Several months ago, at the close of the 2019 Blue Jays season, I took it upon myself to evaluate the work of the people in charge of the Blue Jays. As a person outside the organization there is only so much information available for me to work from, hence I jokingly referred to them as “completely and utterly made up (but nonetheless accurate!).”

Beginning today, we’re going to reach deep into the past for a new version of the same exercise: a historical performance review of the club’s former general managers.

Each review will begin with brief biographical information, followed by an assessment of their performance as GM in four key areas, a shortlist of their successes, and “opportunities for personal development,” and ending with an overall score.

Here, then, is our completely and utterly made up (but nonetheless accurate and fair!) performance review, for one of the least successful executives in Blue Jays history, former GM Gord Ash.

Employee Information

Name: Gord Ash
Title: General manager
Manager(s): Paul Beeston (1994-1997), Sam Pollock (1997-2000), Paul Godfrey (2000-2001)
Review Date: 05/22/20
Hire date (as GM): 10/14/94
Fire date: 10/02/01

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Bio

Ash was born in Toronto, the son of a TTC bus driver and a keypunch operator. As a teen in the 1960s, he would visit old Maple Leaf Stadium. In 1978 he joined the Blue Jays’ ticket office at the expense of his burgeoning career as a bank teller. His rise within the organization from there was rather meteoric: he became a mail-order clerk before taking charge of the grounds crew, and later, game-day operations. In 1984 he was named the team’s administrator of player personnel. And by 1989 he was named an assistant GM to the legendary Pat Gillick.

Lauded as a negotiator, a listener, and a “decision-maker,” Ash “gradually took on more and more responsibilities,” explained Jim Byers of the Toronto Star in an October 1994 profile. “To the point where he and Gillick have been almost equals for the last while.”

Ash was considered as a possible heir to Gillick’s throne as early as 1987, while Gillick was being wooed by the Dodgers. Ash later became a sought-after executive in his own right, interviewing for the Padres’ top job in 1991. But after being assured that Gillick would eventually step aside, Ash began declining interviews with other organizations.

When the time did arrive for Ash to take over, the transition was less than smooth. In mid-1994 rumours began to circulate that the “retiring” Gillick still might retain significant power with the club after stepping down. In July of that year, Danny Gallagher wrote for the Globe and Mail that just “2-1/2 months before he is due to officially pass on the torch, the club’s brain trust, particularly president Paul Beeston, is still caught up in succession planning because sources say Gillick, himself, may still play a significant role of some sort after all.”

Gallagher added that Ash might be asked to share power with someone who had the scouting or playing background he lacked — potentially Gillick or then-farm director Mel Queen.

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“Ash is considered in some quarters to be utilitarian and frail in player assessment,” Gallagher wrote.

“Player evaluations are not my strong suit,” Ash admitted to Byers in October 1994.

The organization he inherited

Ash was promoted at the end of the 1994 season, amid the uncertainty of a work stoppage that threatened to bleed into 1995. Simultaneously, the Blue Jays’ principal owner, John Labatt Ltd., was being sized up for a hostile takeover by Canadian private equity firm Onex. The threat forced Labatt to seek a white knight new owner. The process led them into the arms of Belgian brewing conglomerate Interbrew, who officially took control of Labatt, and its 90 percent share of the Blue Jays in a $2.7 billion deal on July 26, 1995.

“There hasn’t been time to sit down and discuss the sports ownership situations,” Labatt CEO George Taylor told the Canadian Press, not long after Interbrew’s purchase bid was accepted. “There were a great number of issues to resolve, and the Jays weren’t that high on the priority of things.”

Interbrew had little interest in owning a baseball team, and the possibility of another sale loomed over the Jays throughout Ash’s tenure.

At the end of the 1995 season, instead of staying with the Jays to serve as a high-powered advisor, Gillick bolted to Baltimore to become GM of the Orioles. Two years after that, the influential Paul Beeston would resign as the team’s president to become president of Major League Baseball in New York.

As for the roster Ash inherited in 1995 (and, to be fair, one he helped design), while it still featured many players from the World Series clubs, several of them (including Devon White, Paul Molitor, Roberto Alomar, and Al Leiter) were scheduled to become free agents that fall.

Meanwhile, the Canadian dollar was in the midst of a slow and painful decline that would see it sink to 63 cents U.S. by February 2002. The novelty of the SkyDome was also wearing off on fans just as the team struggled for the first time in over a decade and as newer “retro” parks such as Camden Yards and Cleveland’s Jacobs Field came into fashion. The terms of the Blue Jays’ lease with then building owners SkyDome Corporation were so bad by 1998 that Interbrew – which could amass no more than a 48 percent stake in SkyDome Corporation itself – threatened (quite hilariously) to move the team back to Exhibition Stadium.

