|
Toronto Blue Jays
Scouting Report
By the Numbers | Players To Watch | Projected Roster
| |
The Blue Jays hope Shawn Green
and Co. can generate more scoring than last year's league-worst
offense.
(Stephen
Green)
| Hard
to
believe it has been just four seasons since the Blue Jays'
Joe Carter launched the final pitch of the '93 World Series
over the leftfield wall at the
SkyDome and skipped around the bases like a giddy child. At
that glorious moment Toronto was
baseball's model organization. Winners of back-to-back world
championships, the Blue Jays had stable ownership, a
brilliant general manager, a respected veteran manager, a
state-of-the-art stadium and the league's best attendance.
Now they have none of that. They
don't even have Carter
anymore.
Righthander Pat Hentgen, who was completing only his second
full year in the majors that memorable night—two seasons,
two World Series rings—is one of just three players
remaining from the '93 team. "I didn't grasp the
moment as well as I should have,"
Hentgen says. "It all happened so fast and I was so
young and I guess I thought we would just keep on winning
forever."
General manager Gord Ash watches videotapes of those Series
games each winter, trying to transport himself back to a
time when he was the assistant G.M. of a baseball
juggernaut on a remarkable run of 11 straight winning
seasons, including five American
League East titles. "Talk about spoiled," Ash
says. "Everything we did for a decade seemed to work
great, but you don't realize how fragile success is until
you try to duplicate it. There is a cyclical nature to
professional sport. Even the Montreal
Canadiens have had droughts."
The Blue Jays have endured four straight seasons under
.500, finishing fifth, fourth and fifth in the East the
past three years. With so many of the elements that
fortified the franchise now lost, dissipated or replaced in
recent years, it is fair to
wonder if Toronto can regain its momentum anytime
soon.
Despite rumors in the past year that the franchise was
about to be sold, it is still on the market. SkyDome, once
an attraction in itself, has been upstaged by the newer
retro parks, like Camden Yards and Jacobs Field. After
drawing more than four
million in '91, '92 and '93, the Blue Jays drew just 2,589,297
last season, ninth in the majors. This was particularly
troubling because Toronto had outbid the Yankees for free
agent Roger Clemens. His salary helped jack up the payroll
nearly $20 million to
$48 million for '97, but even with a Cy Young Award-winning
performance by Clemens, the Blue Jays' attendance increased
just 367 fans per game over the previous year, leading to
reported losses of $21 million. Part of the apathy can be
attributed to the
major leagues' worst offense—Toronto finished last in the
league in batting average, runs, slugging percentage and
on-base percentage, and when Carter left he took 16% of the
team's RBIs in '97 with
him.
Ash has struggled to fill the shoes of his wily
predecessor, Pat Gillick (now the Orioles' general
manager), who built the Blue Jays by developing young
players and filling holes with seasoned veterans. Ash is
trying to follow the same game plan, but
things have not gone as swimmingly. For instance, after
failing this past winter to acquire Paul Molitor, Chili
Davis, Chuck Knoblauch or Mike
Lansing to jump-start the offense, Ash instead signed
free-agent closer Randy Myers to a three-year,
$16 million contract, stocking a position the team was not
particularly desperate to upgrade. (Toronto did acquire
Jose Canseco, Mike Stanley and Darrin Fletcher to bolster
the offense.) Also, the recent string of disappointing
seasons led to last
September's firing of manager Cito Gaston, who had shepherded the
Blue Jays for nine years. He was replaced by Tim Johnson,
who has never managed in the
majors.
On that fateful evening when Carter hit his shot heard
round the world, Johnson sat on his couch in Great Falls,
Mont., pumping his fist with joy. Johnson, who played in
Toronto as a reserve infielder in '78 and '79, was the
Expos' bench coach in '93,
and he could never have imagined he would be the Blue Jays'
manager just four seasons later. "Thinking back, that
night seems like 10 years ago," Johnson says. "I
remember being so happy for Toronto, and I felt like I
played a little part in bringing
Toronto to the peak of the baseball world. Now I have the tough
task of bringing back that feeling you get when everybody
else wishes they could trade places with
you."
—by Tim Crothers
Scouting Report | By the Numbers | Players To Watch | Projected Roster
|
