Fallen Leafs

Basking in the levity of sports, cookery, and a few ice cream sandwiches on the side.

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Posts tagged "Alex Anthopoulos"

Toronto Blue Jays officially name former Boston Red Sox pitching coach John Farrell as their 12th manager in history.

“We’re all sports fans, and you live and die with your team. You want to know that your GM and your front office, they’re up all night, they’re thinking about it, they’re coming to work, they’re doing everything they can. … I want to know, if I’m a fan, that my GM is doing everything he can.”

~ Toronto Blue Jays GM Alex Anthopoulos

Peace, Order, and Alex Anthopoulos

Scouts love their jobs; they might go 80 straight days on the road, they’ll work themselves to death. But they have families. A pipe breaks at home, the wife is there alone with the kids and she has to take care of it while the scout is away. That’s a tough thing. We want to make this the best, or one of the best, places in the major leagues to work. Then we can attract the best people. And the best people are going to find the best players.

Toronto Blue Jays GM Alex Anthopoulos, using one of the weirdest domestic issues to illustrate his point about keeping scouts at home for at least 10 days a month. (via ESPN)

Really, I would characterize it as ‘building’.

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.