Alex Anthopoulos Leaves Blue Jays
Well, this is a bit surprising.
Sources: Alex Anthopoulos leaving #BlueJays after turning down extension: https://t.co/XgO8q7D1J3
— Shi Davidi (@ShiDavidi) October 29, 2015
Sources: #BlueJays offered Anthopoulos long-term contract. His departure is not over terms or money.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) October 29, 2015
Alex Anthopoulos wanted full GM responsibilities. He told me recently he wouldn't stay under conditions less than that.
— steve simmons (@simmonssteve) October 29, 2015
Source: In their 1st & only meeting, new Jays prez Mark Shapiro scolded Alex Anthopolous & staff for trading so many top prospects this yr
— Rick Westhead (@rwesthead) October 29, 2015
The Blue Jays have been publicly looking for a baseball guy to replace Paul Beeston as team president for over a year, beginning with their awkward courtship of Kenny Williams and Dan Duquette last winter. They finally found their replacement in August, when they brought Mark Shapiro over from Cleveland to take the job, though the announcement at the time suggested that Shapiro would focus mostly on the business side of the organization, leaving the baseball operations department in Anthopoulos’ hands. After the team won the AL East on the backs of his many acquisitions over the last year, the general assumption was that he’d done enough to earn autonomy as the guy putting together the team’s roster.
But perhaps we should have seen this coming, given that the organization was clearly looking for a former GM to take their presidents role, rather than focusing solely on someone with a business background. They made a point of hiring a baseball guy to be Anthopoulos’ new boss, and it’s probably difficult to assume that you’re going to be allowed to make decisions if your boss was hired in large part because he’d done your job before.
So now a great 2015 Blue Jays season ends with a stain, as the team will have to undergo changes in the baseball operations department as well. Shapiro’s lengthy tenure in Cleveland helped produce many front office members around the game and the team’s position should help attract quality candidates; I’d suggest this might be the kind of job that could get Ben Cherington to reconsider taking a year off from working in baseball, for instance.
But this is an awkward cap to put on a great year in Toronto. Anthopoulos absolutely did trade away huge chunks of the team’s farm system, but in acquiring guys like Josh Donaldson, Troy Tulowitzki, Devon Travis, and Russell Martin, he made moves that set the team up to win not just in 2015, but beyond as well. And focusing solely on the cost of the acquisitions without balancing that against the obvious rewards of reinvigorating a city that hadn’t seen playoff baseball in 20 years seems short-sighted at best.
The Blue Jays will probably be fine without Anthopoulos, but the Jays are going to have to do some pretty nifty PR to not squander the significant excitement for the franchise they just spent so much time generating. And while there aren’t any other GM jobs open at the moment, it seems pretty likely that Anthopoulos will find a job in the not too distant future, and probably one where he’s allowed to call his own shots, rather than reporting to a GM-turned-president who doesn’t share his same philosophies.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
Really sorry guys.
The most Canadian bat flip ever.
Dave, his name is spelled ‘Anthopoulos.’ No ‘u’ after the ‘l.’
rolling eyes…
I never correct mistakes but it was throughout the article.
Anyway, surprising news.
Let’s just be happy George Stroumboulopoulos is involved with Rogers’ hockey rather than baseball.
threw you an upvote…
Just in time, before anyone sees Syndergaard pitch to d’Arnaud in the World Series.
I thought AA worked for Shapiro in Cleveland (correct me if I’m wrong). But wouldn’t they have similar philosophies if this were the case?
Scratch that, he never did. Sorry.
Your wrong. 🙂 AA began with the expos and then worked with JP Riccardi with the Jays before taking up the GM mantle.
And I wonder if any other fanbases (or organizations) that recently got a new GM are now wishing they waited.
I was thinking the same thing. He looks like he’d be perfect for Philadelphia.
Except in Phillie he’d be walking into exactly the same situation that was intolerable to him in Toronto: he’d be #2 to Andy MacPhail. Matt Klentak is apparently comfortable with limited authority since he also has limited experience and is presumably being groomed for more autonomy down the road; AA already had autonomy on baseball decisions and clearly is not willing to work in an environment where he has that taken away.
Maybe the Phillies (or their fans) would rather have AA than MacPhail, but that ship sailed months ago.
Seems like a pretty big mistake for Toronto.
Seems like the mistake was hiring Shapiro rather than promoting AA and putting one of these new-fangled limited GMs under him. Or, if they didn’t want to inflate AA’s title to “president” as so many orgs are now doing with their head baseball guy, the mistake was hiring a president over him who would obviously be involved in baseball (rather than business) decisions. Maybe AA didn’t make clear that he would find that situation intolerable, and maybe he didn’t realize how intolerable he would find it — and maybe it’s purely a personality thing and it might’ve worked with someone other than Shapiro — but I have to assume that this was not the outcome that Ted Rogers had in mind when he hired Shapiro.
🙁
….
Fuck this bullshit…
Bold prediction: Billy Beane will be the next GM of the Blue Jays.
Thus, completing his plan. It was all so obvious, looking back.
Why would he be interested in that job?
Billy Beane has complete baseball decision-making authority in Oakland and (as seems to be the recent trend) a fancy executive title above that of GM: Vice President of Baseball Operations. He would be getting neither of those things under Mark Shapiro in Toronto. Also, Beane is under contract until 2019, is well-compensated, and has an ownership stake in the A’s.
This reply is insanely tedious
If you find long-winded but comprehensive and fact-packed expositions on baseball to be “insanely tedious” I’m not sure what you’re doing on this website.
