Blue Jays going for it, budget and all

Imagine if GM could spend like rest of league?

The single biggest argument against the shock trade that brings Colorado shortstop/masher Troy Tulowitzki to Toronto in exchange for Jose Reyes and a package of prospects is that it was a deal the team didn’t need to make.

In short: the Blue Jays need pitching, they don’t need another bat.

But they didn’t particularly need Josh Donaldson this past off-season, either, and you would have to have completely taken leave of your senses to argue, today, that the deal that brought him to Toronto was not one worth making.

That is, third base was not the position most in need of an upgrade in the winter — you may recall the monthslong debate about trading Jose Bautista for starting pitching — but it was an upgrade that general manager Alex Anthopoulos was able to make. And now Donaldson is in the midst of what might be the best season by a Toronto third baseman ever, a key part of the major-league-leading offence and a good defender, too, and a pretty fine demonstration that an upgrade is an upgrade is an upgrade.

The Tulowitzki trade fits into that template. There will always be concerns about his durability, but that was precisely the case with the shortstop he replaces and, oh, by the way, he’s one of the best hitters in the game. In what world could adding him to the lineup be considered a bad thing? The Blue Jays will be a better team when Tulowitzki joins them on Wednesday than they were on Monday, which seems to be the point of making a trade.

The more significant meaning of the deal, though, is that it suggests Anthopoulos is doing all he can to make this a playoff team in 2015, instead of building a firewall around his prospects and hoping that a flawed roster can somehow drag itself into the playoffs for the first time since Kim Campbell was prime minister.

There remains, obviously, much to be done. As weak as the American League East has been this season, it is hard to be confident in a Toronto surge over the final two months with a starting rotation of R.A. Dickey, Mark Buehrle, Marco Estrada, Drew Hutchison and (unintelligible sound, coughing fit). The bullpen isn’t terribly inspiring, either.

Actually fixing those problems, though, is not an easy task, or else Anthopoulos would have done it already. It’s been clear since the spring that the pitching staff, especially after Marcus Stroman was lost for the season, had holes bigger than those in Reyes’ defensive range. That the general manager finds himself in this pickle at all brings the conversation back, as it always should, to the team’s ownership.

Rogers Communications, for reasons only known to Rogers, has set a budget for the Blue Jays that, by all accounts, cannot be exceeded. This is why Anthopoulos, after the 2013 season, had to monkey around with existing contracts in pursuit of free-agent pitching and why, this past offseason, it was widely reported that he was intentionally giving himself some payroll buffer so he could have the ability to make an addition at the trade deadline. It’s also at least in part why Toronto broke camp in the spring with six rookies on the 25-man roster.

Something manager John Gibbons said at the time about that decision — “these are our best guys” — was meant as an endorsement of the strategy, but it also, perhaps unintentionally, was an admission of something else: The Blue Jays had so many weaknesses that they were willing to rush a bunch of high-upside kids into the lineup in hopes that they would be a better complement to the team’s veteran stars than replacement-level players.

It remains a baffling concession for a team that plays in one of the league’s biggest markets, and is owned by a billion-dollar media conglomerate that controls its broadcast rights. Elsewhere in baseball, big-market teams are spending seemingly limitless amounts on their payrolls, secure in the knowledge that a successful product on the field is a far more valuable asset in terms of broadcast ratings and advertiser/subscriber dollars than a middling one.

Meanwhile, Anthopoulos is struggling to move pieces around on his payroll puzzle, trying to improve the team but always constrained by whatever internal budget number he has been given. Rogers paid $5 billion for NHL broadcast rights just so it could have access to that content for its platforms. It gets the Blue Jays’ content for free by virtue of owning the team, but it seems uninterested in capitalizing on that asset by spending whatever it takes to make it a winner. Put another way: What would Anthopoulos have done over the past couple of seasons if he didn’t have to worry about payroll?

It is sometimes argued that the GM had his shot, when the payroll jumped three years ago with the acquisitions of Dickey and the boatload of exMarlins. He went all in at the poker table and he didn’t end up with the best hand. You don’t get all your chips back, that argument goes.

But what if you had an unlimited replenishment of chips? For this franchise, money shouldn’t be a hinderance. There’s no alternative trophy for building the best budget team. The Blue Jays are playing for it anyway.