The recent move by Alex Rios from the Blue Jays to the White Sox via a waiver claim is a win for both sides.

The Blue Jays get rid of an albatross of a contract which they had to get out from under if they are going to have any chance of competing going forward, and the White Sox get the one thing they have been searching for in vain for years on end: a viable option in center field.

Sure, the White Sox are overpaying, but unlike the Jake Peavy deal, in which they had to overpay *and* give up premium prospects, to get Rios the Sox did not have to give up any young, cost-controlled talent, so if they play their cards right they will be more than making up for the extra money they are paying Rios by making good use of the talent they did not give up.

But the bottom line is that beggars can’t be choosers. The Sox desperately needed a centerfielder, and Rios is a legit defender in center, with his career 12.8 UZR/150 as a centerfielder, and his cannon arm: since 2004 only Jeff Francoeur and Alfonso Soriano have more outfield assists than Rios’s 55.

Moreover, Rios’s bat will play in center, given his underappreciated defensive talents. The problem for the Blue Jays is that they were playing him in right, due to the even-more-of-an-albatross contract they’d given to Vernon Wells.

But more than just finally giving the South-siders a CF, the move also gives Kenny Williams all kinds of options.  The money owed to Peavy and Rios isn’t really that big a deal, given that if the Sox want, they can clear tons of salary this offseason by letting both Jim Thome and Jermaine Dye walk as free agents, if they want to.

Given Kenny’s enduring fondness for the kind of veterans who got him a ring in 2005, I see a much more likely scenario as being the Sox picking up Dye’s option and resigning Thome to a cheaper deal, if he’s willing, or else, picking up Dye, letting Thome walk, and moving Dye to DH, and leaving an outfield of Scott Podsednik, Rios, and Carlos Quentin.

But in any case, the Rios acquisition combined with Dye’s option gives Kenny a lot of flexibility this offseason to see what’s out there and pursue a wide variety of pieces which he can then shift around to fit different combinations.  By finally filling the gaping hole in center, Rios makes this possible.

As for the Jays, the problem wasn’t so much Rios’s deal in isolation, as the fact that the team was on the hook for at least *four* seemingly un-movable contracts, at positions that are normally the easiest to fill on the free agent market, severely restricting flexibility and completely hindering the team’s ability to retool. In actuality, Rios’s contract was probably the least bad of the four (the others being Wells, Rolen, and Overbay), but given the overall situation, and the fact that Wells is absolutely never ever going anywhere ever, moving Rios if at all possible can only help the team going forward.

In today’s market, Rios’s annual salary can probably sign 3 players who can put up similar production, and given that the Jays were clearly not going to win with the present model, given the division they play in, breaking up the team in some way, no matter how, is the only way to go.

People may wonder why a deal that was so bad for the Jays could be so good for the Sox, but it all comes down to context – the Sox play in a winnable division in which they already have a relatively strong team, desperately needed a centerfielder, and have upcoming payroll flexibility, whereas the Jays play in the AL East, which now has three other juggernauts, had a lot of bad contracts all at once, and have less payroll flexibility in general due to lower revenues and the Canadian dollar.

This is one of a series of posts in which we throw cold water on each team’s pathetic offseason twiddlings while spraying champagne all over their ingenious winter machinations.

The Toronto Blue Jays have been stuck in a funk lo these last few years. They compete in a tough-as-nails division, dominated by two big-market teams, and they only crack the top two when something goes horribly wrong with one of those teams (such as when the Red Sox experienced disastrous injuries in 2006, allowing the Jays to beat them for second place by one game). And last year, despite heading into the season with a promising lineup, they themselves suffered injury after injury, apparently cursed by a vengeful swamp hag. Yet despite this, they managed to hang around second place in the AL East through the first half of the 2007 season, as the Yankees were similarly blighted. Unfortunately for Toronto, the Yankees then suddenly remembered, “Holy s—, we’re the New York f—ing Yankees!” and started winning again. And the Blue Jays finished the season 13 games out of first place.

What did the Jays do this offseason to try and break out of their perpetual state of mediocrity? The signed David Eckstein. Now, David Eckstein, though often treated as little more than a punchline by the average blogger, is not actually terrible. However, he’s not actually that good, either.

The other major move made by the Jays this winter was the acquisition of Scott Rolen in a one-for-one trade of third basemen, sending Troy Glaus to the Cardinals. Rolen, pissed off at Tony La Russa, waived his no-trade clause to get out of St. Louis. Glaus, whose tender feet didn’t enjoy playing half their games on turf, was just as happy to leave the Rogers Center. When healthy, the two are remarkably similar in their offensive output, but Rolen has struggled to stay on the field since a collision at first base that left him with nagging shoulder problems. Then there’s the question of how hard Rolen will play—certainly, La Russa got the impression he was dogging it. (But perhaps Eckstein, the intangibly gritty gamer that he is, will inspire similar intestinal fortitude in his fellow infielder. There. There’s your David Eckstein joke. I hope you enjoyed it.) At least Rolen will be an upgrade, defensively. But it’s the contracts carried by each of these men that render the deal a bit of a puzzle. As Paul put it in a recent email, “Glaus had one year at $12.75m left on his deal. So they sent him away and got back Rolen who has three years and $33m left. Why would you paint yourself into a corner like that when you had the ability to lose payroll?” Why indeed? And in a year when third basemen were either commanding lucrative contracts (A-Rod, Mike Lowell) or functioning as the centerpiece in the winter’s biggest trade (Miguel Cabrera), and you, J.P. Ricciardi, wanted to trade Troy Glaus, why would you trade him for a Scott Rolen when you could have gotten a couple of decent prospects with upside?

