Post by dougiejays on May 28, 2020 10:32:45 GMT -5
With the Blue Jays comfortably in playoff position (8 games up on 2nd place Cleveland), there wasn’t a lot of pressure on the front office to get something done on deadline day. Rumours briefly connected the team to Dodgers’ lefty Jamie Moyer (eventually sent to Boston) and Royals’ shortstop Dickie Thon, but in the end the Jays elected to stand pat except for the minor acquisition of OF Gary Redus from Montreal for an undisclosed, but presumably nominal, fee.
Redus, originally shipped in the opposite direction (from Toronto to Montreal) in a waiver deal almost exactly three years ago, isn’t much of a hitter (.660 career OPS) but does bring good speed and solid defence at the corner spots. With 343 career steals in 431 attempts (79.6%), he figures to fill the role that Bill Madlock was expected to fill this year before his sudden if unsurprising decline.
The deal comes on the heels of the Jays selling reliever Ken Dayley to Oakland for $5M last week. Likely unhappy with his role ping-ponging back and forth between Toronto and the Triple-A club, Dayley had turned down multiple extension offers and was due to become a free agent at the end of the season, so the team used the opportunity to gain some much-needed relief from their ongoing financial woes.
The Jays project to lose more than $20M this season and salary cap experts believe they may be in even worse shape next season. The team currently projects for a payroll a little over $90M in 1992 – less than the current roster, but far above even the most optimistic of revenue projections. These financial concerns likely hamstrung the team’s ability to execute any major trades on deadline day.
“I mean, technically we could still take on salary in the right deal,” Jays GM Doug Davis said from his office on Sunday. “But we have to be very careful about how that money impacts our flexibility in future years. Frankly, we’re already looking at a situation where it’s going to be difficult to retain both Randy Myers and Matt Winters after next season – let alone anyone else who’s up for free agency – and any salary we added now would further impact that calculation.”
The quiet deadline followed up an offseason without a single move, but it wasn’t all crickets on the trade front this season. The heavy lifting was of course done in June when Toronto flipped expiring star shortstop Eric Davis and a draft pick to Texas for DH Albert Hall and swingman Moose Haas, followed in short order by the acquisition of replacement shortstop Scott Fletcher from Montreal (again for a nominal undisclosed fee). There was also the swap of Bill Gullickson for Mark Fidrych in May, a deal largely designed to get Gullickson’s money off the books for 1992.
Canny fans will notice a trend.
“When you’re building a team, it’s all about acquiring talent,” Davis acknowledged reluctantly. “But once you reach the top of the mountain, it’s about retaining talent, and sometimes that leads to tough decisions – trades made for financial reasons as much as on-field ones. Sometimes you might need to give up a second-tier player to keep a superstar around for the long haul. It’s not how we’d like it to be, but it’s the reality of the situation when you’re running the second-highest payroll in the league.”
