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Great Expectations
The Lost Toronto Blue Jays Season
By Shi Davidi, John Lott ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Shi Davidi and John Lott
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-424-8
CHAPTER 1
THE BLOCKBUSTER
"Hopefully by the end of 2013, we'll say 2012 is the best year the organization had. We needed it for all these things to happen. And if that isn't the case, we'll just say that was a terrible year and we lived through it."
— Alex Anthopoulos in February 2013
BY THE TIME THE BLUE JAYS ended their 2012 season on October 3 at 73-89 after a 2-1 victory over the Minnesota Twins, all Alex Anthopoulos wanted to do was get away. In previous years the tireless GM immediately pushed himself and his lieutenants into post-mortem meetings that lasted for days, using those talks as a springboard into the winter's business, everything happening at a dizzying, manic pace. But all the losing in a year of misery, all the grinding of moving players up and down from the minors while scanning the waiver wire or working the phones to try to find some upgrades, had taken a toll on the whole organization. So Anthopoulos did something almost unthinkable for him — he told everyone to go home and take a break. Even the man known for sending 2 a.m. emails briefly stepped aside from work, returning home to Montreal to reconnect with family and celebrate Thanksgiving. He needed the time not only to get away from baseball, but also to relax with his immediate family and newborn son John, an August addition to his clan.
By the time the holiday weekend was over, he was ready to begin picking up the pieces of his baseball team, and the first order of business was debriefing manager John Farrell.
They spoke all day the Monday after Thanksgiving and again on Tuesday, exchanging information and ideas in an open, direct, and forthright manner they hadn't enjoyed for months. The conversations were mostly constructive, although there were tense moments. Farrell complained of instances when he felt Anthopoulos made decisions without considering his input. Anthopoulos countered by telling Farrell that he needed to be stronger in stating his case when something was especially important to him, and he shouldn't relent if he didn't believe in a particular move. Then, at the very end, Anthopoulos finally broached the subject they had stayed away from, but ultimately the one most pressing: what to make of all those clandestine feelers from the Boston Red Sox?
Anthopoulos raised the matter first, asking Farrell directly what he should do if the Red Sox called again, inquiring about his availability. Farrell replied by saying that if he had an opportunity to pursue the job, he'd be interested, the same response he gave nearly a year earlier when the Red Sox took their first run at him. The Blue Jays angrily rebuffed that effort by demanding frontline pitcher Clay Buchholz in return for their manager, abruptly ending the conversation. This time, Anthopoulos told Farrell the Blue Jays hadn't been contacted yet by their division rival, and that nothing could happen unless they were. Essentially, it was a message that the Blue Jays were ready to discuss trading him, a marked shift from the GM's public pronouncements that "John is our manager." They were done fighting for someone who wanted to be somewhere else.
The next day Red Sox owner John Henry called Blue Jays president Paul Beeston to ask about Farrell again, and the ball got rolling. Negotiations were primarily handled between Beeston and close friend Larry Lucchino, Red Sox president and CEO, with input on trade pieces from Anthopoulos and his Boston counterpart, Ben Cherington. For a deal to happen, the Blue Jays insisted they get a big-league player in return; their asks included Jacoby Ellsbury and top pitching prospect Rubby De La Rosa. The Red Sox started by offering Chris Carpenter, the right-hander they received from the Chicago Cubs a year earlier as compensation for former GM Theo Epstein. Over the next week and a half they went back and forth until October 20, when they finally settled on infielder Mike Aviles, the Blue Jays then granting the Red Sox permission to negotiate a new contract with Farrell. It was done that night; the Red Sox leaked word shortly before midnight (infuriating the Blue Jays), and an official announcement came the next day. "I'm extremely excited to be returning to the Red Sox and to Boston," Farrell said in a release issued by the Red Sox. "I love this organization."
While that irritated many Toronto fans, what twisted the knife was the news conference at Fenway Park on October 23, when Farrell was feted like a conquering hero back to reclaim a throne that was rightfully his. As he revelled in the moment, several Blue Jays players and staff felt that he made his time in Toronto seem like an internship. Some were irked that he finally got what he wanted, others were simply happy to see him go, while many were turned off by a commitment they had long questioned because of Farrell's public statements that never definitively dismissed the possibility of returning to Boston. The Toronto front office was furious and dumbfounded that he volunteered the information that he asked out of his deal in October 2011, a move that led the Blue Jays to institute a policy preventing their employees from breaking contracts for lateral moves. And worst of all was the way getting jilted by Farrell after two mediocre seasons of work sent the franchise boring through bedrock to a new low, while a division rival that had schemed and plotted for a year at last got their man, saddling the Blue Jays with a manager search they didn't necessarily want.
