Since he took over as Blue Jay general manager last October, Alex Anthopoulos has been in overdrive. If there are a dozen ways to make his baseball club better, you can be sure he's neglecting none of them.
But there's little doubt where he has made his biggest investment both in time, manpower and money. With an expanded scouting staff and the backing of ownership, the Blue Jays are poised to attack the June amateur draft as they have never done before.
In six months, Anthopoulos has more than doubled the Toronto scouting staff which currently is beating the bushes to make this 2010 draft as productive as possible. They have accumulated seven of the first 80 picks and 10 of the first 126. Anthopoulos and amateur scouting director Andrew Tinnish are determined to make them count.
"It's a big draft for us," said Anthopoulos earlier this spring in Dunedin. "So many picks. Seven in the top two rounds; 10 in the top four. We're very excited about it. It's a good opportunity for us to infuse a lot of talent into the minor leagues.
"If there was ever a time to add some bodies and some staff, it's as good a year as any."
Unless you are the Yankees or the Red Sox with bottomless pits of money, no team can afford to buy its core players on the free agent market. You have to draft high-end talent and hope it matures into an Alex Rodriguez or a Matt Holliday or, yes, a Roy Halladay. They are hard to find, but when you find them, they are the heart and soul of your franchise.
"We're trying to get players who you would have a hard time getting in free agency and a hard time getting in trades," Anthopoulos said. "As a result, you're going for a higher-ceiling player and there's going to be more risk."
The draft is supposed to be a democratic process by which the small market teams and the rich boys are competing on a level playing field. But that isn't how it works. The high-ceiling players that Anthopoulos covets know they have extra value and their agents try to wring every last nickel out of the selecting team. So, for fear of wasting a pick, smaller market teams have routinely bypassed expensive prospects (ie Scott Boras clients) in favour of ones more cheaply signed.
In that way, the purpose of the draft is subverted in that big-talent players often fall into the hands of the rich teams by default. Anthopoulos has no intention of letting his owners get taken to the cleaners but he is not going to ignore the best players, either.
"Our ownership is clearly committed to spending when we feel it's the right opportunity to spend," Anthopoulos said. "We're not going to go into the draft shying away from certain players because we believe they are too expensive.
"If we feel that the value is there and we put the right value on those players, we will have the money to go sign those players. That said, a lot was made last year when we didn't sign some of our picks. It's not that we didn't have the money to sign those picks. We just felt the price point for those players and the value we placed on them didn't line up."
The players in question -- James Paxton, Jake Eliopoulos and Jake Barrett -- went back into the draft and the Jays were awarded three equivalent picks in this year's auction.
Like baseball itself, where a hitter can command an eight-figure annual salary by failing seven out of 10 times at the plate, the draft is a crapshoot. Trying to project a 17-year-old high school player four or five years down the line is like guessing which elevator is going to come first.
Take the 1999 draft for example. Eight of the top 15 picks never played a day in the major leagues. The 52nd player turned out to be Carl Crawford, a star with Tampa. The 68th player was John Lackey, who just signed for a king's ransom with Boston. The 89th player was Canadian Justin Morneau, a former MVP. And the 402nd player taken was a kid named Albert Pujols. Wonder what ever happened to him?
"Certainly you're going to make mistakes," Anthopoulos said. "You're not going to hit on all of them. If you hit on two of 10 high-ceiling, high-impact guys, I'd rather have those two than five solid, average big-league players because I feel like those are the players we can get in trades, and in free agency."
Neither is the draft a time to try to get cute, ignoring, say, a shortstop because you already have a good one at the big-league level.
It's tough, frustrating, time-consuming and it's also the Jays' best hope to get to where they want to be.
KEN.FIDLIN@SUNMEDIA.CA
