It's time

JEFF BLAIR

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

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March 28, 2008 at 11:22 PM EST

DUNEDIN, FLA. — He was not Paul Godfrey's first choice. Or his second, or third.

As J.P. Ricciardi went about his business this spring, the general manager of the Toronto Blue Jays was asked one day whether he thought his job was in jeopardy after six years without a playoff berth.

"Nobody's told me this year is bigger than any other year," Ricciardi said. "I've never heard from anybody that my job's on the line. I don't know … maybe I'll go into TV. Maybe I'll do ESPN."

Ricciardi's glibness has been evident as usual during spring training, but a friend said he thought Ricciardi's body language was different. Nervousness? No. Feeling that this is a watershed season? Yes.

The Blue Jays will open the 2008 season at Yankee Stadium on Monday, and Ricciardi says this is the best team he's had since arriving in the winter of 2001.

"I said last year I liked this team," Ricciardi said. "I had a lot of belief about them, too. But this … this is the best group of guys we've had together. The most depth."

All of which guarantees nothing. This is the American League, after all, where, as Ricciardi says, "a team can win 85 games, have a pretty good year, and not make the playoffs. I hope we're not that club."

They have been that club twice in his tenure. And what happens if they're "that club" again in 2008? Godfrey, the Blue Jays' president and chief executive officer, says that speculating about Ricciardi's job status is "unfair to the whole organization."

Maybe. But this spring, Blue Jays ace Roy Halladay said he thought the team lacked a "sense of urgency" last year. Translation: time's a-wasting.

"There's pressure on everyone, especially those guys," veteran outfielder Vernon Wells said, referring to Ricciardi and manager John Gibbons, who's in the final year of his contract. "That's especially the case when you see the team we have now. He [Ricciardi] came in and had to cut payroll a little bit and try to get young guys experience so that over the years we could gradually build a team that should win. That's really all they [the front office] have control over.

"Doc [Halladay] has been here so long and I've been here so long … you get tired of finishing third," Wells continued. "I think that's what Doc means. We're to a point now where we're all a little older, and it's time to maybe start grasping things instead of letting them get by us. "

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Of the nine general managers in major-league baseball who have held their jobs with the same team since he joined the Blue Jays on Nov. 14, 2001, Ricciardi is the only one who has not taken his team to the postseason at least once.

His winning percentage (.495) is the second worst of that group. Since last year, three GMs with records significantly better than his (Walt Jocketty, Terry Ryan and Bill Stoneman) have been fired or resigned. Jocketty and Stoneman have World Series rings, with the St. Louis Cardinals and Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, respectively.

Ricciardi's record of personnel moves is a mixed bag. After inheriting a team that had 40 per cent of its payroll tied up in two players — Carlos Delgado and Raul Mondesi — Ricciardi fulfilled an order to gut a franchise that was experiencing losses of more than $70-million (Canadian).

Since then, Ricciardi has locked up the core of the team (Halladay and Wells) through 2010 (2014 in Wells's case). If he can get a deal with Alex Rios, he would have a player under contract through 2015, all without seeing the team's star players exercise free agency.

Free agents such as B.J. Ryan and A.J. Burnett signed with the club, turning down deals with clubs in more traditionally attractive baseball markets. Troy Glaus waived a no-trade clause specifically mentioning Toronto, and the third baseman's replacement, Scott Rolen, also waived a no-trade clause last winter to leave St. Louis for Toronto.

Ricciardi has hit on bargain-basement free agents such as Gregg Zaun (signed to a minor-league contract) and Frank Catalanotto. He struck out on middling free agents such as Terry Adams and Kerry Ligtenberg. And he raised eyes when he gave Frank Thomas a contract that puts Thomas in position to be making $10-million (U.S.) next year at the age of 41 if he makes 376 plate appearances this year.

He's made some good trades — Ted Lilly for Bobby Kielty, and Shea Hillenbrand for Adam Peterson. Aaron Hill is a first-round pick who's been a hit. Pitchers Shaun Marcum and Casey Janssen are lower-round draft choices who have enjoyed some success. But Russ Adams and, so far at least, Ricky Romero have not lived up to their first-round pedigree.