@MjwW… go away bitch.
why would cherington want this job? isn’t it basically the one he just passed over except with a worse guy above him?
Was gonna say the same thing. Both Cherington and Anthopoulos have now resigned when ownership undermined their authority by hiring a baseball ops guy above them. There’s now a shrinking pool of teams where the General Manager is actually the guy in charge.
Traditionally, baseball executives were owners/businessmen, while GM’s (ideally) had autonomy in regards to baseball personnel decisions. But there’s this recent trend of GM’s getting executive titles and then hiring “General Managers” with limited authority under them. It’s basically just job title inflation.
The Cubs (Epstein/Hoyer), A’s (Beane/Forst), White Sox (Williams/Hahn), Indians (Antonetti/Chernoff), Red Sox (Dombrowski/Hazen), Blue Jays (Shapiro/???), Braves (Hart/Coppolella), Dodgers (Friedman/Zaidi), Phillies (MacPhail/Klentak), Padres (Minaya/Preller) and maybe the Diamondbacks (La Russa/Stewart) all have this arrangement.
Giants with Sabean/Evans as well
Hay, that job title inflation’s not just a baseball thing either.
Just neighing.
That arrangement works fine so long as both the GM and President are hired or promoted to those roles with the understanding that that’s how it’ll be. Anthopoulos and Cherington prove that it doesn’t work when you try it with an experienced GM who’s used to GM duties. Job title inflation causes problems when it leads to de facto demotions.
“but the Jays are going to have to do some pretty nifty PR to not squander the significant excitement for the franchise they just spent so much time generating.”
Too late. There is no PR for this mess. Rogers can go die in a fire.
This, mon frère. Let’s build the fire with shredded Rogers cellphone bills and put it out with the tears of customers stuck with Rogers’ horrible coverage zones.
Based on what they’ve each accomplished, I would rather AA than Shapiro, if all other things were equal. (I know the titles aren’t ‘equal’, just when it comes to making decisions.) It seems Jays fans agree with that sentiment.
Based on the message boards I’ve visited today the vast majority of Blue Jay fans are shocked that Alex is leaving and this happened just as they were starting to move on from being ousted from the playoffs.
A small minority who never got over the Dickey and Marlins trades are celebrating though.
Eddy Rogers fumbles it again. Have we ever had an unemployed Executive of the year before?
I don’t know about Executive of the Year, but Joe Girardi was rather famously fired by the Marlins immediately following the season he was voted Manager of the Year (probably because he’d managed go get the Marlins into the playoffs despite a $15M payroll, which completely messed up Jeffrey Loria’s narrative that he required a taxpayer-subsidized stadium in order to build a winning team)
Ahem.
Did Jeff Loria watch Major League and think “hey, that Rachel lady had the right idea” or something like that?
Pretty much, though he took it much, much further. Screenwriters wouldn’t dare pitch the kind of machinations that actually took place in South Florida
Simply put, Jeffrey Loria is an evil genius. Consider: He got the other teams to take the Expos off his hands and give him a loan to buy the Marlins (remember this, loans come due). He then cut the Marlins payroll to the point where the team was earning more in revenue sharing from the other teams than he was spending on the players, so he literally could have zero attendance or TV money and still turn a profit. He then did all sorts of things (some subtle, some not) to drive fans away, in order to support his narrative that what he needed to draw fans was a new, taxpayer-subsidized stadium. He finally got that stadium (whose funding was so questionable it invited both an SEC investigation and a mayoral recall) but he was careful to not get the deal signed until he’d owned the Marlins for six years. Why six years? Because according to the terms of that loan from MLB (remember?) he only had to pay back half of it (and zero interest) if the Marlins didn’t get a new stadium within five years.
Like I said: genius. Evil, but genius. Even the other owners hate him.
If you want to read more, there’s plenty out there but this THT article covers a lot of it.
I’m happy to say I cancelled my Rogers cable TV an hour ago. Of course I’d been planning to cancel it for a few months as I stream everything, but I like the narrative of a disgruntled fan better.
I’m a Jays fan and I am pretty upset about this. The totality of AA’s moves over the past several years led to the best offence in baseball, by far, an ALCS showing, and, perhaps most importantly, a team full of players that I find fun to root for.
If AA rejected the offer because Rogers ownership decided to replace his boss with someone whose philosophy was so different that AA couldnt fathom sticking around, then i side with AA.
This transcends sports. I support people who build things that I find admirable. I am not loyal to the Jays just because I live in Toronto.
Fun fact: the MLB.com Blue Jays Front Office page not only still lists Anthopoulos as GM, it still lists Beeston, rather than Shapiro, as the president — and this despite being prominently labeled as “Revised: October 29, 2015”
Well, technically Beeston’s and AA’s contracts expire at the end of October…
That’s a fair point. Wikipedia lists Shapiro’s tenure as “2016-present” which will eventually be correct but seems bizarrely Marty McFly during this interregnum.
Nothing like assuming Shapiro makes it into 2016, eh?
here comes Rogers raining on everyone’s parade again.
the move to promote AA to president of baseball ops and Tony LaCava to GM, and then hire a business guy was just too logical apparently.
The blue jays will be fine, they’ll just hire one of the plethora of genius commenters here who think the royals have figured out how to play real baseball. Since hosmer and moustakas are unavailable to fill the role of bully, they’ll get harold Reynolds and Kevin millar to come out of retirement.