Toronto Blue Jays fire their General Manager

The longest tenured baseball General Manger without a post season trip on his resume was let go today. JP Ricciardi has been fired by the Toronto Blue Jays, and it may be the first signal in a complete overhaul of this under achieving franchise. Ricciardi has been the main guy for the Jays since 2001, and he was never able to return this organization back to the glory of the past. In all reality Ricciardi has done little in his tenure with the Blue Jays.

Maybe that is not exactly fair, as Ricciardi’s teams have generally finished with a winning record. The real problem, is this team has never caught up to the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox, and now have even fallen behind the Tampa Bay Rays. Sure they play in a tough division, but with the amount of payroll dollars this team has spent they should have been more competitive.

Ricciardi kind of got dealt a bad hand over the past year and a half. With a slumping economy, and falling attendance the Jays were forced to begin to cut their payroll. So Ricciardi went out looking for a deal for star pitcher Roy Halladay. Ricciardi’s asking price for the pitcher was so high that no deal could be completed, that may have been the straw the broke the camels back.

In the end Ricciardi’s record as GM of the Blue Jays is 646 and 649. While that isn’t horrible this team never won their own division or qualified for the American League Wild Card. In the end the Jays missed out on a lot of post season revenue, and that is why a change was needed.