Romero was chosen sixth in the 2005 draft, considered one of the best first rounds ever — just check the cover of Sports Illustrated's Baseball Preview — and Ricciardi admits he overruled some of his people when he chose Romero, the best college left-hander available then, ahead of shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, who is the next Derek Jeter in some minds.

Ricciardi has gone from being one of the game's bright young things — a disciple of Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane when Moneyball was all the rage — to somebody hammered by the same people who once sang his praises. In his first year with Toronto, Ricciardi admonished a reporter one day for using a copy of the staid old Sporting News Register as a reference source.

"You need this," Ricciardi said, sliding a copy of Baseball Prospectus across his desk.

No more. That publication believes he has broken faith with the Moneyball principles, or at least hasn't changed with them.

"Look, it's not what kind of farm system you have or how many prospects you have, it's what you do at the major-league level," Ricciardi said.

Ricciardi didn't make a high-school player his first choice until two years ago, when he selected outfielder Travis Snider, who is now considered the organization's top prospect.

"I think you see things in a different light when running a team, compared to being a scout or in player development," Ricciardi said. "When you come from a scouting and player development background, you have more patience with kids and more optimism that all your guys will become something.

"In this job, you value guys who get the job done. Period. It's easy to have pie-in-the-sky dreams about what a guy in A-ball can do, but you value the guys who can come up here [to the majors] and give you 12 or 13 wins, even if that guy isn't as spicy as somebody else."

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When the Blue Jays sit in their boardroom for the June draft, they see two lists of amateur players — ones they can afford and others they can't.

The Blue Jays zealously adhere to the concept of slotting, the process by which the commissioner's office provides teams with a recommendation regarding the signing bonus a player can receive in the June draft.

It's generally considered to be the one area of the player market where ownership has the hammer in cost control. The players union gladly gives way in the matter during collective bargaining because the college and high school players aren't union members. Clubs that go over the slot are usually threatened and fined by the commissioner's office, but if a GM has the political and financial support of ownership, it doesn't matter.

Boston Red Sox GM Theo Epstein and his counterpart with the New York Yankees, Brian Cashman, both routinely go over slot. So does David Dombrowski of the Detroit Tigers, who gave Rick Porcello $7.3-million to sign last year even though the commissioner's office had "suggested" a $1.17-million bonus for a player chosen 27th. Even the lowly Kansas City Royals went over slot for Luke Hochevar and Alex Gordon.

This isn't just inside-baseball hooey. A study by Baseball America showed that amateur players signed over slot have a higher success rate.

That's how the Yankees signed Joba Chamberlain and Ian Kennedy in 2006. The Tigers landed Justin Verlander, Cameron Maybin and Andrew Miller by doing that. Maybin and Miller were parlayed into Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis last winter in a trade with the Florida Marlins.

The Blue Jays do not go over slot, although it seems to be a no-brainer for an organization that competes in the AL East with a middle-of-the-pack payroll and talks about emphasizing player development. Other GMs wonder why a club owned by Ted Rogers, whose personal wealth blows their own owners out of the water, is so happy to play along with the commissioner's office.

"We only have so much money to spend," Godfrey said. "The only time we've increased the scouting payroll is 2007 and we did that because we had a lot of picks because of the free agents we lost. It's safe to say the long-range goal is to put more money in that."

Godfrey speculates that the club's payroll won't change much. That means the Blue Jays have consigned themselves once again to baseball's version of middle-class hell, just as they were in the bad old days of Interbrew ownership. It's just the numbers have changed.

"What we've managed to do because it is a publicly traded company is manage very responsibly," said Godfrey, who before signing Ricciardi offered the job to Dombrowski and Paul DePodesta, after the Minnesota Twins turned down his request to talk to Ryan. "When Ted took over, at no point did we want to be the highest-spending team in the league. We wanted to run it as close as a business as we could and be competitive at the same time."

Much was made of the fact that the Blue Jays' payroll in 2007 was the largest in club history ($81,942,800, according to The Associated Press). That's true. It's also true that the gap between the Blue Jays' payroll (which was 16th largest in the majors) and those of the Yankees and Red Sox was $107,696,345 and $61,083,414, respectively.

