The trade route

TORONTO – The Toronto Blue Jays closed out the home portion of their 2011 season Thursday night and the issue top of mind for the 22,769 fans in attendance as they bid adieu to their team was how do things get better from here.

At 42-39 at Rogers Centre and 79-77 overall after Edwin Encarnacion’s homer in the 12th inning secured a 4-3 win and a split of a four-game set with the Los Angeles Angels, this has been a year of both growth and development for general manager Alex Anthopoulos’s club.

Ten players from the opening day roster have been either traded or cut, most replaced by younger players hoping to make themselves part of the future. The Blue Jays have gone through 24 different position players and a stunning 30 different pitchers, by far the most in franchise history, allowing manager John Farrell to catalogue much of the organization’s big-league ready inventory.

Around the diamond, the Blue Jays are stocked with players “we’re prepared to commit to,” says Anthopoulos. Think Jose Bautista, Adam Lind, Yunel Escobar, Brett Lawrie, J.P. Arencibia, Colby Rasmus and Eric Thames.

On the mound – the area most glaringly in need of improvement – things are more fluid, although Anthopoulos sees a host of potential solutions in house, including the promising double-A foursome of Chad Jenkins, Deck McGuire, Drew Hutchison and Nestor Molina. “We think they will all factor in next year,” Anthopoulos says in an interview. “They could have pitched here in September, we think any four of those guys could have come up here and been OK. How well they would have done I don’t know, but we think they definitely could have done it.

“To me that means next season, unless things change, they’ll definitely be on the map and the radar to be called up at some point. Up here you still have guys like Kyle Drabek, Brett Cecil, Brandon Morrow, Ricky Romero, Henderson Alvarez. Given those five and the other four, that’s nine young, inexperienced starters that can go either way at any time.”

That doesn’t mean the Blue Jays won’t be looking to add pitching over the off-season. There’s a feeling among some in the organization that the team needs to add at least one proven starter, and a run at Japanese star Yu Darvish, whose rights are expected to be posted for bidding, seems likely.

A couple of veteran relievers are probably on the shopping list, too.

The avenue in which Anthopoulos expects to be most active is the trade market, where he will try to leverage his growing stockpile of young talent into more core parts. Fans pining for a splashy free agent addition or two – say Prince Fielder, C.J. Wilson, or Heath Bell – should brace themselves for disappointment unless a great opportunity presents itself.

“Philosophically speaking, if we want to improve the club, free agency is the last area I want to go to,” says Anthopoulos. “I prefer to use free agency as a market to finalize the team rather than build the team. I just think it’s a harder to try and build a winning team through free agency.

“The flip side is if you’re trying to build it through the draft, it’s not going to time (with their arrivals). … So you can’t do it solely through the draft and you can’t do it solely through free agency. What’s the one thing you sort of can control? The trade market, because I can be selective about the type of players, the age, the service time, I can target those type of players. They might be hard to acquire but I can be more specific about what I want.”

In other words, rival GMs better be ready for an ever steadier diet of phone calls from the persistent Anthopoulos this winter.

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While any potential trades may speed up the Blue Jays’ growth into a contender, significant internal reinforcements from a positional standpoint are unlikely to arrive next year.

The current plan is for shortstop Adeiny Hechavarria, catcher Travis d’Arnaud and centre-fielder Anthony Gose to spend all of 2012 in the minors. Barring an immediate need at the big-league level, the earliest they will be considered for an everyday role is 2013.

Given all those factors, Blue Jays fans may be facing another season of patience, something that’s getting old with a playoff drought that dates back to 1993. The team finished with a total attendance of 1,818,103—a slight increase over last year’s 1,625,555, but still the fourth lowest number since the team moved into the Rogers Centre in 1989.

But in his first two seasons as GM, Anthopoulos has continually maintained a strong discipline to his gameplan, unwilling to risk shortcuts that may hamper the grander vision.

“The trade route is still better because we’re still finding out about our team,” says Anthopoulos. “There’s a lot of risk to free agency. I think there’s more risk potentially to trades because you have more of a chance to get burned, you’re giving something up. You can say in free agency the mistake is you spend money and you don’t want to throw money away, but I think it hurts more from an organizational standpoint if you give up a great player in trade.

"I think it takes a little bit more nerve to do it but for where this organization is at right now, I think it’s the most effective way to go about it.”

Shi Davidi is the MLB Insider for sportsnet.ca. Come back to read his insight and opinion regularly.