The Jays win just enough, apparently, to keep the FO from admitting defeat and deciding to rebuild. Yet they lose too much to make the playoffs. So they’re stuck. They’ve got one bonafide ace in Roy Halladay and a good No. 2 in AJ Burnett. The back of their rotation is better than most—and at least their 3, 4, and 5 pitchers are all young. Closer BJ Ryan, who had Tommy John surgery in May, says he’ll be ready to go by Opening Day. But even if Lyle Overbay and Rolen can both bounce back offensively this year, their lineup will still lack sufficient on-base, top-of-the-order types, and they could use another power bat. Their defense? No real complaints (though Eckstein is a downgrade at short). In fact, despite the holes in their roster, the Jays have enough youngish, decent talent—guys like Halladay, Burnett, Alex Rios, Vernon Wells, Aaron Hill—that if their farm system were stocked, they might have a chance to make a good run at the Wild Card in the next couple of years. But will the farm provide?

The Jays have some decent prospects in their system, but none are close enough to the bigs to help out in the near future. In fact, the organization’s most exciting youngsters can’t even drink legally. The best of these is outfielder Travis Snider, who just turned 20 on Groundhog Day. Baseball Prospectus describes him as “one of the top hitting prospects in baseball” who projects for “legitimate MVP-level numbers” in the future. That’s the good news. The bad? His flaws make his plate approach sound a bit like JD Drew to me (“could use more aggressiveness at the plate…currently works himself into poor hitter’s counts while letting not perfect–yet perfectly hittable–pitches go by”) and the hulking 245-pounder is not fast (he got caught stealing nine times in a row last year). In a perfect world, he’d be “a number-three hitter on a championship-level team, and a perennial All-Star.” However, he has yet to play above low-A ball. For better or for worse, he still has a ways to go. And after Snider, what has Toronto got? A talented 18-year old third base prospect (Kevin Ahrens); a solid, middle-of-the-rotation type lefty making the transition from a closer to a starter and aiming for AA ball by the end of the summer (Brett Cecil); a 19-year old with power but no natural defensive position position who has played all of 49 games in the Gulf Coast League (John Tolisano); and a good catching prospect who still strikes out too much (J.P. Arencibia).

All this leads me to believe that the Lansing Lugnuts will be a great team to watch this year. I wish I could say the same for the Toronto Blue Jays.

Acquisitions: Rod Barajas, C; David Eckstein, SS; Marco Scutaro, 3B; Buck Coats, RF; Scott Rolen, 3B

Losses: Josh Towers, SP; Troy Glaus, 3B

Projected Lineup, Rotation, and Closer:

SS David Eckstein, 33 years old, 3 homers, .309 avg

1B Lyle Overbay, 31 years old, 10 homers, .240 avg

RF Alex Rios, 27 years old, 24 homers, .297 avg

DH Frank Thomas, 39 years old, 26 homers, .277 avg

2B Aaron Hill, 25 years old, 17 homers, .291 avg

CF Vernon Wells, 29 years old, 16 homers, .245 avg

3B Scott Rolen, 32 years old, 8 homers, .265 avg

C, Gregg Zaun, 36 years old, 10 homers, .242 avg

LF Reed Johnson, 31 years old, 2 homers, .236 avg

SP1 Roy Halladay, 30 years old, 225.1 IP, 3.71 ERA

SP2 AJ Burnett, 31 years old, 165.2 IP, 3.75 ERA

SP3 Dustin McGowan, 25 years old, 169.2 IP, 4.05 ERA

SP4 Jesse Litsch, 22 years old, 111.0 IP, 3.81 ERA

SP5a Shaun Marcum, 26 years old, 159.0 IP, 4.13 ERA

SP5b Gustavo Chacin, 27 years old, 27.1 IP, 5.60 ERA

CL BJ Ryan, 32 years old, 38 saves with a 1.37 ERA in 2006; he had 3 saves and 2 losses, with a 12.46 ERA in 2007.

Grade: D

What the Blue Jays have assembled here is not a bad team—if they played in the NL Central. Though the Toronto brass has promised to rebuild many times, they’ve yet to actually do so. I’m not asking for a drastic fire sale; they just need to stop acquiring mediocre hitters in their 30s. If they could face up to reality and unload a couple of their older players this year at the trade deadline, they could conceivably end up with some prospects who could actually help them in 2009 or 2010. But hoping for the two teams ahead of you to suddenly collapse—especially when those two teams have healthy farm systems and way more revenue than you do—is not a strategy.

Looking towards the future of the division, with the Devil Rays ascendant and the Orioles finally starting a rebuilding process of their own, if the Jays keep on their current path, they will soon be recalling their days in third place with fond nostalgia.

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