Pressure rising on Anthopoulos
This year’s MLB trade deadline most critical of Jays GM’s career
Alex Anthopoulos isn’t likely to characterize it this way, but the next four days figure to be the most important of his career.
The Blue Jays’ 38-year-old general manager is in the final year of his contract, while the man who hired him — team president Paul Beeston — is retiring at season’s end. With a new boss on the horizon, it’s tough to imagine Anthopoulos surviving another October on the outside looking in.
Meanwhile, his club is armed with the best offence in baseball but remains held back by a mediocre pitching staff. With 62 games to go, they trail the first-place Yankees by 61⁄ games and the second
2 wild-card spot by three.
The Jays GM is dealing with an anxious fan base, the longest post-season drought in pro sports and a restless core of players — some of whom publicly criticized his lack of action at last year’s deadline.
Standing pat hardly seems an option this time around, but how much of the future is Anthopoulos willing to sacrifice to make a run in the present?
We will find out sometime before Friday at 4 p.m.
As usual, the Jays have been linked to many teams and players, ranging from rentals like Jeff Samardzija, to high-end closers like Craig Kimbrel and Aroldis Chapman, and off-the-radar types like Carlos Carrasco and Mike Fiers.
Anthopoulos’s track record suggests he is reluctant to give up prospects and their multiple years of control for players on expiring contracts, like Samardzija. In fact, he has described the rental market as “the last aisle I want to shop in.”
That made his reported interest in Milwaukee’s Fiers and Cleveland’s Carrasco somewhat interesting. Fiers has four more years of team control, while Carrasco has three. Both right-handers are high-strikeout pitchers whose peripheral numbers suggest they are better than their less-than-spectacular ERAs. But given those years of control, their price will be high.
Opposing clubs have naturally asked Anthopoulos for Marcus Stroman, the Jays’ ace-in-waiting whose season-ending injury in spring training remains — in many ways — the story of their season. When Anthopoulos inquired with Cincinnati about Johnny Cueto — who was dealt to Kansas City on Sunday — the Reds’ demands reportedly began with Stroman, which was a nonstarter for Toronto.
The next tier of prospects the Jays could deal from include works-inprogress Daniel Norris and Dalton Pompey, last year’s first-round-draft-picks Jeff Hoffman and Max Pentecost, as well as other budding farmhands, such as Miguel Castro, Richard Urena and Anthony Alford.
Besides Anthopoulos’s personal stake in the matter, this may also be the biggest deadline for the organization since 2000, when just a week before the deadline the Jays were only 11⁄ games back of the first-place
2 Yankees. That year, in an attempt to bolster their pitching staff, general manager Gord Ash made one of the most ill-fated trades in franchise history, sending minor-league prospect Michael Young to the Rangers for Estaban Loaiza. Young went on to become a seven-time all-star and face of the Rangers’ franchise, while Loaiza pitched two mediocre seasons in Toronto. The Loaiza trade may prove a lesson in the dangers of desperate deadline dealing, and Anthopoulos has previously said the trade deadline is typically when GMs make the most mistakes.
But there is also a growing sense the Jays are in danger of wasting a championship-caliber offence if they don’t improve the pitching staff.
Anthopoulos’s resume of trades is mixed, but he has drafted well and rebuilt an ailing farm system in his 51⁄ years at the helm. More mea
2 sured minds may view his legacy in that light, but chances are the impatient majority won’t afford him that.
Most will judge him on what he pulls off — or doesn’t — in the next few days.