To put it in perspective, when the Blue Jays won the World Series in 1992 and 1993, the difference between the largest and smallest payrolls in major-league baseball was $35,427,500 and $36,918,666, respectively. Further perspective: In 2001, Gord Ash's last year as GM, the Blue Jays' payroll was $76,895,999, 10th in the majors, and just $35,390,144 behind the front-running Yankees.

During Ricciardi's reign in Toronto, the average payroll for a postseason team in the AL has been $104,298,909. It's no surprise that of the 24 postseason berths available in that time, 10 have gone to either the Yankees or Red Sox as divisional champions and the wild-card team.

The average payroll of the 14 remaining postseason teams, though, was $65,279,341. The Blue Jays' average payroll during that time was $62,954,605. In other words, the Blue Jays are just sort of keeping pace, no more, no less.

Of course, that's not supposed to matter, right? Wasn't Ricciardi's selling point that he could replicate in Toronto what the Athletics did in 2001, when they made the playoffs with a $33,810,750 payroll? Wasn't that part of the famous five-year plan?

Ricciardi said he never used the words "five-year plan," and Godfrey agrees.

"What J.P. said is we should start seeing some evidence of success in five years," Godfrey said. "He never, ever, specified it was a five-year plan. It was more talking blue sky, that it would take at least five years to be competitive if we wanted him to first dismantle the organization.

"We're competitive. If you ask people in baseball, for the past two years they've thought we've had a chance at a playoff spot."

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Halladay is right. There ought to be a sense of urgency. Next year, the Yankees will move into a new ballpark that will allow them to increase revenue from luxury suites and ticket sales to more than $250-million, compared with $160-million in recent years. If the Yankees handle their own concessions, they'll make $30-million more, and that's before they parcel out naming rights to different areas of the new park. And like the Red Sox, everything they make goes back into baseball.

Perhaps there'll be another gift from Rogers. His famous three-year, $210-million payroll pledge that coincided with his purchase of the former SkyDome came out of the blue. The Canadian dollar is strong, the company's core business is just grand and Major League Baseball's central revenue machine is churning out cash.

A three-million attendance figure would, according to one source, be the thing that really shakes up the Rogers board, but the Blue Jays have budgeted for 2.45 million fans, which would place them about 20th among baseball's 30 franchises. They've been 18th the past two years. Reported ticket sales have been gradually increasing, but there is skepticism within the organization and on the Rogers board about the real strength of those sales.

But that's out of Ricciardi's realm. This will be a telling year for him, because Gibbons is a long-time acquaintance. Firing him isn't the same as firing Buck Martinez or Carlos Tosca. There is a restlessness about this team that could go either way, and Ricciardi will have two more years on his contract after this season. The last time he had two years left, he received an extension.

"If I was fired tomorrow, I won't stop being a father or husband," Ricciardi said. "I have other things in my life that are important to me. This is important, but it's not life-changing.

"But, you know, I'm comfortable with what we've done and confident where we're going. I'm probably more at peace with myself in this job than I've ever been."

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Our writers make their picks

Jeff Blair - Predictions for 2008

AMERICAN LEAGUE

East

1. Boston Red Sox
2. New York Yankees
3. Toronto Blue Jays
4. Tampa Bay Rays
5. Baltimore Orioles

Central

1. Detroit Tigers
2. Cleveland Indians
3. Minnesota Twins
4. Chicago White Sox
5. Kansas City Royals

West

1. Seattle Mariners
2. L.A. Angels of Anaheim
3. Texas Rangers
4. Oakland Athletics

Wild card

New York Yankees

Champions

Boston Red Sox

MVP

Alex Rodriguez, Yankees

Cy Young

Roy Halladay, Blue Jays

Rookie of the year

Joba Chamberlain, Yankees

Manager of the year

Terry Francona, Red Sox

NATIONAL LEAGUE

East

1. New York Mets
2. Philadelphia Phillies
3. Atlanta Braves
4. Florida Marlins
5. Washington Nationals

Central

1. Chicago Cubs
2. Milwaukee Brewers
3. Cincinnati Reds
4. St. Louis Cardinals
5. Pittsburgh Pirates
6. Houston Astros

West

1. Arizona Diamondbacks
2. Los Angeles Dodgers
3. Colorado Rockies
4. San Diego Padres
5. San Francisco Giants

Wild card

Los Angeles Dodgers

Champions

New York Mets

MVP

David Wright, Mets

Cy Young

Johan Santana, Mets

Rookie of the year

Kosuke Fukodome, Cubs

Manager of the year

Bob Melvin, Diamondbacks

World Series

Boston Red Sox defeat New York Mets

Jeff Blair's 6 difference makers

Erik Bedard, Mariners: The Angels' starters are beaten up and Bedard can single-handedly swing the balance of power in the AL West.

