Jays’ Anthopolous talks
GM continues to put pieces in place for run at championship
Fast start, slow start . . . “It’s too long a season to get caught up in anything. (But) as much as you tell yourself not to, you live and die with every loss.” ALEX ANTHOPOLOUSOULOS “On a one-in-one-million chance you get a knock-’em-out deal, you have to consider it.” ALEX ANTHOPOULOS ON WHY NO ONE IS UNTRADEABLE
The Star sat down with Alex Anthopoulos in his office at spring training as he enters his third season as Blue Jays GM.
The Jays finished with 81 wins last year, down from 85 in 2010. But there’s more talent at this camp — no Jo-jo Reyes vying for a spot. The true strength of this organization remains a year or two away, so how do the Jays plan on competing in the meantime, and how do changes in the CBA affect their future? Richard Griffin: You came into your job with your style of gathering information, of finding out as much about what every team needs in advance. Having that information with you helps when you make future calls, even with forming three-way deals. Have other GMS made adjustments to your style and do you need to make adjustments back, like players often do? Alex Anthopoulos: I know it’s adjustments, but it’s relationships, right? To me, it’s two years into the job. Hopefully I’ve built relationships, greater relationships, stronger relationships. The 29 other GMS are the guys that I’ve got to work with. I’ve always said, the trade avenue is an important one for us. We haven’t been big into free agency, so scouting, development and trades are going to be a big part of it. I don’t think there’s a style. You know, my style when you talk trades with GMS, you think about making trades and it’s like fantasy sports. I never try to sell or convince anyone of anything. Everyone has their own scouting departments. I think it’s more just frank, candid conversations: “This is what I’m going to do, this is what you’re willing to do.” It’s not up to me to tell you what I think about it. You become more comfortable with the people that you deal with and you know what everyone’s plan is and what they look to do. RG: Do you start offering names from now on, moving forward? AA: I don’t think it comes down to that. I think of all the guys that were traded, we had an opportunity to acquire all of them except one. The one we didn’t have the opportunity to acquire was strictly because we didn’t have the right fit in terms of now players. There were a lot of deals where we could strip the bigleague club but it was robbing Peter to pay Paul. Get a good player, but we’d lose another good player, so the strength of the team is in the same spot.
But this winter we had the ability to say yes to a lot of deals for some of the other guys that were traded. (But) it didn’t make sense for us. It was a comfortable “No.” There was one deal where it was never a matter of us saying no. It was a matter of — and the GM told me this at the time — we had a lot of very good players available, but they needed players that were going to be on the big-league roster right away. So that was an easy one, too. RG: Are you going to have more now players next winter, because all your young players were pretty much a year or two off? AA: Sure, I would hope so. I would think as the minor leagues get better, everybody talks about how we’ve got great prospects. They are exactly that though, they are prospects. But they’re a year closer and you look at that group that was in New Hampshire — arguably they are two steps away. Now they get to graduate to Las Vegas and hopefully they get to Toronto at some point. So now all of a sudden you do have players that can go to the big leagues right away. Again, with some teams, they were fine with taking prospects and they gave us a price and it wasn’t going to work for us or we decided to say no.
It would be almost like when we traded Roy Halladay. We could have gotten players that could have come into the big leagues right away or be a year away. But for us, where we were and what we were trying to time it for, we didn’t mind taking guys that were three to four years away, because they were going to fit more from a philosophical standpoint. RG: You talked about the difficulty you had in coming to grips with trading Nestor Molina. Did you realize this winter that maybe Brett Lawrie was as close to an untouchable moving forward as you had? AA: I guess I don’t look at it that way from a roster standpoint. I always say that you’re open-minded to any player. It’s not that certain players are judged by how important they are to your club, so you value them and make them almost untradeable. I just don’t believe there are any untradeable players. Because what if somebody’s going to knock your door down? That rarely if ever happens, because that probably means it’s a win-trade for you and you’re never going to get that deal. But there are players — we don’t have any players on this team with a no-trade clause — but there’s a lot of players that have been here for a while and are probably going to be here for a long time because of their importance and value to us. We always talk about timing and where the timing is with this club. It makes it harder to trade them. It makes them virtually untradeable, but on a one-in-one-mil- lion chance you get a knock-’emout deal, you have to consider it. RG: In May of ’09, you spoke about Canadian farm teams and you couldn’t understand why there weren’t more teams with Canadian affiliates. You got Vancouver, but it sounded like you were interested in more than one. Still interested? AA: The problem is, we don’t own our affiliates. So, from a Canadian baseball perspective it’s great. I don’t see why with all these small towns in the United States, with so many Canadian cities, they should be able to support baseball. I wasn’t around or wasn’t as involved in the game to understand why those other markets failed — whether it was Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, what have you. St. Catharines, Medicine Hat, I mean there were a lot of them. Then, all of a sudden, they vanished. I think the more success that the big-league club has, it’s going to help in terms of the popularity of the sport. Would I love to see there be more Canadian minorleague affiliates? Sure, but that means leagues have to be willing to go in there and there are certain stumbling blocks and you need to have ownership and a stadium and then help from everybody else involved. RG: