Blue Jays Mailbag: The Role the Front Office Played in a Lost 2017 Season

The Blue Jays’ season is winding down, and apparently we’re all looking firmly toward the future.

And why wouldn’t we? This season? Woof. But that doesn’t mean things are all bad as far as your Toronto Blue Jays go. They’re just, y’know, mostly bad. Hey, but don’t sweat it, spring training is only 150 days away.

So let’s warm ourselves up for a long winter of Blue Jays fan infighting, and take a look what’s in this week’s mailbag!

If you have a Blue Jays question you’d like me to tackle for next week, be sure to send it to stoeten@gmail.com. As always, I have not read any of Griff’s answers.

As much as I’d like to be the arbiter of what is or isn’t legitimate to criticize, sadly, I can’t tell anybody that something they want to be critical of is off-limits. I can only just tell them what I think they’re missing—y’know, as forcefully as possible.

But you’re right that there are definitely moves that fans looking to criticize the new front office will glom onto as clear examples of their ineptitude—sometimes even rightly! Few of them have to do with internal changes (beefing up analytics, more focus on player development, adding the high performance department, etc.) so I’ll focus mostly on player moves here. And in that respect, I think there are a few things that get lost in some folks’ rush to shout about the club’s most obvious and inarguable missteps. One of those is the fact that every front office, even the very best of them, makes mistakes all the time (Brett Anderson was in the Cubs’ Opening Day rotation, for God’s sake!). It’s just the nature of the sport. Another is the fact that, here at the tail end of a rather miserable Jays season, in which they’ve ended up in last place after going to the ALCS last season, the mistakes sometimes get amplified beyond all proportion.