8/3/09

The Roy Halladay Situation

The media has been piling on J.P. Ricciardi over his handling of the Roy Halladay trade deadline situation. And while I agree that it was unfair that Doc had to go through what seemed like months of 'will he or won't he be traded', I have to wonder how much of that was the fault of the media. They're the ones who took what J.P. had been saying before the season started ("We probably won't trade him unless we're blown away by an offer") and ran it into the ground. Obviously, looking for a story, they started frothing at the mouth and took an opportunity to dream up trade scenarios with half the teams in baseball and when none of those teams were willing to cough up fair value (or, at least, what J.P. decided was fair value) they decided to blame the whole mess on the GM, because God forbid he make them look stupid after basically every one of them said that Doc was as good as gone.

On top of that, all of this has overshadowed the seemingly great Scott Rolen trade that was made with the Reds (Baseball Prospectus called it 'The Worst Deadline Deal'). Getting 2 potential closers for an injury prone, soon-to-be 35-year old 3B could be a steal but no one is paying any attention to that when listing the Jays among their 'Losers' at the trade deadline.

Anyway, back on topic, I just don't get the thought process that somehow makes not trading your best player just for the sake of trading him bad for your team and you have to love the media ignoring their role in how public it all was.

3 comments:

Navin Vaswani (@eyebleaf) said...

Totally agree with you, bro. The media made this a much, much bigger story than it should have been. Ricciardi was actually pretty consistent, for once in his life.

Navin Vaswani (@eyebleaf) said...

And I love Doc, more than anyone probably, but this whole "how could they treat Halladay like this?" stuff is complete bullshit.

He's a pro athlete who makes a millions of fucking dollars. At the end of the day, it's a good damn business. If this is the price that Doc has to pay to be one of the best pitchers in baseball, I think it's a price he'd gladly play.

What a bunch of bullshit. If one more "fan" tells me that the Jays treated Doc horribly by having him go through this "ordeal," I'm going to lose my shit.

Bitey said...

I agree with you to an extent, stuff like press conferences and questions in the clubhouse come with the territory.

I mostly just meant it was unfair the way his stellar season was being ignored and everything was "COULD BE MIGHT BE HIS FINAL START WITH THE BLUE JAYS" every 5 days.