ALL THE RIGHT MOVES
Architect of Toronto’s success truly grateful for this moment
For Alex Anthopoulos, architect of the resurgent Blue Jays, AL East title caps an emotional journey to the top of the game.
Alex Anthopoulos sat in the front row, surrounded by his closest front-office people — Tony LaCava, Andrew Tinnish, Dana Brown — and his wife, Cristina. He used to take Cristina to the ballpark when they were first dating: he was a scouting co-ordinator for the Jays, and had to sit behind home plate with a radar gun and chart the type of pitch, and its velocity. She would sit with him, and they’d chat between innings. They hadn’t done it since.
But this was something special, so in a partly empty Camden Yards Anthopoulos watched his Toronto Blue Jays crush the Baltimore Orioles for their first American League division title since 1993, in a stadium where he and LaCava had watched the Orioles celebrate a division title a year ago. The Toronto fans in the mostly empty stands chanted ‘Thank You Alex’ and he wasn’t sure how to react. It felt surreal. Mark Buehrle was grinning, saying, “Stand up, stand up, wave!” Anthopoulos decided he’d wave.
And sometime after the seventh inning, it all hit him. Anthopoulos had left his phone in the clubhouse, and someone brought it to him, and in the waterfall of text messages there was one from his oldest brother, George. Dad would be proud, it said, and Alex Anthopoulos felt the floor start to give way, a little. His father John had died of a heart attack when his youngest son was 20 years old. Dad would be proud.
“Every time I talk about him, it’s nuts,” says Anthopoulos, his voice audibly wavering.
“And I told him you a------, you know I’m going to cry.”
The text messages kept coming from George, piling it on: it was like a wedding speech, where you finally get to say the things you really mean about someone you love. When Anthopoulos went onto the field to celebrate, it was mayhem: Troy Tulowitzki, acquired at the trade deadline, patted him on the chest after a hug and said, “I’m happy for you, Alex. I’m really happy for you.” Anthopoulos was still trying to fight off the emotion.
And then he spoke to head athletic trainer George Poulis, who had also lost his father while relatively young: the two men had talked about it before. And Poulis said it too: Alex, your dad would be proud. By the time Anthopoulos was pulled onto Sportsnet for an on-field interview, you could hear his voice shaking.
“My parents got divorced when I was young, and my dad, he raised us, so, big impact,” says Anthopoulos. “Made us breakfast, drove us to school, he did everything. We named our son after him. John.
“After all this time I still get choked up. I was 20, and I’m 38 now, and . . . I guess it’s a good thing, too.
“It was really nice, but I wish it had happened when I was alone.”
It took a long time to reach that place. For a long time the American League East was a death sentence, especially if you trafficked in halfmeasures. The Yankees and the Red Sox were goliaths; the Rays, all wunderkinds; then last year, the Orioles. J.P. Ricciardi, the man who elevated Anthopoulos to assistant GM, ran out of rope, some of which he supplied, some of which came from above. Rogers cut payroll; Ricciardi said stuff like, it’s not a lie if we know the truth. Jays president Paul Beeston announced the 32-year-old Anthopoulos was the new GM in Baltimore.
And he built. Anthopoulos signed players who would bring in compensatory draft picks until that loophole closed; he boosted money into scouting and development. He was the boy genius, they said. He traded some $80 million (U.S.) worth of Vernon Wells, for goodness sake.
But he tried to build it small, because it wasn’t possible to go big. Draft, develop, until the Marlins deal in 2013. He felt funny talking about it as a success, amid the hue and cry, before the season began.
Smart, in a way, because it blew up from Game 1. There was no money the next year, not with those giant contracts weighing on an inflexible cap, and the only thing Anthopoulos could do was swap in Dioner Navarro for J.P. Arencibia. Another nothing year, and Anthopoulos said ‘OK, I have to be me again.’ He was excited.
He picked up Marco Estrada for Adam Lind. He convinced Russell Martin to take the money and spurn the Dodgers. The Josh Donaldson trade was simply absurd. Weighing every penny, Anthopoulos picked up Justin Smoak, Chris Colabello, Ezequiel Carrera. He was optimistic.