Would you rate Vancouver a huge success? AA: Huge is an understatement. I don’t know that we could have dreamed of the atmosphere. I didn’t get to go until the end, but all our scouts that went through there said, “What an unbelievable atmosphere.” And the fan base and the excitement, the people that were there that run the place, Jay Kerr, Jeff Mooney, Andy Dunn, they do an unbelievable job of sellouts in an environment that I would tell everybody they should experience it once. It’s that much fun. RG: I talked to Jose Bautista and he said he was not even aware there was a team policy of nothing beyond five years, that he was happy with the length of the deal he signed. But has length of contract for this organization been more of an impediment than money? AA: It hasn’t come up yet, it hasn’t become an issue. It hasn’t been where we were right there with a free agent and our policy became a stumbling block. You know Paul (Beeston has) had a long-standing belief that length is the thing he’s most concerned about and I understand. He would always rather go shorter, so five is as far as he would go. Even when we did Romero’s deal, we did the five but again, that took a little bit of time to end up getting through that. There hasn’t been a free-agent deal that’s come up where we wanted to do more than five years and policy came into play. We just haven’t been in the market for free agents that have signed for more than five years. RG: Imagination is a word that you like to use a lot in terms of the rules and all sorts of ways of dealing with the way the game is regulated. Now with Jose, for instance, if he hit another 45 home runs and this team was not moving forward, is there a creative thing where you could extend from the end of his current contract and make that new deal reach five more years, effectively lengthening that original deal to eight? AA: There’s always ways to look at things. RG: But are you always looking for imaginative solutions? AA: I think I know when I was discussing Romero’s (five-year) extenson with Paul, he was strong on three years if he pitched, five years for a position player . . . It took a long time and the term was the problem there. From that standpoint, I don’t ever want to say never, have absolutes, put lines in the sand and box yourself in, but there’s a reason we have things in place. It’s probably to police ourselves from ourselves. RG: When Rogers got involved negotiating for MLSE, was there a change in what you guys were going to do? AA: I didn’t know anything about it, that Maple Leaf thing. I found out about it the morning it was announced and that’s fine. It’s not my area. I’m worried about the baseball operations, the baseball team and that’s a million steps removed from what head office is doing. RG: Did you think back and go, “Oh, that explains that.” AA: No. I mean communication is always good. I deal with Paul 99.9 per cent of the time and obviously he deals with ownership. I know there was a lot of talk in the offseason about payroll and things like that. I just felt like, I always talk about our fans being able to think along with us.
It’s not our fans agreeing with us, because that’s not going to happen, no matter who’s doing the job. But I just want them, as we make transactions, as we do things, to say, “Okay, I understand why. I may not agree, but I understand why and at least there’s a consistency in terms of the plan. At least there’s a consistency in terms of what we’re being told the club is going to do.’ RG: I know you like to make up your own mind about people, but there seems to be an organizational negative vibe toward Scott Boras’s clients. Is that something you’ve inherited?
AA: There’s no negative view. I mean, we drafted James Paxton two years ago. Scott Schoeneweis was here. We’ve had a bunch of minor-league free agents. Josh Banks was here, Guillermo Quiroz. We look at the players based on talent and ability. So, again, some years we have a lot of clients from a certain agent, other years it changes. RG: One more on free agency. You and Tony flew to Japan and sat in the stands. Don Nomura signed Dice-k for five years. Was it a turning point for Yu Darvish when six years was on the table, or is it a fact that in advance nobody knew that this guy wanted six years? AA: It was a secret negotiation, but I’m sure there was a scenario where someone would have preferred five years, but I can also see the argument for six because of the money that they’ve had to put up front for the posting. RG: How do the new rule changes affect your approach to international free agency, the draft and inseason trades where you may have had a guy who was compensation-worthy? Those were three areas that you used nicely, but the rules have changed. AA: The international signings, you have to be more selective, when you only have a certain amount of money to deal with. I guess you can go over but it’s more than a slap on the wrist, it’s like getting your hand chopped off. Knowing that, I think we have to be more selective and it makes good scouting that much more important. The same goes for the draft. I think you’re going to see a lot more high school players go to school and that’s just because, we take a kid like Drew Hutchison in the 14th round or whatever it was, we can’t pay that guy $400,000. And then from a trade standpoint, without compensation, I think you’re going to see more players traded that aren’t going to factor for a team long-term . . . for salary relief. RG: Last question. If you started 20-10 or you started10-20, does that change anything for you? AA: No, it shouldn’t. Last year, Tampa started1-8, Boston the same. It’s too long a season. It’s the same as you look at teams’ collapses at the end, too. Last year, we may have lost seven or eight in a row and we won six in a row. It’s too long a season to get caught up in anything. It really is. The year 2009 is not lost on me at all. Six weeks in, I think we had the best team in the game. It was exciting. It’s a six-month season and you don’t have to go pole to pole, start to finish. The Cardinals last year weren’t in it and they accelerated at the end. The Braves and Boston came back at the end the year before. The Rockies were out of it and they accelerated all the way to the end. I’ve told myself repeatedly, “I’m not going to get too high or too low.” We just try to block it out and keep our eye on the prize. As much as you tell yourself not to, you do live and die with every loss.