BY ROBBIE GOLDMAN – FAN FUEL BLOGGER
Almost twenty years ago, the Rogers Centre (SkyDome) went crazy. Joe Carter had just hit the game winning home run and the Blue Jays were World Series Champions for the second straight year.
Fans were on a high, some thought that the Blue Jays were going to be competitive for the next ten years. Others thought that they were going to fall off a little given the fact that they had traded a few top prospects like Jeff Kent.
But nobody thought that they weren’t going to be playing October baseball for at least the next twenty years. After a few seasons of mediocre baseball, the Blue Jays became an afterthought as the Leafs became back to being Toronto’s number one team.
But times are changing.
Going into the 2012 offseason, the Blue Jays had a boatload of problems that needed to be addressed. In one week Alex Anthopoulos addressed 90 per cent of them.
What makes this deal different than the other big trades that the Blue Jays have been in in the last decade is that they weren’t on the rebuilding end. When Roy Halladay was traded to the Phillies it looked like Toronto was once again rebuilding and the fans were growing more and more impatient. However this trade puts the Blue Jays on the “we want to win now” side and has people buzzing about baseball once again in Toronto.
This Toronto team will now be able to compete with the Yankees, Red Sox and Rays. Some people even have them at 11-1 odds of winning the World Series which is the highest it has been since they actually won it back in 1993.
This by no means says that the Blue Jays will be making the World Series, heck I’d be happy if Toronto just made the playoffs.
But now we have a legitimate contender that has people talking about baseball across the country and in the city of Toronto in the early fall months, which is a huge step in the right direction.
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