KingKat

The polishing turds philosophy was really more what the previous Rays brains trust was about. Fierce penny-pinching to monetize assets was their m.o. and they tried to apply it to baseball with disastrous results. I'd recommend reading the Extra 2% for more on the topic.

Well since it's been established that the Rays are a lowest revenue team, I don't really understand how Friedman could be excused of cheaping out.

Does anyone remember if doubt has ever been raised about Melky's age? (I suppose I'm doing it right now just by posting this.) I have never heard anything to that effect but he plays pretty old for his age.

Really? Not just better at defense, not just better value for the money but flat out all-around better and obviously so? This is something you believe?

Do you equate keeping costs in line with revenues with cheaping out?

Yeah I guess in re-reading my post, I make it sound like all ownership does is give Beane the keys to the car and there's obviously more to it than that. Oakland didn't become a progressive organization the day Beane walked in the door (like Moneyball might make you believe). They won't stop being a progressive organization the day he leaves either.

I wasn't trying to re-write your post. I was just agreeing with you that ownership is super important and then I went on my own tangent about the subject of ownership.

Ah... O.K. That's WELL after he initially turned down Boston.

Olivera might make more sense for the situation the Jays are in now (team win an immediate need and some payroll constraints) but if I am not mistaken there's an injury concern and that could (justifiably) scare off the Jays. In any case, the more infielders on the market, the better for the Jays. If Fernandez can make himself available in time, it increases the Jays chances of nabbing at least someone from some part of the market even if it isn't him.

Do you know the timing of this?

You are absolutely right that it all begins with ownership. Look at Billy Beane, there's a reason he's stayed in Oakland. Ownership lets him do what he wants. He was even given the luxury of no less than 5 consecutive .500 or less seasons right in the middle of his ten year tenure. You only get that kind of rope from an organization that cares as much about cost cutting as about the product on the field. Beane's no idiot, he realizes that there's a kind of freedom that comes with not having the pressure to win all the time and he ultimately turned down the Red Sox job because all he really he wanted from them was recognition not the actual situation. Trying to stretch every dollar in Oakland is a challenge he relishes and he's good at it. He works well with the limitations put on him and the trade off for those limitations is more than off set by the fact that he's given more freedom to make mistakes than probably any other GM. And it's not at all crazy to think he works better with a limited payroll than he would with a large one. Limitations stimulate creativity (necessity is the mother of invention and all that). As for Friedman, we really know much less about him than we know about Beane. As has been pointed out, he's a finance guy and of a for all we know, his long term ambition may have nothing to do with sports or he may indeed want to stick with baseball but have a career that's more in the Pat Gillick mould where you preserve your legacy by bailing at the first sign of the downturn. Things have definitely gotten more difficult for the Rays since baseball has eliminated the compensation system that they gamed so well. Things like picking up roster players in the Price trade could help to prop up the window for a little while longer but it will be really hard to keep it going without the kind of MiLB depth that they used to have. The challenge for the new GM will be to refine the approach, find new loopholes if there are any, do more with less picks and try to avoid a drought period as adjustments are made.

Wilko: I'll join if there's room. I tried to reply a few days ago but was banned . lol

I wonder what John Hart was thinking? It seems like a pretty good gig with some solid pieces already in place.

The Force is strong in this one. (Don't hate me for that dumb joke.)

I don't think this is nearly the no-brainer that you claim it is. When I imagine Melky at 34, I certainly don't picture Bautista at 34 and I'm hardly what you'd call a Jays apologist.

... and the Moogy interpretaion is always correct. In fact to call it an interpretation is practically absurd since its irrefutable. Ho-hum. Do you want to score yourself another point in your internal scorebook since this is a Sudoku like past time for you?

I guess my experience was different from yours. I had plenty of talk with BTS in the fantasy threads all through his supposed dissapearance. He did complain quite vocally about the crap JFaS was taking in the GDT and that may be what turned him off to most of the board. You'll tell me that that's a generous interpretation and I'll tell you that anyone who calls him things like Queen BTS clearly has a bizzare and childish vendetta against him. We could go back and forth with these competing interpretations and if you're true to form, you might even promote the fallacy that a very detailed interpretation of events somehow isn't still an interpretation (like you like to do with Jose Bautisa's comments).

I don't really see AA being in the market for a middling veteran catcher given the commitment already made to Navarro.

BTS never went anywhere. He kept posting in on this board. He just wasn't as active in threads like the Game Day threads and that was because of all the crap JFAS was taking and the overall quality of the threads than anything else. When the Jays are winning, it brings out a lot of casuals which of course it a good thing but it can make a lot of threads a chore to navigate. Plenty of veteran posters are more active when the board is quieter, this isn't a new trend or something exclusive to BTS but for some strange reason BTS is a bit of a lightning rod around here. He's the ring leader of a supposed groupthink (presumedly composed of people who like me who happen to disagree with him on all sorts of things but happen to like him and respect his opinion enough to have civil discussions). He's apparently a shamed Rays fans even though that narrative was started by people who were projecting their own belief in small sample sizes on to him. I mean if you know anything about BTS, do you know really think he would let one season influence how he views Friedman's body of work? That he would be suddenly ashamed of the Rays? We all known that Moogy will latch on to anything negative about one of his favorite targets (Bautista, BTS, the Rays) but that's Moogy's m.o. Why anyone else would latch on to this idiotic narrative is beyond me.

Oh come on... Who are "they"? You're better than this nonsense.

Asking Friedman to do that instead of Colletti is pretty smart.

I'm more interested to see what the Rays do without Friedman than what Friedman does without the Rays. By it's very nature, the Rays situation requires out of the box solutions so the candidates to replace Friedman should be some pretty interesting people and not necessarily obvious candidates. On the other hand, Friedman is in a no-win solution. Win with that big payroll and it's expected, lose and you suck.

Oh really... He seemed like a pretty cool guy from the interviews I heard but wtf do I know.

I doubt that any meeting this guy had with the Jays was about replacing Seitzer. Maybe they want him to be the manager for an affiliate or something.

The 2009 draft was definitely a good one for the Jays and if they had signed Paxton it would have been even more impressive. Mike Trout overshadows the entire draft class but the Jays weren't the only team to pass on him and overall it was a good haul. The only problem with attributing credit to him for this draft was that Beaston had already started the process of phasing him out J.P. at this point so it's not clear how involved he was. I remember reading something to the effect that Jenkins was a J.P. pick and Paxton an AA pick (the beginning of a shift towards the future GM'S drafting philosophy). What further muddies the waters is that at some point neither AA nor JP would have been much involved in the draft because the scouting director would have taken sole responsibility for the picks.