As we embark on the week of the trade deadline, let’s be clear: Right now, Toronto Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos has less reason to trade for a rental player or pitcher than he did last season – unless it costs him a modest prospect such as Matt Boyd.
Anthopoulos took grief in 2014 when he failed to make a move to help a team that was three games up in the second wild card and three games back in the American League East. This year’s team isn’t that close, despite a hefty run differential.
The good news for Anthopoulos is he can help the team this year by helping them next season, and vice versa. Unlike last season, Anthopoulos knows he won’t likely have Mark Buehrle back in the fold; he knows that Roberto Osuna and Aaron Sanchez present intriguing bullpen or starting rotation options; he likely realizes that Drew Hutchison’s ceiling might be a little less than anticipated. He knows, in other words, that he needs another starting pitcher – and a good one – in 2016, somebody who will give him 200 innings besides R.A. Dickey. Marcus Stroman might be the guy; or he might not. Better to add some certainty.
The future and present can be addressed by adding a pitcher with some control, and he still has Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion around for another year.
They won’t say so publicly, but it’s clear that the pitching prospects the Blue Jays would move are Daniel Norris and Boyd. All others are off the table, as they should be.
OH-LYMPICS!
Now that the Pan Am Games are in the bag without a major catastrophe, attention will shift to a Toronto bid for the 2024 or 2028 Olympics. I mean, I hate to say I told you so, but …
Beyond mere piddling issues such as logistics and transportation and financing – the numbers never matter, anyhow; they’re always half of the final cost – here are a couple of things to keep in mind.
First, all these Pan Am facilities? They won’t cut it as Olympic facilities … especially not nine, or 13, years down the road, regardless of what COC president Marcel Aubut says. Second, the Rogers Centre will be around 35-40 years old and even with natural grass … well, Toronto’s going to need a new, downtown stadium for opening ceremonies and track and field. Cue the NFL dreamers … or the new, state-of-the-art downtown ballpark dreamers. Atlanta built a stadium that was retrofitted for baseball? Why not Toronto?
(That’s right: A new baseball stadium for Toronto! There. I said it. Or, what about this … a twin bid with Montreal that includes a gussied-up Rogers Centre and new stadium for Montreal that can be converted to baseball.)
But the neatest trick is going to be when all the right-of-centre politicians, who have been telling us that Ontario is going to financial hell in a handbasket, start squaring their no-taxes mantra with the reality of a multibillion Olympic project – let alone the $50 million it’s going to cost just to bid for the thing.
Check the makeup of previous Olympic bid committees: There are as many blue Tories as money-wasting Liberals among the idle rich who move to the forefront of these things. I’d love to hear the new provincial Conservative leader, Patrick Brown, walk this tightrope. That in itself might be an Olympic sport. And don’t get us started about what happens when Ford Nation arises ….
Still, I feel a lot better having this debate with an adult in the mayor’s office. My sense is this discussion needs to be a lot more nuanced in this social media age – and from seeing how successful London was with temporary venues. I don’t know where I come down on this yet, but if we can have more dialogues such as the one I had with Dr. Bruce Kidd in an interview on Prime Time Sports this month, I’m at least prepared to listen …
QUIBBLES AND BITS
• Since June 29, when the New York Yankees were in third place and five games out, the Bombers have gone 14-7 while the Baltimore Orioles, Blue Jays and Tampa Bay Rays have gone a combined 23-45. If you thought it was difficult living with the Yankees as perennial favourites, living with them as cuddly, spunky underdogs is worse, especially when Alex Rodriguez has games like he did Saturday: Three home runs, A-Rod’s fifth triple HR game and one away from the MLB record held by Sammy Sosa and Johnny Mize.
• As someone who covered the disqualification of the Canadian 4 x 100 men’s relay team at the 2012 London Olympics, the team’s disqualification in the Pan Am event on Saturday was hard to watch. We have a history in this race: Jared Connaughton was the sprinter who was ruled to have stepped on the line in London, costing us a bronze in a race dominated by the vaunted Jamaicans and the U.S., and botched handoffs also saw us DQ’d at the Commonwealth Games and the IAAF World Relays.
It was Trinidad and Tobago who took the bronze in London as a result of the DQ … and it was a T-and-T runner who took credit for pointing out Gavin Smellie’s faux pas on Saturday. Smellie, sadly, was part of the London team, and if he can get some redemption at the upcoming IAAF World Championships in Beijing, it would be a great Canadian sports story. I’m cheering for them, and so should you.
• Sometimes, the statistics and the contract don’t matter. Seeing Ivorian Didier Drogba playing for the MLS’s Montreal Impact – in a French-speaking milieu – just seems cool. It just seems right …
THE END GAME
Sprinter Andre De Grasse was great. So were a lot of other athletes. But it was basketball that won the Pan Am Games, thanks to the women’s team winning the country’s first significant international competition and the men beating the U.S. And what a summer this could be for the sport, what with the FIBA Americas tourney still on deck. It’s one thing to supply NCAA and NBA players; but it’s medals that get you props in the living rooms across this country, many of which don’t know players from the NBA.
To that end, if there was a loser, it is soccer.
As much as it pains me to say this, it’s been a terrible summer for our national programs, between the failure to emerge of a second option to Christine Sinclair in the Women’s World Cup, the embarrassing performance of the national men’s team in the Gold Cup and a dreary, under-23 performance in the Pan Ams. With each year, more of the world passes us by.
If this was hockey, we’d be calling it a full-fledged crisis.
Jeff Blair hosts The Jeff Blair Show from 9 a.m.-Noon and Baseball Central from Noon-1 E.T. on Sportsnet 590/The Fan. He also appears frequently on Prime Time Sports with Bob McCown. Follow him on Twitter @SNJeffBlair