"It's over, it's finished. He's still in the game, we're still in the game," Beeston says tersely of the whole affair, his reluctance to discuss it underlining how touchy the matter remains. "I know what it was, Alex knows what it was, John Farrell knows what it was, Larry Lucchino knows what it was, John Henry knows what it was. That's good enough. It's done. We wish him good luck." Blue Jays fans were nowhere near as gracious, enraged by the doom and gloom Farrell left behind. But it was a decision the team had to make. "Do you really want somebody who doesn't want to be there, or wants to be somewhere else, in your organization?" says Keith Pelley, the head of Rogers Media. "What does that do for the culture, what does that do for the messaging to the players, and if you're not all in, and you don't have the unwavering passion, how successful are you going to be? So I think the decision they made with John was the right decision. It might have been a little bit different if we hadn't had 73 wins [in 2012], you know? We were 73-89 and had some challenges that were made public in the clubhouse. Things might have been different if it was the other way around and we were two games from a playoff position."
On the day of Farrell's departure, Anthopoulos said there were "zero" frontrunners in the search for a replacement, and he meant it. His mind was focused elsewhere.
WHILE FARRELL'S MESSY EXIT was being orchestrated, the plans for an off-season roster makeover were being mapped out on a series of whiteboards in luxury suites 327 and 328, which had been converted into a war room.
Interns were tasked with making magnets displaying the names of players on every big-league club, which were subsequently ranked by Anthopoulos, assistant general managers Tony LaCava, Jay Sartori, and Andrew Tinnish, and pro scouting director Perry Minasian. They slotted free agents by position for both the fall of 2012 and 2013, to give them a better sense of possible targets for the next year, and then began building scenarios of how to attack the winter, factoring in who might be available, how much they might cost, and how best to allocate the dollars.
Team owner Rogers Communications Inc. had already approved a payroll increase of roughly $20 million to $105 million before the season ended. Given the prior commitments the Blue Jays had in place of about $80 million, Anthopoulos had roughly $25 million to pursue an aggressive plan that included, in order of priority, two starting pitchers, an infielder, a reliever, and a left fielder. That's an ambitious shopping list on a limited budget, and the tight constraints meant Anthopoulos and his staff refined their past processes, narrowing the net they cast. With free agents, they pared down their list based on how a player would fit into both the payroll and the clubhouse, and what their potential alternatives were. In terms of trades, they locked in on players that teams would be motivated to move, rather than trying to be creative in search of players under long-term control. "It was like, we're not going to chase our tails and really try to go after a player that's going to be hard to pry," says Anthopoulos. "You might do it, but it's going to take so much time and effort, and we need to get a lot done, so let's be decisive and really key in on teams that, just from past knowledge, they'll be open to talking about this player and that player. Let's spend time talking about that."
To that end, as the San Francisco Giants were putting the finishing touches on a four-game sweep of the Detroit Tigers in the World Series, Anthopoulos was on the phone with the Chicago White Sox, trying to find out their plans for Jake Peavy. The 2007 National League Cy Young Award winner had a $22 million option for 2013 that was sure to be declined in favour of a $4 million buyout. Rick Hahn was on the verge of being named the new general manager and it was unclear which direction the club was heading, and whether negotiations on a new deal for Peavy would pan out. So the Blue Jays made sure to ask the White Sox to check in with them first before they declined Peavy's option and sent him into free agency. They also explored a trade for Dan Haren, whose $15.5 million option was going to be declined by the Los Angeles Angels, although they were wary about his health.
Meanwhile, the Blue Jays were also keeping a close eye on Tigers starter Anibal Sanchez, who was due to hit free agency once the Fall Classic ended. Of all the pitchers entering the open market, he was the one the Blue Jays focused in on, especially with Zack Greinke, an arm Anthopoulos had long coveted, demanding more than the five-year max they could offer under team policy. (The Los Angeles Dodgers eventually gave him $147 million over six years.) By the time Sergio Romo got Miguel Cabrera looking at a third strike to clinch the Giants' second title in three years on October 28, the Blue Jays were ready to pounce on multiple fronts.
One of the first places Anthopoulos landed was at the White Sox's door. Word was that talks with Peavy on a new deal weren't making much progress. The Blue Jays were willing to pick up his pricy option for 2013 and were ready to part with some prospects to make it happen. Dealing him away wasn't the White Sox's preference, but Hahn did the responsible thing and examined all options, and worked out a couple of different trade scenarios with Anthopoulos that he put on the back burner. The scenario the Blue Jays preferred had the White Sox absorbing the $4 million in buyout money they were going to pay anyway, making Peavy an $18 million budgetary hit, but that was still going to drain too much of their available payroll. So Anthopoulos and Beeston went to the ownership at Rogers Communications Inc., and during a meeting with CEO Nadir Mohamed, CFO Tony Staffieri, and Rogers Media head Keith Pelley, made a pitch for a one-time commitment over and above the already settled budget. They got it. "We sat around the board table and talked about Jake Peavy for about 90 minutes, a couple of hours, and at the end of the day, it was 'Alex, if you feel the Jake Peavy deal is what you need to do ...'" recalls Pelley. "That was a pretty important conversation. That opened the door to 'we're ready to commit to spend more dollars.'"
