Dick_Pole

Dennis Lamp 1985 11-0 Best...season...ever

Interesting. Now you guys should do a David Wells vs Jack Morris comparison and figure out why Wells couldn't even meet minimum qualifications to stay on the ballot.

Don't lump me in with this f***er.

People can say what they want about his voting process or whatever, but I look at his picks and they are all 10 legit and defend-able choices. He's hit his limit so I'm not sure how people can complain about any of his snubs, no matter what his reasons were. It's not like he's putting Ray Durham and Mike Timlin on his ballot just to prove some kind of stupid point.

See but this is where I contend that it's not an issue - We don't know the ins and outs of Rogers' books. But if they hedged the currency as I assume they would, that $150M US translates to something like $160M CDN and it's a solid number on both aspects. The budget would have always been $160M CDN but the $150M US number was vocalized. I'm just making this up based on your numbers, I haven't actually heard a $150M number though I assume they always mean US figures. It would be nonsensical if they used $CDN to express a US-dollar based expense. Actually, do you mean next year as in the upcoming season? Or next year as in 2015? If you meant the latter then yes, it would hurt the business. If $160M CDN bought you a $150M US budget for 2014 and the CDN dollar drops 5% by the time next year's budgeting and hedging process starts, then your same $160M CDN would get you 5% less, around $8M less for 2015.

JPR's mouth said he was negatively affected by it...but he wasn't. His mouth just liked to open whenever there was some kind of excuse to be had for his mediocre performance. Understand the budgeting process - it's to come up with a figure, a guess, of how much money you're going to have available for next year. The most variables you take out of the equation, the more solid your number becomes, and the better benefit you have of being able to plan around a solid number sooner. So hedging away your foreign currency risks to your operations is almost always beneficial. JPR wasn't negatively affected by it, there was a missed opportunity. He didn't get some bonus cash, but the cash he expected was there. That's what the problem was. But even if they didn't hedge and $5M was unexpectedly thrown at his doorstep, what would he have done with it? Not much you can do if your bosses give you an extra $5M in March. Sure, he could have picked someone up at the deadline, but the prerequisite to that is that you have to be in serious contention which JPR never was.

Yeah but getting Colby Rasmus was his prime focus until he realized that having Fransisco Cordero in the bullpen was not a winning situation.

Everyone has one of those. I had 30K shares of this company on the NASDAQ symbol OXBT in which I bought for less than $2 literally minutes before the stock went crazy. I sold it in the mid-2's getting scared that it would drop the very next day. Instead it went up to almost $10 like 3 or 4 days later. On the flip side I was looking at a gold company in Canada symbol CSI at a buck a few weeks ago. It was down from $5 earlier in the year so it looked like it was cheap. I avoided it and it was the right call - it closed at 4 cents today. We all tend to remember our great missed opportunities but forget all those land mines that we brilliantly avoided. We have a limited set of choices in life so there will be numerous good and bad ones that we didn't make. Chances are if you have enough time to waste and so little problems in your life than you can use it to talk about a losing baseball team in the off-season, you've been lucky/fortunate/smart enough to make more good decisions than bad ones in life.

Meh...a non-issue, usually perpetuated by a media loudmouth like JPR looking for excuses at to why his team sucks or he can't get free agents. Any company with a treasury department worth the salary that it signs its own checks on will have hedged their currency risk for budgeting purposes several months before. I work for a competitor of Rogers and our US purchases for 2014 are fully hedged for Q1 and more than half hedged for the rest of the year in September 2013. I can imagine that Rogers would have a similar policy. I'm pretty sure that any budget number that Alex was given in October already took into account hedged currencies and recent fluctuations will have no impact on his target.