And then Marcus Stroman blew his ACL fielding a bunt, and Michael Saunders hurt a knee stepping on a sprinkler, and it really mattered because everyone knew what had floated out of Rogers: Playoffs, or you’re fired. The company had already tried to replace Beeston in blind, clumsy fashion over the winter; Rogers talked to Baltimore about trading for general manager Dan Duquette in January. Rogers had never been a model owner, but this was farce.
Anthopoulos never complained. When his daughter is halfway across the monkey bars and wants to stop he tells her, Anthopouloses don’t quit. The bullpen blew leads and the starters were shaky, but the GM held steady, waiting for the trade market to unlock itself. Second-best run differential in the AL; they were good. He believed.
Anthopoulos had failed to pry Tulowitzki out of Colorado over the winter, and when he circled back in late July, the door was open. That was a Tuesday, and the Jays lost that night to fall to 50-51. On Wednesday, he was wondering about David Price — he had heard the Tigers were considering a sell-off. At about 3 a.m. Thursday morning they agreed to the deal. Anthopoulos still couldn’t sleep when he got home, and went back to work on getting Ben Revere and Mark Lowe on Friday. Then, it was done.
“It’s almost like you want to make a stew, right?” he says. “You need all the parts of a stew. So you add some salt, a little spice, some carrots.”
They won 42 of their next 56 games after Tulowitzki was put in the lineup, a hurricane, and stormed their way to the division title on a Wednesday afternoon in Baltimore.
As he watched the division clincher, Beeston thought about the kid he had mentored, trusted, watched blossom. He was happy for him. “Because I know the effort he’s put into it, I know the commitment he put into it, I know all the things that have happened in the last year to the organization,” says Beeston, who considers Anthopoulos a sort of son. “And you know, where’s the organization going, and this is his team. This is his manager, this is his scouting staff, this is his development staff, this is his team.
“He’s the future of baseball in Toronto.”
No contract has been announced yet, so maybe. It took so much for this team to get here, beyond the moves that paid off. Anthopoulos probably needed the Farrell’s betrayal to go back to John Gibbons, who he trusts. He probably needed Yunel Escobar’s indolent idiocy to truly value team chemistry, in addition to talent. He probably needed the Marlins mistake to go for it on his own terms, smarter, better. He needed all of this.
Anthopoulos always knew how to work, because he figured out that you needed to do something that didn’t feel like work. Anthopoulos’s dad was cracking jokes the last day he saw him, in a hospital bed; he needed a heart bypass, and it was coming next week. On the Friday, Anthopoulos got the call from his brother.
Anthopoulos was lost. He worked at his father’s heating and ventilation company; he tried. He hated it.
“That really opened up that it’s so critical to do something that you love,” says Anthopoulos. “It’s so critical. If that hadn’t happened, I don’t know if I would have pursued this.”
He was on a bus with a friend one day and said, ‘I really want a job in sports.’ And his friend said, ‘I’m sick of you saying it. Do it, already.’ Anthopoulos talked his way into working for the Expos for free, and paid the $1,000 to go to scout school. He met someone who worked for the Blue Jays. It took two years to get paid, but he got there.
He still worries. He always worries. When the Jays clinched a playoff berth on Saturday, Anthopoulos found himself in Gibbons’s office, and the skipper said, “Yeah jeez, you’re finally smiling for once.” And he was, really smiling. We finally accomplished something, he said. Finally.
“Just pride, I feel more than anything else,” says Anthopoulos. “All this stuff sounds corny, but to see the impact — I don’t want to say something silly like Canada, because not all of Canada is following sports. But I know what it’s like to be a fan. And to see people so proud to be Blue Jays fans, wearing the hats, the cheers — you can stick out your chest being a Blue Jays fan.
“I mean, the playoffs, anything can happen. But there’s going to be a banner up there, and it won’t go away, and my kids will see it.”
It took a long time, but on a Wednesday afternoon in Baltimore, there was Alex Anthopoulos in full: in the stands, unsure of what to say, surrounded by the people closest to him, tears in his eyes.