Toronto Blue Jays GM Alex Anthopoulos spoke to Jim Bowden and Dan Duquette on Sirius XM this morning and talked about some of the rumours that have been swirling around the Blue Jays’ interest in Chicago Cubs starter Jeff Samardzija.
The big question is whether Anthopoulos actually said anything new at all. The first question that we hear being asked gets to the point right away, asking about reports that the Blue Jays are in talks with the Cubs “in regards to a blockbuster that will bring Jeff Samardzija to Toronto.”
Well, Alex was his typical obfuscating self, telling Duquette and Bowden that he won’t comment on any rumours. He does admit that the club is “definitely exploring starters with teams . . . we have not made an offer to anybody with respect to a starter.”
It’s a little amusing to hear the disappointment in the voices of the radio hosts after getting this AA answer (AAnswer?) that we, in Toronto, are so used to hearing. Anthopoulos does admit that they’re “talking to one club about a smaller trade” but, of course, he follows that little tidbit of information with the qualifier “maybe it’ll move in the next few days or maybe it won’t happen.” So, uh, you’re not really giving us much to go on, are you, Alex?
One of the hosts* rattled off some free agent names like Matt Garza, Bronson Arroyo, Jarrod Saltalamacchia and A.J. Pierzynski but that didn’t rattle Anthopoulos who said, “I probably wouldn’t come out and say who we might be in on just from a competitive standpoint, we’ve probably talked about all those guys, definitely all the starters.” Again, this isn’t something new to us Blue Jays fans. If you’ve read “Great Expectations” by Shi Davidi and John Lott, you know how thorough Anthopoulos and his staff are and they’re going to have discussions about everyone on the market.
The one little bit of information that he did “reveal” is that they’ve “even called up positions that we don’t have a need on because there have been some trade talks where some teams have asked about some guys we don’t plan on trading but all of a sudden we get to fill some other holes and if we get to backfill through free agency and strengthen the club, we would look to do that as well.”
Ok, so he tells us that they’re open to filling “other holes” on the club by trading people that they don’t plan on. This, again, doesn’t tell us anything. All teams are looking to upgrade themselves over the offseason. Sometimes a team can go out and directly address its needs and other times, they have to take advantage of situations that are presented to them.
Before we go crazy, running around saying “ooooo! The Blue Jays are going to get Samardzija!” We should realize that AA’s saying the same things that he always says which is basically “no comment,” except in this case, it took him two and a half minutes to say it.
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*I don’t have XM radio and I don’t know the voices of the hosts so I can’t really tell which one is which.