1:50 PM Eastern

The Blue Jays began the rehabilitation of their image to the fanbase this morning with the firing of J.P. Ricciardi.  According to the official news release, J.P. “will be leaving his position ….. effective immediately”, which sounds a lot nicer than “Ricciardi was terminated”  or “Ricciardi was let go” or “Ricciardi had to be canned to satisfy the bloodlust of a fanbase that seems to be slipping away”.  Alex Anthopoulos takes over, I’m assuming on an interim basis since the presidency of the team is still up for grabs.

The move isn’t a surprising one, but the timing is.  There’s no question in my mind that the announcement was moved up about 48 hours because of the massive crapstorm that began with Ken Rosenthal’s “Player Mutiny” story that came out yesterday.  It’s not so much that interim President Paul Beeston wanted to deflect attention away from the Cito story, I don’t think, as it is that Rosenthal has gotten a lot of Blue Jays scoops over the past few years and it’s not unreasonable to believe that J.P. himself may well have been the leak.

As I mentioned yesterday (either in the comments section or on The JaysTalk, I can’t remember which – maybe both), I had a really hard time listening to what turned out to be J.P.’s final interview as the Jays’ G.M., on the Fan’s bullpen yesterday.  He tried his best to distance himself from the whole Cito story, to say the right things, to not throw anyone under the bus.  I didn’t believe most of what he said, which is rare for me.

So now the Blue Jays have their fifth General Manager in club history, following Pete Bavasi (54-108, .335 – 1 manager), Pat Gillick (1352-1297, .510 – 5 managers), Gord Ash (541-575, .485 – 4 managers) and Ricciardi (642-661, .493 – 4 managers).  Gillick’s teams won five division titles, two pennants and two World Series.  Nobody else’s ever made the playoffs.

When Ricciardi was hired, he immediately made several unpopular moves with an eye to the long-term, including trading away fan favourites Alex Gonzalez and Paul Quantrill for salary relief and cutting a swath through the scouting department.  The first trade he ever made brought in Eric Hinske and Justin Miller for Billy Koch.  Hinske won the A.L. rookie of the year but never fulfilled that early promise, mostly because of a broken hand in Spring Training the next year – though most seem to believe that he ate his way out of a good career.

I’m not going to go over J.P.’s entire C.V. here, his moves have been debated in this space ever since there’s been a this space.  A lot of the things for which he takes the most heat were out of his control (low-balling Carlos Delgado, signing Vernon Wells to that monster deal, Russ Adams forgetting how to throw a baseball), a lot of his very good moves get ignored by the bloodthirsty masses (trading Shannon Stewart for Ted Lilly, via Bobby Kielty; picking up Justin Speier for Mark Hendrickson; getting Marco Scutaro, John McDonald, Brian Tallet and Cory Lidle for basically nothing; picking up Scott Downs on waivers).

And, of course, there’s the revisionist history concerning guys like Chris Carpenter.

The main problem, I think, is that the little things that J.P. did tended to work out very well (though there are still complaints about the Ohka/Zambrano/Thomson thing, which I’ll never understand), and the big moves that J.P. made have tended not to work out at all.

For every early Vernon Wells contract, there was an Eric Hinske contract.  For every Aaron Hill contract, there was an Alex Rios contract.  For every cheap 30-save-guy-acquired-for-a-malcontent-who-had-been-designated-for-assignment, there was a guy who wound up making $626,667 per save.  Rarely was the fact that Ricciardi got Roy Halladay to forgo free agency TWICE ever mentioned.

Those “bad” moves, coupled with the fact that J.P. was occasionally his own worst enemy when a microphone was put in front of him, led to him becoming pretty much Satan incarnate in the eyes of a great many fans.

There was no question that he had to go.  It’s just too bad it came to that.

J.P.’s legacy will become more clear over the course of the next decade.  Just as his detractors often pointed to Halladay, Dustin McGowan, Wells and Rios as the great players that J.P. inherited (you really don’t hear much about that now, do you?), we will see how Ricciardi draft picks such as Aaron Hill, Adam Lind, Travis Snider, Shaun Marcum, Jesse Litsch, Ricky Romero, Brett Cecil, Marc Rzepczynski et al wind up doing – and that “et al” is going to include some pretty terrific players, too.

When you crunch the numbers, though, the thing that stands out the most is that over eight seasons, Ricciardi built a team that finished higher than third place only once.  The Jays’ biggest opportunity to make the playoffs came last season, when they had the best pitching and defense in the major leagues but wasted almost 650 plate appearances on Frank Thomas, Shannon Stewart, Brad Wilkerson and Kevin Mench – the best of whom, believe it or not, was Mench.

This year was supposed to be a step back in order to compete in 2010, mostly because of the injuries to Marcum and McGowan, but somewhere along the way that  competitive 2010 got derailed – mostly because of the failings of B.J. Ryan and Alex Rios, the struggles of Vernon Wells, Travis Snider, David Purcey and Casey Janssen, and the injuries to Jesse Litsch and (again) McGowan.