Review assessment criteria:

(4 Exceptional, 3 Meets Expectations, 2 Needs Improvement, 1 Poor)

• Attitude: Leadership skills, culture, organizational harmony
• Communication: Accountability, media relations, management of expectations
• Growth: Did the organization progress or regress? Did he learn from his mistakes?
• Productivity: Asset management, transactions, draft record, on-field success

Attitude (2)

On Oct. 2, 2001, the day Ash was fired, club president Paul Godfrey told reporters he felt it was necessary to change the “culture, emotional makeup and attitude of the club.” Partly, it was speculated at the time by Geoff Baker and Mark Zwolinski of the Toronto Star, that this was a dig at the club’s expensive slugger Carlos Delgado.

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The comment could have just as easily been directed at Ash, though.

While Ash had his hands tied in innumerable ways during his Blue Jays tenure, his biggest blunders could be attributed to his own indecision and fecklessness. He is redeemed only somewhat by appearing well-meaning, and because for better or (more often) worse, he genuinely tried every year to bring playoff baseball back to Toronto. He just failed miserably at it. There was no full-scale rebuild in the Ash era, even if maybe there should have been one. Granted, the club’s payroll was slashed from $49.8 million in 1995 to $28.5 million for 1996, hastening the exits of free agents Alomar, White, Molitor and Leiter, but a year later, thanks in no small part to the arrival of Roger Clemens, the payroll was nearly all the way back up to the same level as before.

Despite his own failings, the failings of those he put in positions of authority, and the uncertain ownership situation above him, Ash always tried to put a winner on the field. You’ve got to respect that.

Still, the negatives clearly outweigh the positives on this file. Did Ash comport himself in a manner, and command the kind of respect, necessary to lead a successful organization? No. Did he employ and empower positive, team-first individuals who could point the organization in a winning direction? No.

Did Ash, in his last couple of seasons at the helm, exhibit “periodic signs of paranoia”?

Actually yes! After his firing, in Oct. 2001, Allan Ryan of the Toronto Star wrote that “From time to time, the phone would ring at certain media outlets in the city and it would be Ash wanting to talk about ‘agendas’ to bring down the Jays.”

That seems odd! Also, was he too loyal at times to figures such as Tim Johnson and Dave Stewart? Oh, probably.

But let’s back up and focus on his leadership.

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Early in the 1997 season, Ash wanted to fire manager Cito Gaston, but he didn’t have the political capital within his own organization to do so. Prior to leaving the organization in July of that year, Beeston had protected his longtime friend Gaston, aided by the fact that the club was up for sale and the appetite simply wasn’t there to make such a drastic change, especially given that the expectation that new ownership may soon be in place. The sale saga, however, dragged on throughout the summer and Gaston hung on despite the team on the field spiralling into an underachieving mess.

During the season, Gaston grew particularly frustrated and combative. His relationship with the local media, who he felt had not given him enough credit for his earlier success, had badly deteriorated. In April Gaston caused controversy when during a pregame radio show he said he believed that some of the criticisms of his managerial strategy were racially motivated.

“There’s a couple who continue to take shots at me for no reason at all,” Gaston told the Toronto Sun. “I just wonder if they would take the same shot at me if I was white.”

His infamous apology: “Whatever has been said, whatever has been written, if it has offended someone and it’s unjustly offended them, I apologize. If it hasn’t, then I don’t apologize,” did little to rein in the circus-like atmosphere that would characterize his final season with the club. And his relationship with Ash didn’t seem a whole lot better than the one he had with the media.

“Coming back from the break, the Jays travelled to Boston for the series that included Roger Clemens’s memorable return to Fenway Park, arguably the highlight of the season,” wrote Stephen Brunt of the Globe and Mail in December 1997. “Those games are also remembered for a strange scene in the dugout before the first game began: Ash, delivering a state of the team message to the press, talking about a new attitude, a new way of doing business and then suggesting that everyone talk to Gaston about it. Gaston, sitting at the other end of the same dugout, acting as though it were all news to him, showing open disrespect for his boss.

“Ash says now that the incident was overplayed, that Gaston apologized later and said that he never meant it to come out that way. But anyone who was there knew exactly what he meant, and where it was directed. It was an act of defiance from a manager who knew he was playing out the string, but was bound and determined to do it on his terms. And it was a slight to Ash – the kind of slight it would be hard to imagine a manager directing at, say, Pat Gillick.”

