Hands off!

It is a stretch to say that Alex Anthopoulos listened to fans when he flip-flopped on more than three decades of Toronto Blue Jays tradition and locked down his manager.

The reality is, Alex Anthopoulos was listening to his Blackberry blow up in response to rumours that the Boston Red Sox were going to make a run at John Farrell and said enough was enough -- this after he recovered from a nasty bout of tummy flu he picked up from his infant daughter, who in turn, picked up the bug at daycare.

"It got to the point that we needed to have this thing addressed," Anthopoulos said on a hastily-arranged conference call. "There was a loophole (in our policy) that was time-consuming for all of us."

It was less a loophole than a crater. As articulated by Anthopoulos himself recently, Blue Jays staff were free to leave for jobs with other organizations as they pleased. No permission required. No contract would hold them back.

Let the record show that loophole was cinched shut on Oct. 25th, 2011 just before lunch:

"Due to the distraction caused by media speculation regarding our employee permission policy, the Toronto Blue Jays have amended their policy and will not grant permission for lateral moves," read a statement signed by Blue Jays president and chief executive officer Paul Beeston as well as Anthopoulos.

So it was a business decision, made in the name of not having to waste precious time responding to a crush of media inquiries about a rumour.

But in the same way that the Toronto Blue Jays general manager wasn't made ill directly as a result of his daughter's bacteria-laden playmates, the cute little germ factories she goes to daycare with certainly had something to do with it.

So it is with Anthopoulos' snap reversal on the Jays' treasured personnel policy, handed down from high up by Peter Hardy of the original ownership group more than 30 years ago, then preserved by Beeston and finally inherited by Anthopoulos.

Did the anger of the fans - expressed online and over the airwaves - move the club? No. But they moved the media enough to know that the perception of the Blue Jays' being bullied by Boston was not going to fly with fans wanting to believe in the reconstruction. Let the dive-bombing of Anthopoulos', Farrell's and Beeston's inboxes begin.

So in a butterfly-flapping-its-wings-in-North York kind of way; the fans have been heard.

That the Jays had to act reflects the way times have changed since 1977.

The elegant human resources policy crafted when the club was founded was meant to help attract good people to a fledgling outfit with the promise that coming to Toronto wouldn't be at the expense of long-held ambitions elsewhere.

As the Jays became the class of the American League, worrying about staff leaving for greener pastures wasn't that big a deal. Bobby Cox going home to Atlanta opened the door, eventually, for Cito Gaston and two World Series wins.

But those days are long gone and Boston and New York have made a tradition of vacuuming up players with great, inflationary, swaths of money. Sucking up front office or managerial talent seems like the next logical step, and in that light; standing up and telling Boston to back off and - if necessary - Farrell to fulfill his contract was vital.

How real was the threat of Farrell leaving for Boston? We may never know, though his email to Sportsnet's Shi Davidi Monday morning, after the story first surfaced in Boston, wasn't exactly an announcement that he was late for his appointment to get a BJ Birdy tattoo.

He left plenty of wriggle room. Mix in Farrell's ties to Boston, the esteem he's held by the Red Sox and the news reported by the Toronto Star's Richard Griffin that Farrell's son is being treated for a recurring tumour in Boston and you get a scope of the factors potentially under consideration.

Had he simply come out and said he wasn't leaving, he might have saved Anthopoulos a conference call.

But Anthopoulos' exploding hand-held device aside, the announcement Tuesday was essential for the Blue Jays going forward as they continue a long, slow battle to make their fans believe in their organization again.

The possibility of losing right-hand man and assistant general manager Tony LaCava to the Baltimore Orioles was one thing. Not ideal, but it represents a promotion for a long-serving company man.

But if the Jays are going to succeed they can't concede any advantage to Boston or New York casually.

Tuesday was the one-year anniversary of Farrell's hiring. Anthopoulos' daughter is about the same age.

The Blue Jays general manager couldn't have picked a better time to have Jays fans know that he had their interests at heart by repeating that cardinal rule of life in daycare and, apparently, the American League East:

Keep you hands to yourself.

Michael Grange will provide insight and analysis on all the top stories in sports.