This is what makes this debate so frustrating. People are throwing out stuff like stats and roster management. It's not like it takes a genius to implement some kind of saber analysis into your repertoire. Any idiot can look at some stats and use the sort or filter function in Microsoft Excel. Nor does it take a genius to have basic roster management skills. The most important trait a GM can have is negotiation skills and its subset of traits (personable, outgoing, aggressive etc). Alex has proven in the past with contract negotiations and with trades he excels in this aspect with the exception of the Dickey trade where that was a clear overpay. The problem is the end goal he is aiming towards is f***ed up. There's no one better at assembling a dominant and deep bullpen than Alex. One that is so deep that there's 3 or 4 guys capable of being in an MLB bullpen rotting in triple A and running out of options. And it was created at the detriment of depth at an MLB roster where your core five guys (Lawrie, Reyes, Rasmus, Bautista, EE) have a good chance of averaging less than 120 games each in any given season. Who in their right mind does something like this?

Whether he's good or not really depends on what you value most as a GM. Because he's great at some things and terrible at other aspects of his job. What I can say is he is an underachiever. If he did even some the basics right that most posters on here can see needs to be done, then he'd be much better. He's like a guy that can pass an advanced calculus class but gets so myopic that he'll fail basic grade 8 math. How can someone have done such ridiculous roster management? Tossing away catchers and middle infielders in favour of an abundance of relievers. On top of that, the guys who could be used as starters in favour of the trash we saw during the season aren't even given a chance to do so. This was very basic stuff that he screwed up massively on.

The problem is you use too many words and too many paragraphs to explain things. Makes you seem obsessive. Get to the point. And not to throw accusations around but you have a very similar long winded style and make the same types of spelling errors as another frequent, kind of weird poster: ie. publically...you and him are the only two people I recall using that same spelling of that word multiple times.

I thought there were IP address checks on here? Don't tell me this character is smart enough to use VPN...or desperate enough to frequent various sources of the internet (libraries, cafes) just to post on here?

I think the Interbrew thing is overdone. I mean they signed Clemens during those days right? Pretty much the biggest FA signing you could get. The lack of success in the Interbrew days has a lot more to do with wasting assets like John Olerud, inconsistent assets like Juan Guzman who after the World Series years was dominant one season and trash the next and really poor choices/terrible luck on acquisitions like Eric Hanson, Carlos Garcia and Danny Darwin. Mix that in with the Yankees trying to build a HOF team every year and not even a Mark Cuban level of engaged owner could have done much with that squad at the time. I mean with Green, Delgado, the Cy Young awards, Jose Cruz fleecing from Seattle...there was a lot to look forward to from those teams but they never got it together. Not sure how Interbrew could be blamed just because they didn't want to spend like the Yankees at the time.

Sorry, that was meant as more of a rant in general about the state of their crappy team than meant to attack you. You said that you weren't sure if Rogers was committed to doing such a thing - not sure if you mean that you would agree with such a course of action if they did. My point is that Rogers, nor any other team owner should agree to be tanking that bad year after year, because it's embarrassing, as Chappy said it's a cop out, and a team that has to go this deep down into the pits is just a poorly run franchise. No fan of any team should be happy with this course of action under any circumstance. How often does getting year after year of top draft picks actually work? It worked for the Penguins in the NHL but they had uncanny good timing with the elite talents that were available at #1. Look at Washington. Strasburg and Harper, Zimmerman a few years earlier in the top 5 along with Storen and the other recent acquisitions added. They have a good, but not dominant team. Jordan Zimmermann is their ace and he was picked 67th overall so them tanking a few years ago had nothing to do with their ability to get him. Compare that to the Braves. While Washington was really tanking, the Braves were only pulling back a little bit, getting Minor at #7 as their highest pick in recent years. Now they have a better team. I get irritated when people have "reverse standing" threads cheering for the Jays to tank just so they can have a draft pick at a little bit of a higher spot. It doesn't matter whether you have the 5th, 10th or 15th pick in baseball. If you're a good team that knows how to draft and develop players, you will get elite talents no matter which pick you have. And if you're garbage at it the opposite thing applies. Then in the once in a blue moon where a team like the Nationals supposedly hit the jackpot with Strasburg and Harper at #1, they're still not as good as the Braves anyways.

