Fairly Deal Stanton

For a few years there, it really seemed like baseball was fun again. Of course, locally that was because the Blue Jays were finally competitive, but even outside of that, things seemed different. The Royals win in a small market with a hard-working team. The Cubs finally ended their century-long drought, thanks to a team of rising stars. Then the Astros' clever rebuilding finally paid off. Even hateable over-spenders like the Yankees and Dodgers succeeded with likeable young talented players that were easy to root for.

But then with this Giancarlo Stanton trade, it was like bad baseball reasserting itself. If you're not familiar with it, here's what happened:

• New owners Bruce Sherman and Derek Jeter bought a team they couldn't really afford, going deeply in debt
• Through either incompetence, or a desperation to get rid of the previous, widely-hated, owner, the league approved the sale anyway.
• Because of the debt, the new owners couldn't afford the salary of Stanton, the team's star.
• Because his rich contract included a no-trade clause, Stanton could veto any trade destination, and he demanded that the only team he'd go to would be the Yankees.
• Bargaining from a position of extreme weakness in which everyone knew they had to make a trade and it had to be with the Yankees, the Marlins hardly got anything in return.
• rather than try to win over the fans, co-owner/spokesperson Jeter has gone into hiding, not even showing up for the recent winter meetings.

It's hard to imagine one story having a bigger collection of bad memories from the last twenty years. At least without mentioning steroids. Look at what it's done:

• the Yankees are back to being the Evil Empire.
• one of the game's biggest stars has been revealed as a Kevin-Durant-type looking for a shortcut to a championship
• widely-loved superstar Jeter trashed his reputation in one move
• a team that was already having attendance problems has had the third firesale of its brief existence, and the second time they've done that without any success first.

Now the trade is having cascading effects elsewhere. Fellow denizens of the AL east, the Tampa Bay Rays, had been the poster child for competitive small-market teams, but they traded their best player, Evan Longoria. Since he was signed to a team-friendly contact, trading him would seem to be the ultimate sign of giving up for the near future.

I'm worried about where the Jays are going in all this. Just before the Stanton trade, officials from Rogers - the team's owners - admitted they were considering selling the team. Combine these two stories, and one worries that not only are we going back to a late-nineties where our division rivals outspent us year-in, year-out, but we might even be headed down the same road as the Marlins. Thought it's existence, the Jays have always been owned by corporations (first Labatt's, then Rogers.) That's unusual though; traditionally, baseball teams have been owned by individuals. And now Major League Baseball has said that is the only way it will be in the future: they'll only approve individuals as owners, rather than corporations. That has people wondering, how many people in Canada could afford the $1 billion+ cost of the Blue Jays.

So now I'm worried that we're starting the same story, with the sale to someone who can't really afford the team, who'll have to turn it into a low budget, hope-the-prospects-are-good-eventually bottom-dweller. Going into this offseason, there was talk of trading Josh Donaldson to the Cardinals, and I had this whole argument I was going to put into a post about why that would be sending the wrong message, but now people are treating it like a foregone conclusion that unless the team gets off to a tremendous start, he's gone and the rebuilding begins.

It seems to me that the media is seeing things differently than the rest of us. Reporters are a lot more willing to accept the idea that the Jays will be rebuilding. I think it comes down to a subtlety of how the last few years of competitiveness have been perceived. For most of us fans, it wasn't just, "Yay, we're winning!" it was, "Yay, things are back to normal!" We weren't just successful, we felt like a real team again. The idea that we could be relegated back to being a have-not in perpetual rebuilding will be hard to take, even if brief periods of success are guaranteed.