Unfortunately for Ben, his biggest, most expensive acquisitions, Porcello, Hanley, Panda and Castillo, basically underperformed throughout the whole season except for a few good stretches.
The team has invested about 350 million in those 4 players.
The only red flags I see are his overall numbers since he moved to KC. Some very rocky outings that puffed up his ERA.
That and his reported asking price of 8 years, 240 million.
But it's all in the hands of Dombro and JH.
Interesting piece by Verducci on Price tipping his pitches vs. the Royals. Jays commentator Gregg Zaun also made note of the at-bat by Gordon in Game 2 where he laid off all of Price's off-speed pitches. Zaun thought it was signals being stolen.
http://www.si.com/mlb/2015/10/24/royals-blue-jays-alcs-clinch-pennant
The question of whether Ben will get another job takes me back to when Francona was fired and there were people who thought he would have a hard time getting another manager job.
Sanchez was the Jays setup man by the end of the season and was very good in that role with a 2.39 ERA and an .87 WHIP. But the Jays were vulnerable at the back end of the pen, that's for sure.
Gibbons taking out Price there can be argued either way. I don't think it was a flat-out bonehead move by any means. Yost bringing in Madson was a different story. That was a bad move that he got away with.
I'm really not that interested at this point, because I don't care very much about either team. I was hoping for the Jays and the Cubs.
But I'll probably watch some of the Series.
We hear this a lot about the 2004 ALCS - the Yankees ran out of pitching, and all they had left was Kevin Brown.
What is sometimes overlooked is that the Sox starter for Game 7, D-Lowe, had a 5.42 ERA that year (compared to 4.09 for Brown) and was originally left out of the postseason rotation. We were desperate too. D-Lowe came up huge when least expected.
I would have removed Price there too. In the regular season Rios has hit 382/432/735 against Price in 37 PA's. In an earlier at-bat in last night's game he hit a foul ball that was almost a home run and then hit a bullet up the middle for a single.
I know exactly what you're saying. But it was anticlimactic in a good way. And I have to confess that until we got the final out in Game 4 I was still being tormented by thoughts that we might find a way not to win it.