It’s encouraging to have four or five starters at Double-A we feel are starting to settle in there and do well. When we have four or five prospect starter types at Triple-A, and they’re all dominating the competition there, your answer will be there for you. And hopefully three to five guys right behind them at Double-A, and three to five guys right behind them at A-ball, and a mixture of effective potential bullpen guys as well. So, it’s a process. You can’t cheat the process. It takes time and consistency in executing and developing, but we’re getting better, and we’re better now.

It’s not just physical domination, it’s also someone who’s demonstrated that they have the routines that are going to allow them to both adapt and adjust at the major league level, as well as maintain consistency. It’s a lot of the things off the field; how they handle themselves professionally, what kind of teammates they are, can they function in a setting where fear, worry, and doubt is going to enter in a lot more, where the pressures are a lot more intense, where they have to bear the scrutiny of Jeff Blair on a daily basis.

Almost every organization is going to be faced with doing that once or twice during a season, and that’s why the minor league free agent process, or the waiver claim process, is such an important one to stay focussed on — because it’s not always going to happen organically, just from the players you have. When you look up and there’s three guys in the lineup you didn’t plan to be there, and every pitcher that pitches that night are not guys that were in your plans at the start of the season, you’re probably not in a spot that you want to be. But as long as you’ve got a plan to not have that be the long-term state, and you’re moving through it, that’s fine.

It’s almost an unfair question, because you probably know the answer to it before you ask it. I mean, I think you deal with the situation and circumstance you’re in. And we certainly — when you look at some of the better teams out there in the American League; Houston, New York, Cleveland — they are teams that have a diversity of ways to score, athleticism, a blend of youth and experienced players, a balanced team. Again, that would be a long term goal for us. We are what we are now, we have some of the best players in the game on our team, but we’re a little skewed towards the veteran side instead of a mix. And when we do bring young players up they’re probably not the right calibre of young players that we need to have here mixed in with veterans. The goal is to build that over time. Again, there’s no cheating that process, that takes time. If there’s a time that we reach where we feel like we can’t continue to contend and win with the core we have, then we’ll have to look at an alternate plan, but right now we still feel like — although this year has been extremely disappointing to date — that we still have a good core of players, and if we can get healthy, we have the capability of surrounding them with some other players certainly, and being open to some trades, but we still feel that we can build from the core that we’ve got.

There’s two reasons for that, and the first one is just, what you’d see if you come down here on any given night. To be here last night, there’s not a night that I don’t sit, watching the game, look out at our stands or walk around our concourses and just wonder in absolute amazement and appreciation at just the number of fans who come out here. I still feel like our jobs are to obsessively give those fans something to cheer about. And the night that we don’t give them enough to cheer about, and they don’t go home happy, that we need to be resolved to work harder to do that. So that would lead to answering your question, which is: I’m not sure what alternative you’re giving me. What are you saying — to just start over and start the franchise over? Because it is what is is. We’ve got the players we’ve got. We think they’re great players. But there’s no alternative — there’s not an A or a B, “Would you like to go with this younger group of players or do you want to build around the players that are in place here right now?” So we’re going to do the best we can to build around the players we’ve got, and we happen to believe that there’s both some championship calibre talent, as well as people, in that mix. And we going to continue to work hard to surround them with other players that help them win.

With JD, it’s obviously going to be a consistent subject that both he and we have to deal with. I tend to feel like there’s situations both from him and outside of his control that affect that decision for both him and us. The simplest answer to that is that it’s hard to imagine any scenario where we’re a better team without him. He’s a pretty special player, now that he’s gotten kind of healthy over the last couple of weeks — it’s a pretty good reminder of just how great he is offensively and defensively, when he’s healthy. So, again, we want JD here, we appreciate who he is, the way he is, the way he competes, how smart he is, how he prepares. But as far as — the future for right now is next year, and then we’ll explore at the right times, privately, whether there’s an opportunity beyond that.

The increase in ticket prices are not tied into the renovation at all. Those are tied towards, y’know, just, to be frank, just helping us compete against the teams in our division, and helping us, y’know, develop and progress our ticket prices in line with the industry, and in line with the other sports teams in Toronto. It’s never easy for anyone in these jobs to do. Never want any fan to feel like you’re being disrespectful to them. But that’s the business side of the job.

This stadium, as every stadium, still feels great when it’s packed. But there is no compelling feature within this stadium that would cause people to want to be here other than the environment and atmosphere when it’s special or the team’s winning, or just being a hardcore baseball fan. I think ultimately what you’d like to do is design the coolest bar in Toronto that happens to be in Rogers Centre. You have the greatest family entertainment centre, the best food and unique food products. You’d like set all those experiences within a ballpark, and then also have the pure baseball purist experience from base to base for the fans that still want to watch the game the same way they’ve always watched it and scored the game. But a diversity of experiences, targeted for the different parts of our fan base that provide people with a great, cutting edge fan experience. It always starts with winning, but in every other aspect of the experience as well.