Andy Pettitte, Yankees: A healthy, distraction-free year from Pettitte is a must to give the Yankees' young pitchers some breathing room — and the spring does not augur well.

Joe Borowski, Indians: He's ba-a-a-ck! The closer nobody respects will need to protect those late-inning leads again.

Dan Haren, Diamondbacks: Add one of the best pitchers in the AL to a staff with one of the best pitchers in the NL (Brandon Webb) and you can call yourself a repeat divisional champion.

Carlos Marmol, Cubs: What, you think Kerry Wood's actually going to be healthy enough to be the closer?

Carlos Beltran, Mets: Carlos Delgado's too old. Moises Alou is too hurt. Time to earn the paycheque, Senor Beltran, and calling out the Phillies early in spring training was a good start.

Robert Macleod Predictions for 2008

AMERICAN LEAGUE

East

1. Boston Red Sox
2. Tampa Bay Rays
3. New York Yankees
4. Toronto Blue Jays
5. Baltimore Orioles

Central

1. Cleveland Indians
2. Detroit Tigers
3. Minnesota Twins
4. Chicago White Sox
5. Kansas City Royals

West

1. L.A. Angels of Anaheim
2. Seattle Mariners
3. Oakland Athletics
4. Texas Rangers

Wild card

Detroit Tigers

Champion

Cleveland Indians

MVP

Grady Sizemore, Cleveland

Cy Young

C.C. Sabathia, Cleveland

Rookie of the year

Jacoby Ellsbury, Boston

Manager of the year

Joe Maddon, Tampa Bay

NATIONAL LEAGUE

East

1. New York Mets
2. Philadelphia Phillies
3. Atlanta Braves
4. Florida Marlins
5. Washington Nationals

Central

1. Chicago Cubs
2. Cincinnati Reds
3. St. Louis Cardinals
4. Milwaukee Brewers
5. Houston Astros
6. Pittsburgh Pirates

West

1. Los Angeles Dodgers
2. Arizona Diamondbacks
3. Colorado Rockies
4. San Diego Padres
5. San Francisco Giants

Wild card

Arizona Diamondbacks

Champion

Los Angeles Dodgers

MVP

Hanley Ramirez, Florida Marlins

Cy Young

Brad Penny, L.A. Dodgers

Rookie of the year

Kosuke Fukodome, Chicago Cubs

Manager of the year

Joe Torre, L.A. Dodgers

World Series

Cleveland Indians. defeat L.A. Dodgers

Robert MacLeod's 6 difference makers

Joe Torre, Dodgers: The kindly veteran manager will finally silence those critics who claim he was in cruise control during much of his tenure with the star-studded Yankees. He'll managed the Dodgers into the World Series.

Prince Fielder, Brewers: If Fielder lives up to the hype as an MVP candidate, the older and wiser Brewers have a legitimate shot at winning the NL Central.

Johan Santana, Mets: There's no way New York goes into the dumpster over the final three weeks of the season last year if Santana was in the rotation. Now he is and he comes armed with a new $137.5-million (U.S.) contract.

Vladimir Guerrero, Angels: The veteran outfielder may not like the idea of inheriting the designated hitter's role, but a healthy Guerrero wielding a big bat could shift the balance of power in the AL West.

Daisuke Matsuzaka, Red Sox: The Red Sox could run away with the AL East if Dice-K is more consistent in his second tour of major-league duty.

Miguel Cabrera, Tigers: Many went ahead and awarded Detroit the World Series after it obtained the talented third baseman in a huge trade at the winter meetings. Cabrera spent the winter slimming down, obviously mindful of the big expectations he brings to Motown.

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