TORONTO — In early July Alex Anthopoulos finalized an agreement to sign Dominican outfielder Vladimir Guerrero Jr., the 16-year-old son of the Expos great, for $3.9 million. It was a bold move. The kind Anthopoulos has made his name on.
It was bold because spending that much money on Guerrero Jr. pushed the Blue Jays over their pool allotment for international signings, meaning the team would pay a 100 percent tax on that overage and be barred from signing any international free agents for more than $300,000 next year. But Anthopoulos did it anyway, because he believed he was getting the best player available.
He did the same thing when he signed Jose Bautista to a five-year, $65-million contract after an out-of-nowhere offensive season that many in baseball thought would be impossible to repeat. He offered that deal because he believed in Bautista. He did the same throughout his Blue Jays tenure with improbable, astonishing trades that reinvented his major league roster—The Vernon Wells contract shed, the complex series of maneuvers to acquire Colby Rasmus, the incredible Marlins blockbuster, the R.A. Dickey deal. He did it all because he believed those moves were making his club better.
And he did it again at the 2015 trade deadline, selling off a tremendous amount of prospect capital that he had worked tirelessly to build and develop, because he believed he had a World Series calibre team. He believed this was the year.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he did the same thing late Wednesday afternoon when he informed the Blue Jays he would not be returning as general manager for 2016. He made a bold decision because he believed in himself; believed it was the right thing to do. And, in doing so, he did what he has always done.
“I’m young in my age, but I’m getting older in my career,” the 38-year-old said Thursday, shortly after news of his departure broke. “You have to make decisions in life. You have to be true to yourself. You have to know what’s important to you and what you value. Look, I love the Blue Jays. That isn’t going to change. By no means was this an easy decision. But it was one I felt I needed to make.”
For as much shock and bewilderment as there has been over Anthopoulos’ departure, the move really doesn’t stray far from the man’s modus operandi as a baseball executive or, more simply, as a person.
Throughout his time as Toronto’s GM, Anthopoulos has dealt almost exclusively in the surprising, brazen and unpredictable. He demonstrated himself to be an incredibly daring, adventurous tactician as a general manager, trading for players no other GM knew were available, signing players other teams, and even people within his own front office, didn’t believe in, and reinventing the core of his major league roster several times in pursuit of Toronto’s first playoff appearance in a generation.
He was anything but the picture of a conservative, hand-sitting company man that many fans would paint of him when calling for his head at various points in his tenure. He made bold, unconventional moves that were always rooted in his values and principles as a baseball executive. And he continued to do that right up until his final day with the franchise.
Really, he’s done it his entire life. In his early 20’s he left a steady job with his father’s heating and ventilation company, and passed over several lucrative opportunities with Canadian investment firms, to literally open mail for the Montreal Expos on weekends. He worked as a bank teller on weekdays to make ends meet, but when the bank wanted to promote him to a more involved position he quit and took a job working for free at a baseball academy the Expos were involved in.
After he worked his way up the Expos ladder all the way to scouting coordinator, earning plenty of strong allies in Montreal’s front office, he jumped to the Blue Jays, taking a pay cut and lesser role in the process, because he thought he’d have a brighter future in Toronto. In 2009, at just 32, he took on the role of Blue Jays GM in place of J.P. Ricciardi, a mentor and close confidant who he was deeply upset to see go, and worked for his first eight months without a contract, before he quietly signed one in 2010. It expires this weekend.
And now he’s leaving the Blue Jays, after the best season in the last two decades of the franchise, with a lucrative five-year contract offer sitting unsigned on the table, with ownership and the incoming president of the franchise both wanting him to return, with the excitement and interest in the team at all-time highs and his public reputation as a general manger as favourable as it’s ever been, for a completely uncertain future.
There is no job offer awaiting him elsewhere. No greener pasture he’s leaving for. Once again, he’s making a career move, a baseball move, any kind of move, the same was he always has—boldly, with a flash of the unpredictable, yet firmly entrenched in his values. He’s doing it his way.
“This is on me, one-hundred percent. Mark [Shapiro] did everything he could for me to stay. Ownership did everything they could for me to stay,” Anthopoulos said. “And after having some discussions, I approached the ball club and said, look, I just don’t think this is the right fit for me.
“They certainly wanted to continue to have dialogue and talk about it and see if there were other ways for me to stay on. And I really appreciated that,” Anthopoulos continued. “I was treated with unbelievable respect, dignity and class. That made it harder. It’s hard to tell people that treat you that way and want you to be somewhere that ultimately you don’t feel like it’s the right place for you.”
When Anthopoulos made one of his final bold moves as Blue Jays GM and signed Guerrero Jr. four months ago, he thought he would someday be in Toronto, watching from the general manager’s box when the son of an Expos legend made his big league debut. It would have been a fitting piece of symmetry for the Montreal native who cut his teeth in the Expos front office while Vlad Sr. played some of his best seasons on the turf at Olympic Stadium. He thought he’d spend the rest of his career working for Toronto.
But over the coming months, as several of the entities around him shifted, from ownership all the way down to the Blue Jays front office, Anthopoulos began to think that maybe he wouldn’t. He watched the Blue Jays postseason run with a lot of things on his mind, as the Rogers Centre filled every night with 50,000 raucous fans, and the Blue Jays finally demonstrated the nation-binding, powerhouse potential so many had pictured they could hold if they would just win for once. He was responsible for that success and he tried to enjoy it. He really wanted to enjoy it.
He doesn’t have any regrets for that. He calls it one of the greatest experiences of his life. And he doesn’t think he’ll have any regrets for the decision he made Wednesday afternoon, either, when he told his bosses he was walking away. As always, he did what he felt he had to do. He evaluated his position moving forward, weighed it against his own internal values, and decided the best decision was the unlikely one. He made one of those same bold moves he’s made his name on.
“I don’t know that I’ve had to make a harder decision in my life,” said Anthopoulos, a man who’s made an awful lot of hard decisions. “But this is what I needed to do.”