To me, I do feel confident in saying they had a bad offseason. They did. Like, to me, it's a fact. Now, that being said, I'm totally with you in saying that at the outset of this season, you can go back and listen to At The Letters, and you can find me saying that I thought they had a real shot to be a playoff team. Probably a wildcard team, I think, I would have said, just given the Yankees and Orioles. But I thought the Jays had a real shot, and we weren't alone in saying that. If you look at the entire media landscape, the entire baseball media landscape, look at the projections, which had the Blue Jays definitely as a fringe playoff team going into this season. So it was not, we were not alone in thinking that. I think that fans certainly had optimism about this team internally.
The players, of course, they believe that they would be able to do this. So it's a great point to say that it's not as though this was all foretold on Sportsnet.ca on March 15th that they were doomed. You know, that was not the way it worked. But at the same time, like looking at it now, I think that we don't need to know, and I have, I mean, I spent a lot of time and a lot of energy and had a lot of conversations reporting on the offseason to the extent that I possibly could last winter. So I think I have a pretty good idea of what went down to an extent. You're never gonna have a full picture, but end of the day, you don't have to be any sort of reporter or any sort of insider to know what happened, right?
We all know what happened. We all know what they actually did, and they can be judged on that. And what the job of an MLB front office is, is to come up with a plan and a vision and various contingencies and build the depth and adjust on the fly such that you can overcome the inevitable injuries, underperformances, and attrition that happens in the course of a baseball season. And the Jays just haven't done it.