Despite the slight, when Gaston was finally let go in the final week of the ’97 season, Ash gave him a paid one-year sabbatical and offered him the chance to come back as a minor league hitting instructor. Two years later, in November 1999, Gaston would indeed return, but in an even bigger role: as the team’s hitting coach for new manager Buck Martinez. This in spite of the fact that budding star outfielder Shawn Green was no fan of Gaston’s.

If that wasn’t the singular catalyst for Green’s subsequent trade to the Los Angeles Dodgers, it certainly expedited it.

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“I was on the phone with Shawn the day Cito was hired,” former hitting coach Larry Hisle told Richard Griffin of the Toronto Star in November 1999. “He asked me if I knew who the new hitting coach was. I was somewhat shocked, knowing what had taken place (in ’94-95).”

“I think about that a lot,” Hisle said when asked if Ash may not have been aware of what was going on in the clubhouse. “I know Gord was clearly visible a lot my last year (his first as GM). As far as knowing (what went on), it’s possible he didn’t. It depends on who’s giving him the information.”

Granted, because of the ownership situation, blame for the mess that was Gaston’s final season is hard to lay entirely at the feet of Ash. There was also some logic to re-hiring Gaston as hitting coach, both because Martinez lacked managerial experience of his own, and because the two men represented something of a return to the strong, stable, successful Jays of the late ’80s and early ’90s.

The brief but thoroughly embarrassing Tim Johnson era, however, can not be so easily blamed on others.

No, Ash himself didn’t tell lies about serving in Vietnam – and not just banal lies but gruesome lies about actively killing in battle – but he sure missed something during the vetting process that led him to Johnson. He also, as had been the case with Gaston in ’97, completely failed to have a proper handle on the clubhouse, which proved to be the reason Johnson’s lies came undone. Worst of all, Ash naively and vehemently stood by Johnson long after the situation had become untenable, even going as far as accusing reporters of yellow journalism for digging into the details of the Blue Jays’ clubhouse mess. (Yet when the time came in the spring of ’99 for the still-employed Johnson to offer difficult mea culpas in the form of one-on-one interviews, Ash wasn’t in town, leaving some dirty work for assistant GM Dave Stewart.)

“When the team’s former third baseman Ed Sprague said on the record that the players had no respect for Johnson, Ash wrote it off as the grumbling of a disgruntled former employee,” explained Brunt for the Globe in March of 1999.

However, in the wake of Sprague’s comment, Johnson’s slow-to-come apology tour, and a deluge of bad press, the heat finally became too much. On Mar. 18, with just three weeks to go before opening day, Johnson was fired and replaced by Jim Fregosi.

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“This was his guy. This is his timing. Throughout this entire sorry episode, one of the low points in the history of the franchise, his judgment has to be seriously questioned,” Brunt wrote of Ash. “What could possibly have been the last straw, after so many perfectly sound last straws were ignored?”

Einstein is alleged to have said that “weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.” I’m sorry to say that it’s an apt description for Ash’s handling of the Johnson debacle.

Now, what about the club’s next cringe-worthy moment of total debasement: the acquisition of Mike Sirotka?

This was another case of poor vetting. In the deal, the Blue Jays traded their ace pitcher, David Wells, for Sirotka, whose arm was basically hanging by a thread. The doctor who gave Sirotka a clean bill of health at first maybe deserves some of the blame here too, but by the time he examined Sirotka – who, in a later examination by a different doctor, was found to have a fully torn labrum and a partially torn rotator cuff – the deal had already been made. The White Sox said they had told the Jays what they knew about Sirotka’s balky arm, the Jays took them at their word, spoke to Sirotka (who said he was fine), and then made the trade without making it conditional on a physical.

It was a terrible look for an organization that was once the class of baseball. It enraged the few fans who, by that point, still bothered to care about the listless club. And the way that the team cried to the league that the White Sox had done them wrong, only to receive the admonishing rebuke of “caveat emptor” from the office of the commissioner, added another thick layer to the embarrassment.

From the Gaston mess, to the Johnson mess, to Clemens’ rapid loss of faith in the organization, to clubhouse problems that continued during Fregosi’s tenure (and hastened the departure of Pat Hentgen), to the Sirotka disaster, Ash’s front office was rightly perceived as weak and rudderless.

Communication (1)

Like any executive, Ash was prone to the occasional blunder when speaking to the media. But communication is a two-way street. Listening is an element of communication. So too is ensuring that the reasons behind your actions are clearly understood by those they are affecting. Being in tune with the needs of those in your employ, and aware of any problems in the workplace, requires strong communication.

