The Toronto Blue Jays and the Dangerous Joys of Going for It

On Monday, David Price threw eight innings of one-run ball, retiring 15 straight Minnesota Twins to end the outing. That, in and of itself, is not surprising: Price has dominated the Twins throughout his outstanding career in the majors, now in its eighth year, and he's treated many teams roughly as rudely during that time. What is notable is that Price did it in Toronto, in a Blue Jays jersey, and with Troy Tulowitzki playing shortstop behind him.

Acquiring Price and Tulowitzki are stunning moves individually, let alone for a team that was just 51-51 at the time and looking up at the Orioles and the Yankees in the standings. But getting both together? It's never been done before. Name one other team that has acquired David Price and Troy Tulowitzki. That's right, you can't! In two days, the Toronto front office took a mediocre team with a destructive offense and a self-destructive pitching staff and turned it into arguably the most interesting team in baseball. The Blue Jays are interesting because going for it is interesting, because abandoning pretense is interesting. With Price and Tulowitzki, the Jays are virtually screaming, "NOW, BITCHES!" in the sincerest Dave Chappelle voice you've ever heard.

For the most part, MLB teams aim to strike a balance between the future and the present. Teams don't trade their prospects for stars, because they'll need those prospects to be cheap, productive players in years to come. They don't trade all their productive big-league players for prospects, because they want to win games today. The best teams can balance those two goals, but most teams aren't the best teams, which means they fall off the balance beam in some gnarly way as often as not.

Being the team that wins on the field with a great major league roster and a great farm system is the holy hand grenade of Antioch: it's beautiful and perfect but any second now it's going to explode and blow your face off. A great team and a strong farm system don't appear to be contradicting ideals—a front office smart enough to pull together one would seem to be smart enough to manage the other—but for most teams, it's one or the other. In dealing prospects for Price and Tulowitzki, the Blue Jays recognized that balancing the future and the present is as difficult and rare as the ability to hit a major league curve ball as well as Troy Tulowitzki. They made a choice, and went up there hacking.

What's more, going for it is fun! Fans have become so conditioned to see teams take the smart, responsible approach: to build through the draft, to develop sensibly with an eye toward blah blah blah. Fuck that. If you can win right now, win right now! The future will be easier to handle no matter how it turns out if the present includes a parade, some gaudy rings, and a few giant gold bottles of champagne.

Going for it is great for Jays fans, who haven't seen the team make the playoffs since Kurt Cobain was still recording hits. There are Blue Jays fans old enough to vote who were not alive to see their team make the playoffs. It's great to see the Jays decide that now is the time to rectify the situation and who gives a crap about anything else, let's get this done right now. Good for them, good for the fans who hunger for this, and good for baseball to see a front office with a damn pulse for once.

Conversely, if this all goes bad, hell, that's wonderful too! It's not wonderful for exactly the same group of people, of course. A Venn diagram of who enjoys which possible ending for the Jays this season wouldn't have much overlap, but the circles would be pretty similar in size! Either way, it's more interesting than watching teams nibble and nudge themselves along the status quo.

The Jays are hardly perfect, of course, even with Tulowitzki and Price. There's a reason why they were a .500, third-place team before adding two of the best players in baseball. Toronto's pitching still mostly sucks, and, as Dave Cameron pointed out on FanGraphs, their almost entirely right-handed lineup is susceptible to right-handed pitching, which could be a problem in the playoffs and also many other times. But again, if we reach the point where we're discussing playoff match-ups, the Jays have already won.

Any team that hops in a car, points it toward the playoffs, and screams, "GO!" until their voices fail is adding something valuable to the baseball season. This is what the Blue Jays are doing. By trading their prospects and bringing in Tulowitzki and Price (and Ben Revere and LaTroy Hawkins and Mark Lowe and so on), the Jays are headed full speed for a brick wall with "PLAYOFFS" stenciled on it. How thick is the wall? How heavy and fast is the car? Will they break through? Will the wall stop them cold? We won't know until just after impact, but we might as well give them credit for gunning it either way.