would go after Mark Ellis, and for the same reason as Utley, he's not going to break the bank like signing Cano would have, but he's about average level offensive production wise and defensive wise. Add on the fact that he was playing in a much bigger park the years before, Dodgers Stadium, moving him to the Rogers Centre in the AL East could have very well given a bit of a boost to his numbers.
Ok so those are the signings/trades I would have attempted to make as the GM of the Blue Jays. Now From here we wonder how the line up would be organized.
Batting Order
1.) Jose Reyes
2.) Melky Cabrera
3.) Jose Bautista
4.) Edwin Encarnacion
5.) Colby Rasmus
6.) Chase Utley/Mark Ellis
7.) Brett Lawrie
8.) Adam Lind
9.) Dioner Navarro
Now obviously the batting order isn't changed much from last year, I moved the second baseman up and kept Navarro down at the bottom, the reason for this is because one of the glaring issues for the Jays last year was inability to hit with runners in scoring position. Now if we look at Utley/Ellis and Navarro they have had pretty high batting avg. over the last couple years, what that tells me is if we sprinkle contact hitters in the late end of the batting order we can ensure that players continue to get on base instead of the 'strikeout alley' we had last year when we had Arencibia, Rasmus, Lawrie and Izturis/Bonifacio all lined up in a row.
Starting Rotation
1.) Masahiro Tanaka
2.) R.A Dickey
3.) Mark Buerhle
4.) Drew Hutchison
5.) Brandon Morrow
Now again heres something I actually liked that AA did, put Morrow in the 5th spot, now that doesn't say anything about his ability as a pitcher but what it does do is, because of travelling days and even lengthen road trips, gives him more rest between starts, which will allow the Jays to stretch him out better and keep him in consistently good shape to prevent wearing out his arm. As well Hutchison had a fantastic spring so I gave him the #4 spot to even things out, otherwise the rotation is the same as last year with the addition of Tanaka.
-Eric
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