Ricciardi gets fired

Not a surprise. Even if he had made the Jays more competitive with the Sox and Yankees, his utter inability to communicate with people, including the press and his underlings should have doomed him. When J.P. started, he had a good team of people around him, including our buddy Keith Law. Slowly but surely he began to alienate and drive away people like Law and others within the organization. In the past few years he has routinely thrown Jays’ players and personnel under the bus as the team came crashing down around him.

People will cite the Yankees and Red Sox as the Jays’ biggest hurdle, but the fact of the matter is that the Jays are worse off in 2009 on their own terms than they were in 2001 when Ricciardi was hired.


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Brian
14 years ago

All these teams firing their managers and general managers.  As a Met fan my jealousy knows no bounds.

Chris H.
14 years ago

As a Cub fan, I partially agree—I’m ready for the Jim Hendry era to end.  But the thought of ending up with J.P. gives me the shakes…

Brandon Isleib
14 years ago

Has it really been since 2001?  I was in high school then and now I’m just out of graduate school.  And my future looks much, much brighter than J.P.‘s, not because my resume is all that but because I have no track record of destroying once-proud franchises.

I’m a Red Sox fan, but I’m a fan of competent organizations more than that.  Way to get the stench off, Toronto.  I wonder if attendance will increase solely to watch the non-J.P.‘d Jays.

DieHardBronxBomberfan
14 years ago
Tim
14 years ago

I have no idea how someone could think JP ‘destroyed’ the Jays.  Is he a great GM?  No, but at worst, he did a decent job in Toronto and left them with a good, young core of players.  Any new GM is going to build off of guys like Hill, Lind, Snider, Marcum, Romero, and maybe some other guys.

The Jays aren’t some organization in tatters, they’re a relatively good team that’s had some awful luck this season.  They aren’t in great shape, but they could be contenders pretty soon if things go their way.

He’ll get some GM job in a few years, take that team to the playoffs, and Blue Jays fans will whine about him not being able to do that in Toronto, even though his new team could very well be weaker than some of his Jays teams.

Pete Toms
14 years ago

@ Alan – one Toronto writer mentioned the TB factor.  This brings attention to a bigger problem in Toronto, they are cheapskates in the draft – in an era where the draft has never been more important.

Pete Toms
14 years ago

What Rogers Communications plans are for the Blue Jays is vastly more important than who the GM is.

Ricciardi has been bashed a lot for bad contracts – Wells (understood), Rios (at least he got rid of him), Thomas, Koskie, Ryan and the opt out years for Burnett.  But Toronto has to overpay for free agents.  Why play for a team that has little chance of qualifying for the playoffs?  Free agents understand that the chances of Toronto finishing with a better record than New York AND Boston are remote.

This franchise is in deep trouble.

Alan
14 years ago

I wonder to what extent the Rays’ success also helped spell doom for J.P. Andy Friedman takes over a laughingstock franchise and accomplishes in three years what Ricciardi couldn’t do in eight, and with a payroll about half the size. Fans can buy into the myth that Friedman did little but inherit a burgeoning farm system, but odds are Toronto’s ownership knows better.

Richard Dansky
14 years ago

Bottom line, the franchise didn’t get any better while Ricciardi was running it. There were good moves, there were bad moves, but in the end the net result on the field was zero. The Jays were hovering around third when he got there; they’re hovering around third now. His job was to make them better and he didn’t.