In the interim, the White Sox closed in on a new contract with Peavy, whose preference was to stay in Chicago. He had been aware of the potential for a trade to another team, but not the specifics. On October 30, word leaked of a $29 million, two-year extension and its announcement came the next day, just ahead of the deadline for decisions on player options. The Peavy deal was dead. But ownership's willingness to ante up for it emboldened Anthopoulos as he turned to his next targets.
AS THE GENERAL MANAGERS' meetings loomed, the Blue Jays were juggling several balls, and first settled some smaller pieces of business. Mike Aviles, a member of the team for all of two weeks, and catcher Yan Gomes were shipped to the Cleveland Indians on November 3 for Esmil Rogers, a power-armed right-hander with four years of club control set to earn $509,000 in 2013. The trade was both surprising and understandable, as Anthopoulos appeared to have plugged a hole at second base with Aviles, but needed inexpensive relief help and found it in Rogers. And Anthopoulos by that point was deep in negotiations with Maicer Izturis, a utility infielder the Blue Jays felt would be an upgrade on Aviles. His $10 million, three-year contract would be signed just as baseball's movers and shakers arrived to do business at the desert oasis of Indian Wells, California.
Yet before checking into the Hyatt Regency Indian Wells Resort & Spa for two and a half days of meetings, Anthopoulos and assistant GM Tony LaCava also made a clandestine side trip to Miami on a much bigger play, intent on making a quick strike for Anibal Sanchez. Working through their various scenarios in the war room, the Blue Jays decided that of all the free-agent arms, Sanchez was the best they were likely to land, and sought to knock out their competition by getting something done early. Another of their prime targets, right-hander Hisashi Iwakuma, was already off the board, having re-signed with the Seattle Mariners on November 2 without really testing the market, so that added some urgency to the recruiting trip.
Things went well the first day, when Anthopoulos and LaCava took Sanchez and his wife out to dinner, and again the following afternoon when the same foursome lunched along with the pitcher's parents and grandparents. Afterward, Anthopoulos spoke with Gene Mato, Sanchez's agent, and asked, "Can we get this done early? We're going to be aggressive." The Blue Jays offered a five-year deal out of the gate but didn't mention the dollar figure — $75 million — they had in mind. First, they wanted to hear what Mato was thinking, and he replied by saying they were looking for an eight-year commitment, perhaps seven, a total non-starter either way. Sanchez and his wife also needed to visit Toronto to see what the city had to offer before making a decision, a reasonable request but one that would delay the process. According to Anthopoulos, the final message was "We're going to need a little time, we're going to have to talk to other teams, go through the process, get information." Anthopoulos also understood the process would involve multiple teams and likely drag into December. (He was right; Sanchez re-signed with the Tigers for $80 million over five years on December 17.) He and LaCava left for Indian Wells with Sanchez on the back burner, determined to dig up the pitching help they needed somewhere else.
Shortly after they landed at LAX and hopped into a rental SUV bound for Palm Springs, Anthopoulos called Miami Marlins president Larry Beinfest and asked if they could schedule a meeting to discuss Josh Johnson, the strapping 6-foot-7 right-hander due to be a free agent at the end of 2013. The two had discussed Johnson the previous July, when the Blue Jays also inquired about Jose Reyes and Mark Buehrle. Those talks went nowhere, but things were different this time, as the Marlins planned to shed payroll after a failed build-up the previous off-season. They had already purged Hanley Ramirez, Omar Infante, and Sanchez the previous summer, and the Blue Jays believed they were ready to extend the off-load. Beinfest told Anthopoulos that he'd carve out some time in the next day or two.
When Anthopoulos and LaCava arrived at the luxurious resort, their suite was ready for business. Assistant GMs Jay Sartori and Andrew Tinnish and pro scouting director Perry Minasian had already set up computers, a projector, and easel pads so they could easily access stats, watch scouting video, and draft notes for all to discuss. The extra hands were in contrast to the way Anthopoulos handled his first three GM meetings as the man in charge, when only LaCava came along. The larger contingent would come in handy in the days ahead.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Great Expectations by Shi Davidi, John Lott. Copyright © 2013 Shi Davidi and John Lott. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
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