Posted by Bill Baer on Saturday, October 3, 2009 at 8:42 pm

Did you hear? J.P. Ricciardi was relieved of his duties as general manager of the Toronto Blue Jays. Assistant GM Alex Anthopoulos takes Ricciardi’s seat as GM of the franchise, effective immediately.

Under Ricciardi’s watch, the Blue Jays went 642-651 (.497) in the regular season and finished third or worse in seven out of his eight seasons. He has hired and fired three managers, and it’s likely that Cito Gaston, whom J.P. elected to replace John Gibbons last season, will be relieved of his managing duties for the Jays as well.

After a win on May 18, the Jays sat at 27-14, three and a half games ahead in first place in the AL East. They had won seven of their last nine games. Fans in Toronto wondered if this was finally the year the Jays put it all together and earned a post-season berth. Between May 19 and 27, they played nine games and won none of them. When they finally won a game on the 29th, they had fallen to 1.5 games behind in third place.

The Jays never recovered. After losing an inter-league series finale in Philadelphia on June 28, they were six games behind in fourth place, and in fourth place for good. In July and August, they lost 32 of 50 games, good for a winning percentage of .360. For comparison, the Washington Nationals have a .356 winning percentage on the season. Indeed, for two whole months, the Jays were no better than the lowly Nationals.

Fans in Toronto will look back on the Ricciardi era rife with dissatisfaction. With examples abound, we will simply look back on the top-three blunders of the Ricciardi regime — for the sake of brevity.

3. Talking Smack About Adam Dunn in the summer of 2008

From the National Post in ‘08 are the comments Ricciardi made of the polarizing slugger — then of the Cincinnati Reds — while making an appearance on the radio.

“Do you know the guy doesn’t really like baseball that much?” Ricciardi  said to the caller. “Do you know the guy doesn’t have a passion to play the game that much? How much do you know about the player?

“There’s a reason why you’re attracted to some players and there’s a reason why you’re not attracted to some players. I don’t think you’d be very happy if we brought Adam Dunn here …

“We’ve done our homework on guys like Adam Dunn and there’s a reason why we don’t want Adam Dunn. I don’t want to get into specifics.”

Ricciardi, of course, is a disciple of Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane, so he is well-versed in discerning a player’s value in ways other than by looking at his batting average and strikeouts. Between 2004-08, Dunn posted an OPS+ of 129 or higher in four out of five seasons. He had hit exactly 40 home runs in four straight seasons from ‘05-08.

It is true that, other than offense, Dunn doesn’t offer much. But the Jays, at the time, were having some awful problems with hitting the baseball and Dunn would have been a boon, no doubt.

But the worst part of Ricciardi’s actions wasn’t that he made unprovable or otherwise statistically-false statements about Dunn; it was that he showed a lot of immaturity for a person in such a prominent position. Simply put, general managers shouldn’t trash players no matter how bad they are on or off the field.

Furthermore, even if the Jays hadn’t slashed their payroll by nearly 20%, it is unlikely that they would have been an attractive target for impact free agents after those statements. They are already behind the eight-ball by being located in Canada with one of the few ballparks that still utilizes Astroturf. Now you want to add a belligerent GM to the mix? Free agents will gladly have their paychecks cut elsewhere.

This incident was the beginning of the end for Ricciardi. The illusion of success for the Jays was no longer strong enough to blind the Toronto fan base to their GM’s incompetence.

2. Failure to trade Roy Halladay in the summer of 2009

From 2008 to ‘09, the Jays slashed nearly $20 million in payroll. The $80.5 million payroll they went into ‘09 with included payments of $14.25 million to Roy Halladay, $7 million to Lyle Overbay, and $6 million to Alex Rios. That is nearly one-third of the entire payroll dedicated to three players, and about 18% invested in Halladay.

There is no doubt that when this season ends, Halladay will be named one of the best pitchers of the decade. He is one of the few for-sure aces left in the game. However, when the Jays hit the skids in July (they went 8-16), it made mounds of financial sense for the Jays to move Halladay to a post-season contender to clear up some cash for the 2010 season.

They were not without potential suitors. Several teams made inquiries to Ricciardi, but the defending World Series champion Philadelphia Phillies pursued Halladay the most. The Phils offered Carlos Carrasco, Jason Donald, Michael Taylor, and J.A. Happ, their #2, 4, 6, and 9 prospects according to Baseball America’s pre-season rankings. Ricciardi turned it down because Kyle Drabek, the Phillies’ most-coveted pitching prospect, was not included. As I detailed at the time, Ricciardi didn’t exactly have a lot of leverage with which to bargain, so his refusal was mind-boggling then just as it is now.

Looking ahead to 2010, here are some noteworthy salaries they are responsible for:

• Roy Halladay: $15.75 million
• Vernon Wells: $12.5 million
• Lyle Overbay: $7 million
• Edwin Encarnacion: $4.75 million
• Scott Downs: $4 million
• Aaron Hill: $4 million

That is $48 million total between six players. That would represent 60% of this season’s payroll. So, unless Ricciardi planned to increase payroll (which is doubtful considering that the Jays saw a decrease in attendance figures), his failure to trade Halladay is one of his biggest blunders. It is a problem that will now hamstring new GM Alex Anthopoulos going into the off-season.

Luckily, the title to this second item does not read “Failure to trade Roy Halladay and Alex Rios…” as Rios is owed $9.7 million in 2010.

1. Awarding Vernon Wells that ludicrous seven-year, $126 million contract in December 2006

As Joe Posnanski noted in a column on August 13, “Don’t tell me that I won’t win the lottery … just look at Vernon Wells’ contract.”

Yes, Wells’ contract is, well, awful. In the first two years of the contract, Wells got paid a grand total of $2 million. Meaning that for the remaining five years, the Jays were on the hook for $124 million, or an average of nearly $25 million per season. By comparison, for the remaining eight years on the contract belonging to Alex Rodriguez, he will make an average of under $26 million.

One can certainly argue that Wells earned that contract with the way he played between the time he started playing regularly in 2002 and when he signed the contract after the ‘06 season. In that span, he had accrued 18 wins above replacement according to FanGraphs, an average of 3.6 per season. Comparatively, Torii Hunter, Jason Bay, David Wright, and Scott Rolen have earned 3.6 WAR this season.

But Wells was 28 when he signed the contract. He would be 36 when the contract expired. Certainly not a smart idea to invest $126 million in a player’s age 28-36 years, one would think.

Between 2007 and ‘09, Wells hit the skids and accrued less than two WAR in all three seasons combined. Yes, combined. Wells was worth less in three full seasons combined than he was worth on average in his five previous seasons.

While one can say, “Who could have seen that coming?” one can also answer, “J.P. Ricciardi”. His job as GM is to effectively evaluate talent and players just don’t go from 6 WAR one year (2006 in Wells’ case) to under 1 WAR the next year randomly. 2007 was also the first year in which Wells’ defense became a liability and it was the start of a three-year trend in that regard. That tends to happen as players get older and deal with increasingly-frequent injury problems.

Wells contract, at this point, is easily the worst in baseball and Anthopoulos will be unable to make it some other team’s problem the way Ricciardi did with Alex Rios. Simply put, the Jays are stuck with the albatross of a contract with Vernon Wells’ name at the bottom. He will turn 31 years old this December 8 and it is reasonable to say that it would take a miracle to get him anywhere close to the level of production he was providing before he signed the contract.