[Griever20]

One day earlier – February 28th, 2012
Toronto Blue Jays Main Meeting Room

There was stunned silence after the officials from MLB and MLBPA left the meeting room, having explained the new Blue Jays brain trust the sanctions and the way the next 30 days are going to go. Assistant GM(Baseball) Andy Maurer sat there, mulling over his papers. He worked for the Cardinals before and caught our eye with his revolutionary takes on minor league baseball and development… that the Cardinals didn’t like.

Scouting director Sam Grant already started typing in his laptop, opening several documents and the internal scouting database as if he was plotting his move… but looked distressed nonetheless. Our new manager, Nick Bannister, a 36-year old former college coach that we picked for his ability to develop young players, looked unfazed on the outside, like he usually does… but the twitching of his hands told me… he was probably asking himself… what the hell did I get into.

Assistant GM(Business) Michelle Wilke, a good colleague from Rogers Communications and my personal assistant and (sometimes) babysitter sat beside me, and wrote on a piece of paper to me. “Let’s drop the next bomb, shall we?”. She was right.

“Ok, now we have to set up the next 30 days. Sam, you have the list of available free agents that we talked about ready? One list that are players that you deemed very good, but unobtainable, one list of players that are obtainable and good enough to play on a 100-loss team. Please, hand that list over to Andy. Andy, I want you to contact all of them. Tell them, we want them. MLB is going to pay this year’s salary. The big guys, especially V-Mart and Pineda are represented by everybody’s favourite Scott Boras. Tell him this, when you talk to him. Legal got that one covered, but keep it for yourselves. No leaks.” Michelle then handed Andy Maurer a piece of paper that he read… and fel into stunned silence.

Our Director of Farm and partner in crime of Andy Maurer, Tom Scannell leaned over and asked, “I assume we need to fill out the major league roster with kids from the minors, and that we need to be ready for new arrivals. I’ll give you a list of players that you can run out there that will not embarrass us, and whose development won’t be crucial for the future. We started to hand out releases to older players as we talked last week. Shall we stop that?” – “No,” I quickly answered. “We stay our course. The international amateurs that we scoop up from the other teams shall fill out our system from the bottom, and we still can sign minor league free agents. And thank you for the list of players, we will need them very soon.”

Sam Grant decided now to speak up. “Filling up is one thing, getting ‘rid’ is another. The rest of the league is going to get bat **** crazy when this gets released and will want to trade with us, getting basically free players. We need this to go right.” – Michelle nodded and answered right away. “We will, and on our turf. I will rent a small convention hall near Dunedin and invite all GM’s that want to do business with us for the 15th and 16th of March. That is the place where the trades will go down. No other way, no endless phone calls. Our turf, our rules. They come by, or they let it be.”

“We have to get the maximum out of this,” I remarked sternly. “If we can get a prospect haul that can shape this team for the next 15 years, and add some talent via the draft and the international players, we may get some success and change the outlook of this. I got the commitment by Rogers Communications to go above the old budget constraints to extend players that we want to keep. We have to find those guys. Those next 30 days will be crucial. Let’s not mess it up.”