2021 MLB Opening Weekend!!

[Drago]

tbh I thought the old Cleveland front office had absolutely botched the Jays rebuild, whereas now it appears as though it was a lot of necessary teething after Anthopolous went all-in to chase a ring.

I still don't blame him for it, but damn those rentals look bad in hindsight.

[Number1ChanseyFan]

tbh I thought the old Cleveland front office had absolutely botched the Jays rebuild, whereas now it appears as though it was a lot of necessary teething after Anthopolous went all-in to chase a ring.

I still don't blame him for it, but damn those rentals look bad in hindsight.

Yeah, I totally understand that... I wasn’t crazy about our front office at first either!! The perfect storm of events in the mid 90’s allowed the Indians teams that I grew up with to temporarily function like a big market team... so when that was what I was used to, when it went away I was VERY upset... but just like the Blue Jays, our GM, John Hart, completes depletes our farm system to supplement the major league team... And then it just collapsed... our players got old and/or expensive at the same time, and we had nothing in the minors to help us... it was a rather painful rebuild when it came with the realization that we were really a small market team...

Actually, the branch of our front office that went to Toronto seems like it is doing a little bit better at identifying hitters than they did in Cleveland... we have become quite adept at developing starting pitching, but have really struggled developing hitting... we do best trading for hitters that are stuck in the minors in other organizations... and yeah, probably our greatest area of weakness is free agent signings... we don’t do big contracts often, and when we do, they almost never work out. We do great at grabbing injured players or former stars coming off a down year and helping to resurrect their careers, but multi year deals rarely work out for us...

Overall, Toronto has really done an admirable job turning around the organization so quickly, especially in the difficult AL East division, definitely an exciting young team with lots of room to grow in the near future. Hard to believe that our 2 teams are already completely unrecognizable from the last time they met in the playoffs in 2016.