Ricciardi took a few minutes to talk about his team’s lot in life, via phone, Monday night:
RB: How do you view your team after all of this dust has cleared?
JP: We like our team, we really do. We like the nucleus we have in place. We think Hill and Lind are going to be stars and are on their way. We think Snider is going to be a very good player. We like our team. We have a very good catcher in Eric Seivert coming. We like our arms on the mound. There’s a lot of really good things happening here. What I think we’ve realized is the reality of the division. We know it, but we’ve come to realize it even more so. This is not a division you can be good in, you have to be great in it to make the playoffs. We’ve been good the last three years. The ownership has been great to us. They’ve allowed us to spend some money over the last three years, and the last three years we were high 80’s in wins. We’re not good enough to win the division.
What we have to do is take a step back and start looking at ways that we can start building to get great. I think with the Cecils and the Romeros and all the young arms we have, along with the Hills and the Linds and the players we have coming we have a really good foundation and nucleus to get there. But I think we have to be smart about the fact that right now we’re not great and you have to be great to win this division.
I think it’s extremely important. You have to realize that we’re a club that had a $20 million cut in payroll this year. So with that savings going into next year, along with the Rolen savings along with the players we acquired for Rolen, we were able to hopefully utilize that money to address some of our needs. I’ll only be able to answer the question over the next five years how that money works in our favor.
Repoz
Posted: August 18, 2009 at 03:18 PM |
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1. rawagman Posted: August 18, 2009 at 05:00 PM (#3296644)2) Who in the hell is Eric Seivert?
I really, really wish I could say I was done with this team. The front office & the ownership don't deserve anyone's fandom. Missing out on 3 of the top 4 picks in the draft right after cutting a ton of payroll at the big league level is inexcusable. I hate this ####### organization.
Snider's actually been a prospect like this since he was drafted three years ago.
Seconded. And you didn't even mention the Rogers Centre - maybe the worst ballpark in MLB not already slated for the wrecker's ball.
I am aware of this.
I am not aware of your point.
The Rogers Centre isn't that bad. Since they did the sprucing up a couple seasons ago, it's actually a pretty decent place to watch a game.
They need to get rid of the turf.
Strongly disagree.
The problem is just the team. The stadium can be as great as it wants, but it can't compensate for Kevin Millar sucking the soul from fans...
Finally, the seating arrangements are poorly planned. Obviously, there are about 15,000 too many. They are packed too closely to one another, so anyone over 5'9'' spends the game trying to figure out how to accommodate his or her knees. The location is fine, but it is not a comfortable place to watch a game.
The sightlines are mostly decent (excepting parts of the outfield seats), but the turf does look sh*tty.
Baseball is more beautiful to watch in an open environment. I recently went on a short baseball trip to see games in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Detroit. Each of the three stadia put the Rog' to shame. And as bad as the Jays are, they are still better than any of the teams I saw on that trip (Pittsburgh, Washington, Detroit, Baltimore and Cleveland), but the experience of watching the game live in the other parks was vastly superior.
The experience of watching your team WIN is vastly superior. All your arguments are moot to me if the team is winning. I used to sit at the old stadium BEHIND the outfield wall, and sometimes all I'd see all game is an outfielder's glove snag a deep drive. It still rocked because the mid-to-late '80s Jays were all sorts of awesome.
If you didn't notice the sprucing, then I don't know how genuine your bashing can be...
Switching out the old turf for the much better looking FieldTurf, redoing all the walls surrounding the playing field (including adding the additional screens to the outfield wall), replacing the Jumbotron, redoing all the concessions, cleaning up and otherwise tweaking all the concourses. I'm sure there's a bunch of other stuff too, but those are the items that quickly come to mind.
Yeah, it's still not Camden Yards, but it's hardly the abomination you seem to think it is.
Anyone know why they took away the homerun fireworks? Was that a cost move, or something to do with insurance and it sometimes being a closed facility?
Why not just go to grass? Why the insistence on artificial?
It may have something to do with how much time the roof spends closed.
I recall reading something about that. They had conducted studies and determined that maintaining real grass in that environment wasn't viable.
Can you elaborate on this?
This is going to be a very sad several years isn't it?
Like all things Blue Jays lately, it's purely business, and far too little baseball.
They claim they went into this with the strategy of drafting signability issues, and the evidence backs them up. If they'd done this with the plan to sign all of them, they were (a) nuts, and (b) failures. If they went in with that strategy and figured they'd sign some but not all their top picks, they were (a) sane, and (b) successful. Whether the signability strategy will work better than the safe route of past years, I don't know. BA has their organizational talent (prior to the 2009 season) ranked last among AL East teams, so on a relative basis something isn't working.
As I say at the top, Ricciardi is realizing this a little too late. Building up the farm will take a while, and (IMO) he should've done this before now. But it's for the best, eventually.
I heard that they had dressed up the stadium </ducking>
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