But really, the Jays competitveness this year have a lot to do with Marcos Scutaro’s sudden break out. is that even repeatable? or Aaron Hill’s 35 HR pace? or Scott Rolen’s health? lost in the mix of the Jays is that their infield have gotten some absurdly unexpected production from their infield. While I expect Rios to bounce back some, Vernon Wells have basically played at a 3 year pace of replacement level baseball. which is amazing since he’s only getting paid like a inner circle hall of famer .

They COULD contend next year. but it would need to be a perfect storm of all their succesful guys this year repeating and their disappointment / injuries all bounce back (Wells / Rios / McGowan etc) and Travis Snider lights it up.

As for Wells, it turned out even worse than expected but really, anytime you have a contract that’s projected to worht a negative 20 million per year for 5 year. it is enough of a reason to fire even a Yankee GM. let alone a smaller market one.

JP have done some nice things. he drafted better than most people give him credit for . the Jays player development is underrated. but he simply doesn’t have the margin of error (who does really) for a Vernon Wells size problem.

I certainly think the Indians gotten the low end of expected value for Lee (but not absurdly off the charts low, just that they probably like Knapp a lot more than the average outcome you’d expect from a 18 year old top pitching prospect in A ball.) but that doesn’t mean the Jays shouldn’t try to find something that piece together better .

My general logic is that the Jays are in a division where they have 2 juggernauts with vastly more resource. and two other teams that are fairly well runed with similar resource to them. to win in such prohibitive circumstances they can’t look for average outcomes. they gotta gamble on the lottos and hope they strike some serious jackpot.

Every team has a certain fixed pool of picks; anything which requires the use of additional draft picks is a form of opportunity cost.

Average out the results of draft picks and you’ll get a certain average number of wins which a team ought to be producing from their farm system per season, in the form of “free” WAR for players with less than 3 years’ service time and discounted WAR for players in years 3-6.

A check on whether this number of wins is correct is to see if a team with an average payroll, buying free agents at average prices, and adding in that average number of free wins, would finish with about 81 wins.

The average team spends, IIRC, about $85M a season, but $10M of that is mandated (25 players, $400K minimum salary). The other $75M buys wins at $4-4.5M a pop, i.e. around 17-19 wins above replacement. Since a replacement level team would win about 50 games, and a team with an average payroll and no draft picks would win 67-69, I hypothesize that an average farm system should produce in the neighborhood of 12-14 wins above replacement per season.