I don't know why someone would be calling that the correct way to do anything. I can that an embarrassment and running a franchise into the ground. I don't know what people's obsession is that you have to be ultra-terrible to rebuild. I would never in a million years want the Blue Jays to do that. There's teams like the Braves and Cardinals whose version of a rebuild is a couple of seasons at 75 or 80 wins and they're right back into contention again. You know...teams that actually know how to draft and build baseball teams...not the f***ing Houston Astros.

He'll be like Hinske...shuffled out of town after being a failed starter then win a few rings being a role player that barely plays on good teams. Like the opposite of karma. He'll probably have a game winning hit in one key game too then go on Twitter rants about how he's a clutch hero.

The Jays?

I don't think anyone in their right mind thinks he's MLB ready. I guess I should rephrase the question "Who is the prospect most likely to fill a desperate hole and you really, really hope he excels in 2014" Let's just hope and pray 2B isn't a hole until Barreto is ready.

I can understand picking Jimenez from a team needs perspective. He has a decent chance of having the biggest impact on the MLB squad in 2014 out of all those guys. He'd be the answer to "Who is the prospect most likely to fill a desperate hole and you really, really hope he excels"

I don't entirely agree with everything you said, but I just peed a little laughing at that paragraph. Well said in terms of comedic factor and in its accurate portrayal of the two parties in question.

99.99999% of that was Halladay wanting to stay here. The other 0.000001% of that was JPR lying to him about how serious a contender this team could be under him.

Anyone who votes for JPR has a short memory of what he did while here. They look back at the standing and say "hey, in retrospect that team was pretty good" Let's get one thing clear...this team was never close to a contender...once. Looking back at the standings and seeing they were within 8 or 10 games of a playoff spot doesn't mean anything. A lot of those teams were out of it by August then had a hot September. Looking at the standings back then and saying he had the Yankees and Red Sox to deal with isn't fair either. The O's and Rays were s*** and guaranteed wins and guaranteed fillers of #4 and #5 in the standings...Alex does not have that luxury. On top of never being close to a contender, it never had a good farm system, it was a team that was directionless and headed for the abyss for years under the man. That guy could lead the team for 20 years and it'll have a .500 record with no playoff spots and no top prospects to its name. It's funny one of the first pro-JPR posts talks about how he would never field a guy like Arencibia. He drafted the guy 21st overall and the guy before him in the 2007 draft was even worse. So there goes that theory in a way. He won't field him, he'll just draft him so the next guy is burdened with trying him out as the next big upcoming star. One thing that JPR was very, very good at was finding good value guys like Marco Scutaro and Frank Catalanotto. That's the one true positive he has over Alex, and that's probably 90% of the reasons why this pole is actually as close as it is. But on the flip side he gave away a ton of talent. Chris Carpenter walks for nothing to save a couple of million in arb thanks to his injury. A rumoured Cain for Rios deal turns into Rios for a salary dump. Whatever people complain about AA selling low on Snider or anyone else...Snider never had much value to begin with as an MLB player, only as a prospect before he hit the majors. People talk about AA inheriting this player or that player. JPR inherited probably the best pitcher of the mid-2000's and at a below market contract. You don't get handed an ace like that everyday. On top of all that you had to deal with an arrogant ******* that was embarrassing to this organization from a PR standpoint. Before him, this team was seen as top of the class when it comes to upper management. That was 99% Gillick and even though Gord Ash was never a great GM, he was still very well liked. Frank Thomas signed with the Jays because he recalled them as being a classy organization that knew how to build a winner, even though it had a long drought from the playoffs even at his tenure. Now this generation of players has no recollection of the Jays being top of the class and now its harder to sign free agents. I'm not trying to say AA is a genius or without his faults. But clearly people do not recall how BAD JPR was.

A 45-year old Roberto Alomar looks better than this situation at 2B.

I guess saves really don't matter in baseball.