"This will not end well..."
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It’s the end of September, which means that a number of teams, including the Toronto Blue Jays, are engaging in meaningless games in front of hundreds of disinterested fans.
For anyone even remotely following Canada’s only baseball franchise, it’s been painfully obvious for some time that general manager J.P. Ricciardi has to go.
Hell, even he realizes it…so much so that he’s already begun the “J.P. Ricciardi Bridge Burning Tour.”
In an interview with the Canadian Press, Ricciardi was quick to point out the troubles with the Jays and their ability to compete in the A.L. East is all based on economics…and not his own fuck-ups.
“Let me make this clear: It doesn’t matter if J.P. Ricciardi is the GM, or Joe Blow is the GM. Two years from now, five years from now, seven years from now, the reality that we face in Toronto is the division is not going to change,” Ricciardi said in an interview this week. “The Red Sox and Yankees are not going away. If the Yankees want to, they can take their payroll to $300 million.”
“The biggest thing that people forget is that when Toronto won the World Series, they had the highest payroll in baseball. There’s a direct equivalent to that. If we’re going to play in the big man’s division, and we’re not going to spend that money, it’s going to be really hard for us to compete with those teams.”
“I get this feeling that people are dying for me to lose my job, they think my world is going to come crashing down. I’m not built like that.”
“We’ve done the best job we can do under the circumstances in the situation we’ve been given. At the end of the day, if that’s not good enough, that’s not good enough. But until those two factors change, the next guy sitting in this role, whether that’s five years from now or 10 years from now, is going to be faced with the same problem: How do you get by the Red Sox and the Yankees?”
Yes J.P., it’s tough to compete with the Red Sox and the Yankees year in and year out. They have big scary payrolls…the Jays have a lame-duck general manager who dished out $70 million to Alex Rios, $52 million to B.J. Ryan, and gave A.J. Burnett a contract with an opt-out clause after three years. And lets not even get into the Vernon Wells debacle…the Jays are saddled with that contract for years.
But maybe J.P. has a point. With the Yanks having a payroll well over $200 million, and the Sox about $120 million, how does a middle-of-the road payroll team compete? It’s damn near impossible, right? Oh wait, there was that team I remember doing it…when was that…hard to recall…oh yeah, the friggin’ 2008 Tampa Bay Rays. Same division, lower payroll, World Series. And that was just last year. Jays fans are right…it’s time for this douchebag Ricciardi to go.
