The lifespan of a professional athlete has five cycles – getting there, getting acknowledged, getting good, getting paid and getting a ring.
When the nights begin to lengthen and it gets a little harder each morning to get out of bed, only the last one matters.
"You get to a point in your career when you want to win," Jose Reyes, an old 31, said this week. "It's not about the money or anything."
Reyes has made $70-million (U.S.) in his career. He's guaranteed at least $70-million more. He's been to the postseason once, nearly a decade ago. He's well into his baseball golden years. He's post-money.
You have to be there to see the look of childish glee on the faces of multimillionaire ballplayers when the envelopes containing their road per diems start getting handed out. It's about as excited as a clubhouse gets during the regular season.
Their pay goes to a money manager. They never see those ducats. But a few hundred dollars cash? That they can understand.
Money. Eventually, this is the difference between someone who'd prefer to win at the game of baseball and someone who needs to. What the Jays need during this off-season is more of those players moving into the fifth and final stage of life.
That will require spending a great deal of money, which Rogers has; as well as a great deal of courage, which Rogers does not.
Coaches and management planned to sit down Friday to talk about the year gone by. Manager John Gibbons called it "a chance for everyone to say his piece." It should be a fairly short conversation, mostly sighs.
It's both a beauty and a blight on baseball that there's no mystery about what you need to win – X amount of runs allowed; Y amount of runs scored, expressed as a differential.
This year, 14 of 30 teams scored more runs than they gave up. Which is to say, only half the teams in baseball are any good.
Eight of those 14 will be in the playoffs. The Jays were the 10th-best club in the majors by that measure. They're still going home next week.
From the valley of the off-season, the playoff peak looks very high. One of the illusions created by the lengthy canvas of this game is the impression that seasons are won or lost over large swaths. They aren't. They're lost one play, one bad at-bat, one mistake at a time. The Jays will probably finish four or five games out of the wild card – about a 10- or 15-run swing plus or minus. That's nothing. That could so easily have gone the other way. In macro, six-months-of-every-day baseball terms, this team was right there.
What looks like a comprehensive failure comes down to one fewer injury, one pitcher coming out of nowhere and giving you something special. It's asking everyone to do their average, rather than their best.
Whatever you think the Jays are from the vantage of right now – whether it's the incredible run in May (21-9) or the brutal month of August (9-17) – you cannot dispute they are close.
"Close to what?" is the question.
They are close to the end. After next season, there's nothing.
We can only debate teardowns and rebuilds for a year or so, because by 2016, we'll be in the middle of one.
A little more than a year from now, Mark Buehrle and J.A. Happ will be gone. Jose Bautista, R.A. Dickey and Edwin Encarnacion will be entering the final, option years of their contracts.
The brain trust will trade Dickey if they can. There is no scenario in which they re-sign him. That discussion doesn't get around the table once.
Bautista and Encarnacion will be looking for monster deals to make up for all the money they've frittered away due to late-blooming. The team's two biggest stars are still stuck in Stage Four – "Getting paid." You might re-sign one or the other, but you won't want to pay both. If the Jays try to muddle through 2016 with both guys trailing trade rumours like a bad smell, the club will come apart.
By 2016, the Jays are unrecognizable. This leaves us with next year – Year Zero.
This is the last obvious chance for this club to finally shrug off its own history.
Whatever they decide to do, things are already more expensive. Planned raises mean the Jays will be paying $48.5-million (U.S.) to the trio of Buehrle, Reyes and (oh God, no) Ricky Romero. Two years ago, that would have been 60 per cent of the total payroll. Don't think we can't get back there.
They need a left fielder to replace the outgoing Melky Cabrera (surrender all hope on that one). They need a centre fielder to replace Colby Rasmus. They need a second baseman and a closer and bullpen help.
They need a bunch of holes filled, and they can manage it with a few $5-million to $8-million-a-year free agents. Those guys are the silly putty of baseball.
What they truly need, on many levels, is an ace.
There are three free-agent pitchers who meet the criteria – Detroit's Max Scherzer, Oakland's Jon Lester and Kansas City's James Shields.
Any one of those three players bridges the Jays between the present and their future. They can be the pin holding things together, while the young pitching core of Marcus Stroman, Aaron Sanchez and Daniel Norris finds its major-league feet.
More important, they are the difference between a team that makes the postseason and one that shuffles around for another year before stepping into an elevator shaft toward irrelevance.
If Rogers is serious about a winner, it will spend whatever it takes to get one of those three men. It's going to take in the neighbourhood of $150-million to $175-million.
Myself, I like Scherzer. He's the youngest of the three, he's money-oriented and he's spent too long in Justin Verlander's shadow. If you don't dither on the bottom line, he will come here happy and angry, in the right ways.
That team can win. Right now.
We're past excuses. This is a one-stop litmus test for this club's ambition.
Rogers has spent years getting fat by feeding this fan base just enough to fool it into thinking it's full.
If they can't manage to explain this one-off, blowout expenditure to themselves, the fans may finally begin thinking about their own.
Cathal Kelly