Jays hope young prospects can turn fortunes around
Aug 7, 2023 9:34:03 GMT -5
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Post by dougiejays on Aug 7, 2023 9:34:03 GMT -5
Enduring four straight 100-loss seasons has been absolute torture for Toronto Blue Jays' GM Doug Davis.
“It sucks. But frankly, our talent level was just decimated by the end of our run,” says Davis. “For awhile we’d really focused on building a sustainable winner, but eventually the talent pool just runs dry, and we had to make the decision to empty the tank to keep that run going for as long as possible.”
It was a hell of a run: twelve division titles in fourteen years topped off by a World Series Championship in 1999. After the championship, the Jays kept the run going for two more seasons, but capturing a weak AL East in 2001 with a measly 83 wins was the death knell. It was clear that the team was out of gas, and it was time for the fire sale to begin.
“By then it was really too late to recoup any real value,” Sportsnet analyst Ron Blomberg explains. “Guys had gotten old and they just weren’t that appealing to other teams. If the Jays had really wanted to maximize prospect capital, the time to sell off would have been three or four years earlier – but then you miss out on the title. That’s just the price you pay for winning.”
The Jays did manage to acquire a valuable young starting pitcher in Cliff Lee for superstar Gary Sheffield, but aside from that deal, they were largely forced to settle for bit parts and late draft picks in exchange for the pieces that made up the World Series core. It was time to build through the draft – and that meant losing. A lot.
“It’s always painful to go into a season knowing you’re going to lose a lot of games,” Davis says. “But for us, it wasn’t even a question of tanking. We just simply didn’t have the talent base to do anything else. We had to build that back up almost from scratch.”
Now – almost exactly 4 years after the big Sheffield trade – that talent base is finally rounding into shape. Baseball America ranked the Blue Jays as the 6th-best farm system in the league heading into 2006. Lee is coming off a breakout season which saw him place 10th in the American League in ERA, while fellow starters Delvin James and Jeff Austin have solidified themselves as solid young back-end rotation pieces. And the first wave of prospects is beginning to crest: Toronto elected to carry first baseman Adam Lind and center fielder Franklin Gutierrez north with the club for Opening Day.
Gutierrez, 23, is a glove-first center fielder who has spent the past four seasons in AAA, hitting .320 or above for each of the past three. He promises to bring a bit of a power/speed combo to the big club, but his best asset, most agree, is elite center field range which has many prognosticating at least one Gold Glove in the not-too-distant future. Meanwhile, the 22-year-old Lind is a college hitter who shot through the minors and will now make his debut just 2 years after getting drafted. He hit over .330 at every stop and projects to be a solid, dependable bat at first base, if not one who brings the elite power or on-base skills usually associated with the position.
Behind Lind and Gutierrez lies a glut of pitching talent in AAA. The team has several high-end reliever prospects who seem primed to make their debuts sometime in 2006, most notably righty Leo Nunez and lefty Sean Marshall, both of whom are just 23 and feature high-end velocity with control issues. And then there’s the big gun: selected 3rd overall in the 2003 draft, lefty Josh Johnson posted a 4.40 ERA in AAA last year at the age of 21, and despite that slightly elevated figure, some talent evaluators think he’s very close to breaking through at the big league level.
“Josh Johnson has as much talent as anyone in the system,” Blomberg says. “More than Cliff Lee, and this take may be controversial, but more than [2005 first-rounder Michael] Pineda even. Once he gets a little better at keeping guys off base, he’s going to be an absolute force in that rotation, maybe even a Cy Young winner if things break right. I think he’ll be up sometime this year – or by Opening Day 2007 at the very latest.”
To fit alongside the prospects, Davis made the surprising decision to ink several aging veterans in free agency, most notably bringing in 36-year-old shortstop Fernando Vina on a 3-year, $6M deal. He also brought in several aging relievers on one-year contracts. Asked what the ceiling is for this year's team, he’s modest in his assessment.
“Look, I think we’d be happy to put the 100-loss seasons in the rearview,” he says. “There are still a few holes on this team, and we recognize that. I don’t think we brought in those veterans with the aim of being a playoff team – it more about plugging a couple of those holes to see how we might look once we’re able to settle on some longer-term solutions. For this year, I think gunning for .500 might be a little optimistic, but not too crazy.”