Along the way, though, Adam Lind and Aaron Hill blossomed, the Jays found they had something in Romero – who had been thought of as a complete bust prior to this season, Rzepczynski showed that he’s got a chance to really be something and the Jays picked up a terrific young arm in Zack Stewart for malcontent Scott Rolen.  They also rid themselves of Rios’ contract.  I’d say they might have found something in Randy Ruiz, too, but evidently he hits too many home runs to get into the line-up on a regular basis.

There is definitely hope for the future, but so many things are still up in the air until we find out who the new President is going to be.  Will the new boss keep the newly-retitled Alexander Anthopoulos as his G.M. or bring in his own guy?  Will ownership up the payroll to try to compete for a title in 2010, or move more fully into the rebuild process, making the new G.M.’s first job the trade of Roy Halladay?  Hopefully all of that will be revealed to us relatively quickly.

At least for now, for the first time in a long time, the majority of Blue Jays fans are really, really happy.

Rational, reasonable comments are always welcome!

1:15 PM Eastern

In a manner of speaking, that is.

Ken Rosenthal’s story on foxsports.com and Shi Davidi’s more-detailed article (http://www.fan590.com/news/sports/more.jsp?content=s023971627) both told the tale of the Blue Jays’ mutinous feelings towards their skipper.

It’s all true.

I couldn’t do anything with the story because no one would agree to go on the record with me, but never in the time that I’ve been covering this team have I seen clubhouse discontent like this.  During the last homestand, I spoke to over a dozen people on the team, several of whom called me over in hushed tones to talk about their frustration with the skipper.

I’m not going to name any names, because nobody wanted to go on the record, but it’s widespread across the entire ballclub.  Pitchers and position players, high-profile, mid-profile and low-profile.  Cito Gaston has completely lost the clubhouse.

How did this happen?  The biggest complaint was Gaston’s  overwhelming negativity, which really surprised me.  I had always thought that Cito’s greatest strength was his ability to get guys excited about playing for him.  I thought that he knew how to massage egos, how to get everyone on the same page and how to get his players to accept their role happily.  Many times I’ve said that I thought Cito was baseball’s best manager from the end of one game to the beginning of the next – meaning that the positive things he did in the clubhouse outweighed the questionable things he did on the field.  That’s certainly not the case anymore.

I’m told that he actually said to his players that there wasn’t a single good player on the team.

The on-field stuff didn’t help, either.  Refusing to move Alex Rios and Vernon Wells out of the 3-4 holes for half the season when they were obviously struggling, pitching Jesse Carlson as though he had a bionic arm, platooning Travis Snider and Lyle Overbay with Jose Bautista and Kevin Millar but almost never pinch-hitting when the opposition brought in an opposite-handed pitcher, ignoring Randy Ruiz.  All that and more.

I have pointed out things about which I have disagreed with Cito on a regular basis this season, and there’s been a lot of fuel for that fire.  So much so that I’ve been accused of being far too hard on him.  Look, the truth is that tactically, Cito is a laissez-faire guy on offense.  Put nine guys in the line-up and leave them there.  It worked for him from 1989-1993 and it worked for the last 2/3 of last season and the first third of this season, but even early this year, there were head-shaking missteps.

I know that, to some, Cito Gaston walks on water and that the fact that he managed the team to two World Series titles means that he can do no wrong, but he’s not the right manager for this team and the players know it.

And yet, even with all this, the Blue Jays are going to hit and possibly exceed the win total that was predicted for them in Las Vegas at the beginning of this season (I think it was 75 or 76).

Who is at fault most for this disappointing season?  Without question, it’s the players.  Some of them shouldn’t have been in the majors and performed admirably under the circumstances, some should have performed far better than they did and have no excuses.  Of course, some far outperformed expectations or were as great as we’re used to them being.  Others, though, may well have flourished with a different hand guiding them.

Does this team make the playoffs if Cito Gaston isn’t the manager?  Not even a little.

Did Cito Gaston consistently put the right players in the right spots to give them the best chance to succeed on a regular basis?  No.  That’s the main reason he lost the clubhouse and that’s the main reason the Jays would be best-suited to bring someone else in to run the show next season.

Will it happen?  I don’t know.  Some of it depends on how big this story gets and on who, if anyone, will be willing to go on the record to talk about what’s gone on.  One would think that a new President would bring in a new General Manager who would then bring in his own Manager, but when the skipper is someone of the stature of Cito Gaston, that can be tough to do.  J.P. Ricciardi alienated a lot of people right from the get-go with some of the moves he made – would a new G.M. risk doing the same thing by firing Cito as one of his first moves?

The best thing that could come of all this would be for Cito to say “If they don’t want me, they can find someone else and see if he can do better” and retire to a cushy job as an assistant to the President and community ambassador.  He’s well-loved in this city, for good reason, and nothing will change that.

I won’t blame Cito one bit if his answer to these stories is to completely dismiss them because no one has put his name to any comments, but he has to know what the situation is in that clubhouse, and it’s toxic.  When it gets to the point that the players are actually joking about the moves that the manager is making, you’ve got a major issue on your hands.

Oh – here’s Wednesday night’s edition of The JaysTalk, for your listening pleasure:

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Rational, reasonable comments are always welcome, I’ll get to them during the game tonight.