For Blue Jays Mark Shapiro - It's All or Nothing

At the beginning of the Blue Jays season, I said this season’s slogan “to the core” should be called “wait and see”. Well we looked, and nobody has liked what they saw. Too many good starts were wasted by both the continued anemic offense and the average at best, when healthy bullpen. 

Fans' frustration has finally registered at the gate, so perhaps someone or some people will be held accountable. Don't hold your breath on that one.  

The core players it seems aren’t going anywhere and management isn’t going to fire itself. The only ones with the power to make changes is Rogers and while I believe they are concerned, Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro has done enough to earn for them, to earn a mulligan for himself. While most discontent is directed at Shapiro’s hand picked GM, for better or worse he is tied to Shapiro.  The term Shatkins didn’t happen by accident.  Even the most angry Blue Jays acknowledge it's the baseball operations, not the business side that needs changing. So as long as Shapiro is in charge, I wouldn’t expect big offseason changes in the front office.  Even if Shapiro did fire Atkins, would anyone expect him to hire anyone other than another yes man, Atkins. 

As for the players, I was hoping a wait and see season like this one would have tipped its hand on what needs to be done. If you believe you have seen enough and management needs to take the 40 man down to the wood and start again, you might be right, but I just spent the last paragraph telling you why that’s not going to happen. So let’s deal in the probable and not the unlikely. 

When you come off - “the everyone must go” position, the pathway forward gets a hell of a lot more difficult. Sign Vlad, Bo, both, neither? If you think you know the answer, I bet it has changed a few times. Last season when Bo was hitting and Vlad was getting picked off - everyone was talking that this was Bo’s team and they should dump Vlad. After a few months into this dreadful season everyone wanted them both gone. Now, with Vlad hitting again, and a sulking Bo hurt, now the talk is all for extending Vlad. With this uneven performance, perhaps the prudent action is to wait and hold off making that call a little longer. 

In the meantime, I expect Shatkins to be very aggressive in the offseason, filling in gaps to ensure they don’t have a repeat performance. Building a similar roster to this season, that is only good enough if everything goes right, won’t cut it. Shapiro has done a commendable job extracting more money from Blue Jays fans pockets. But it will require being at least good again, for the money to keep flowing. Shapiro knows that and that is why blowing it up on his watch was never going to happen. He also knows he's only got one shot left with ownership. But more important to him, he has one last shot to prove it to skeptical fans and shove it in the face of a hostile local media that he can manage both business AND baseball. 

Cleveland gave up on him being able to do that years ago. Part of the reason he came to Toronto was to get another chance at running the entire show.  The trouble with all or nothing people however, is very few of them can have it all. Most uncompromising end up with nothing. 

Will soon find out if Shapiro is better than most.

By Gregory Cawsey