I just wrote a post on my
Baseball in Alberta blog about what impact the Blue Jays trade could have locally. As a Red Sox fan, I realize that it impacts our team as well, so I am reposting here, with a few edits.
Our division rival, the Toronto Blue Jays pulled off a blockbuster deal and have added 4 all-star players to their roster. Money aside (Rogers still has a few excess billions), the only cost was a
controversial shortstop (whom will be replaced by one of the premier shortstops in the league), an under-performing pitcher and some prospects. And although some of these prospects might pan out in future years, it’s not as though any of them were the kind of prospects that your average baseball fan was following in the minors – a la Bryce Harper or Jesus Montero. In fact it wasn’t even the top organizational prospects – but their consensus #2, 5 and 8 guys.
Should we concede the division right away? Do we have no hope of competing against the re-tooled Blue Jays next season? Not so fast.....
This trade will make Toronto a better team for the immediate future. It may even help their chances of making the playoffs, but we're jumping to conclusions if we assume any more than that. Remember how we felt when we added A-Gon and Carl Crawford to our already potent lineup? It was a foregone conclusion that we would win the division, most of the chatter around the baseball message boards was if we would break the 100 win barrier or not.
Anyhow, there are two ways we can look at this: Look at individual player's impacts, or look at what history tells us about the fate of teams that made huge acquisitions, bolstering their rosters in hope of attaining that elusive championship. Today I'm going to start by looking at history for some parallels. In my next post, I'll analyze this specific trade more closely.
