Good news for some kids, if not Blue Jay fans

The good news is that there’s another big cheque coming to the Jim Proudfoot Corner of the Star’s Santa Claus Fund, courtesy of Paul Beeston.

More than a year ago, when he was named interim president of the Blue Jays, he vowed – and repeatedly – that he would be out of the job by Christmas. This did not sound right and I immediately bet him $500, payable to the paper’s Christmas charity for children, that he would still be in the job after his initial deadline. He paid up, and generously, and sometime after that, as his self-imposed deadline kept extending further outward, we went double or nothing for this year.

So now comes the word, which seemed increasingly more likely as time went on and Rogers kept begging him to stick around, that Beeston will indeed stay on as president and CEO of both the Blue Jays and the Rogers Centre. They say a three-year term, but let’s stop believing that he will ever set a date for the end of this particular run.

He has this business in his blood and the deeper he got into it, the more hollow sounding his vows to get out once he found the right man. I ultimately thought he would aim for his golf handicap over the daily trials and tribulations of a struggling team in a marketplace that has turned sideways, if not turned it back outright, on baseball. But such was not the case.

For the past year, while protesting that he was deep into the search for his replacement, Beeston has acted as if he was in it for the long run rather than the short haul, totally restructuring the business end of an organization. Because he has Rogers’ ears, or most of them, on this – plus a salary commitment of $120 million any time they need it and a chance for more – he caused the baseball end to start getting itself sorted out, too.

It was Beeston, always anxious to keep Canadians on the fast-track management path, who pulled the trigger on J.P. Ricciardi and installed Alex Anthopoulos in that job, lest the team lose Anthopoulos to one of the other clubs that had called asking about his availability.

Since he got the job, Anthopoulos has been hiring scouts and advisors – Mel Didier and Mel Queen, two more blasts from the past, joined today – and it simply didn’t make sense any more to assume the new GM was going to do all this rebuilding when a new president was going to come in on top of him and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’’

So Anthopoulos is Beeston’s guy and so, too, is Cito Gaston, who had one more year to go on his contract.

Beeston and Anthopoulos spent last Thursday having dinner with Roy Halladay and his wife in Florida, where Halladay has a winter home. Halladay holds the immediate key to the future of the team; if he wants out, Anthopoulos has a lot more on his plate than he first suspected. So, too, does the new – make that old – president and CEO, the one who couldn’t stay away. Good news for some kids at Christmas, at least.

Comments

[Geirge Pengilley]

I like the sound of this, could it be Gillick is not far behind in joining the Jays. Lets hope so.

[HugoMonster]

Wow this is very puzzling.The Cito signing makes little to no sense to me except a reward for something he did almost 20 years ago. Very strange – very strange indeed and for me huge step in the wrong direction as this clearly is a stance to stay the course and not be progressive. The chances of Halladay being resigned are now next to zero, and for 2010 the crowds could be at an all-time low since the move to the SkyDome.

[Hugh Grant]

Cito and Beeston are two class acts...AND the only people on board with the knowledge/experience to guide the Jays back into the playoffs. It is important that the ownership backs them strongly.

At the start of last season this experienced partnership started to pay dividends, until backroom squabbles rocked the boat. Success requires that all the management are on the same page. Gaston must be the boss regarding the day to day team affairs, strategy on the field and motivation. Others should not be allowed to get involved, unless through Cito. Happily Beeston runs things that way...but in the recent past that was often not the case.

Hopefully Beeston has now removed the sources of these difficulties, and it is onwards and upwards for The Jays!

[ratboy]

The same old same old. Absolutely stunning, that a somewhat Flakier version of Paul Beeston has signed himself as the new old CEO and already has managed to alienate most of the Jays' faithful. The Anthopoulos deal is a move that I could never condone and understand less. Bringing back Gaston is just stupid. This club, unlike the 92-93 version, does not have the ability to overcome Cito's many shortcomings, the very same ones that he hit fans and players alike over the head with this past season. Beeston is making decisions with his heart and definately not with his head.

I don't know whether or not Anthopoulos will make a good GM or not and with his resume reading more as an indictment for termination, this is not the time nor the place to find out. There is no way that Juan Pedro's influence won't rear its' ugly head as that is the only thing on AA's resume that has any significance for him in relation to becoming a GM.

We had to spend one horrible summer watching Beeston try very hard at not trying to do what he was hired to do. Finally the little devil on his shoulder, aka his ego, won out. Was it worth the torture that fans were left to endure by being left alone to stew and ferment as no one from the organization would say anything about the future of the franchise.

Then came Nadir Mohamed a spokeman from Rogers, who sent chills down our spines by propping up Ricciardi as a great leader in the organization. Of course, he had us believing that JP would be back to finish out the two year extension that he received for a job well done. It turns out that things were worse than we thought as it would be a clone of JP's signing on for multiple years no doubt, that being Alex Anthopoulos, who would replace JP in our nightmares. This franchise has become the Maple Leafs of the last four plus decades. The Jays have becomed mired in trying to regain the past, a system of management that never works. Their incomprehensible refusal to sign those experienced for the positions that needed to be filled, will yet again come back to haunt them.