Fallen Leafs

Toronto Blue Jays GM Alex Anthopoulos’ response to questions about whether the Blue Jays are entering a rebuilding phase during his conference call on Saturday. Anthopoulos wants the team to become a perennial contender in the AL East through strong trades, scouting, and player development, rather than delving heavily into the free agent market.

But as Mike Wilner puts it succinctly,

This probably means that we’ve seen the last of Roy Halladay in a Blue Jays’ uniform…The shame of it all isn’t that the Jays are going to trade arguably the best homegrown player they’ve ever had, and a potential Hall of Famer, but rather that they had him for eight seasons of awesome and couldn’t put a good enough team around him to do any serious damage.

But after this aimless, disaster of a past season, dare I say that the Blue Jays finally have a plan in place? While a ton of work has yet to be completed, Anthopoulos is attempting to ‘build’ the Blue Jays in his vision of drafting, trading, and developing young championship level players.

The entire Anthopoulos conference call can be heard here, and is excellently summarized and analyzed by many Blue Jays writers.