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It’s an area where Ash failed badly.

To be fair, the manager-front office dynamic was quite different 25 years ago than it is today. Gaston had a significant amount of control and influence during his time as manager. A recent piece from the Toronto Star’s Gregor Chisholm revisiting Ash’s trade of John Olerud highlights this, as it describes the trade as one the club felt it needed to make in order to find enough at-bats for the emerging Delgado while Gaston-favourite Joe Carter continued to take turns at DH.

Given Gaston’s stature in the organization and the on-field background he possessed that that Ash didn’t, it’s understandable why Ash might defer to him. But Ash’s seeming inability to maintain a proper dialogue with the men in charge of the clubhouse caused problems beyond the Olerud trade. In the December ’97 Globe piece by Brunt cited earlier, he explains that when camp opened earlier that spring Ash had been asked if the aging Joe Carter would move full-time to DH. “Ash passed the buck to his manager. Gaston deferred to Carter. And Carter said no thanks, he’d rather not do that.”

“What happened was that the players ended up taking their cue from that,” Ash admitted, vowing to do better going forward. “The decisions weren’t being made by the manager, they were being made by the players.”

The Johnson era was no less dysfunctional, and not only because of the war story scandal. Consider this anecdote from a 2002 Toronto Star piece by Richard Griffin, about Johnson’s decision to make Delgado the club’s “captain.”

Critics of Johnson forget the desperate straits he was in at the time. Here’s background on how the captain decision was made. The night of Aug. 12, 1998, I met Johnson at the Purple Pepper, a now- defunct establishment just below the SkyDome on Queen’s Quay. It’s where we often met for friendly, informal, sometimes-intense discussions about baseball.

Johnson was feeling depressed and alone. His job was in jeopardy. The team was threatening to dip below .500. He felt first base coach Jack Hubbard had betrayed him. Pitching coach Mel Queen had a cult- like grip on his pitchers, distancing them from Johnson after the Pat Hentgen/Roger Clemens at Fenway Park fiasco following the all- star break. Queen wanted him fired badly and he was counting on Vietnam lies, already known inside the clubhouse, to sink him. Johnson’s other hand-picked coach, Eddie Rodriguez, was of no help and Gary Matthews was a friend but was never around on the road.

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“It’s obvious you need some help in the clubhouse,” I said. “Why don’t you have a meeting and name Delgado captain. He’s going to be with this team for a long time and he just needs the opportunity to show his leadership. He’ll grow into it. It would take the pressure off you inside the clubhouse and give you an ally.”

For the first time, Johnson looked up and smiled. The next day, by the time I got to the stadium, Johnson had done the deed. The clubhouse was stunned. Delgado was skeptical and reluctant. But, to his credit, he did the job, taking his responsibilities seriously as the team went on a roll.

“Gord (Ash) was really (ticked),” Johnson said with a chuckle. “He said I shouldn’t have done it without telling him. Well, (expletive) Gord.”

The betrayal from Hubbard that Griffin refers to stemmed, according to comments made by Hubbard’s wife in a January 1999 piece by Marty York of the Globe and Mail, from an incident during a June ’98 series in Baltimore.

“She said Hubbard, on the advice of pitching coach Mel Queen, directed Shawn Green to move over in the outfield. She said Johnson became upset that Hubbard listened to Queen. Johnson then asked Hubbard to refrain from collaborating with Queen, she said. Hubbard refused Johnson’s request, she said, and that’s when the two stopped talking to each other.”

The feud had rather hilariously escalated by the time of York’s piece. Johnson had stayed at the Hubbard’s Florida home during spring training in ’98. Hubbard was let go following the ’98 season, when it seemed as though Johnson would return. And so in early ’99 the couple sent Johnson a $1,400 bill “for the cost of vodka, whisky, beer, food and cleaning.”

You wonder how such dysfunction can occur, but there seems to be a common thread. (Hint: It’s the guy who boasted to the Globe and Mail’s Gare Joyce in what is certainly now an eyebrow-raising quote from September 1998 that “the young players in our clubhouse see how professionally and how intensely Jose Canseco and Roger Clemens prepare for the game.”)

At about the same time as the Hubbards were tallying up Johnson’s bill, in January of 1999, reliever Paul Quantrill broke his leg in a snowmobile accident and lied about it. In a move that was sure to rankle his players even further – especially considering what the GM was letting Johnson go unpunished for – Ash publicly left open the possibility that the club might use a “dangerous activity” clause to void the popular Canadian reliever’s contract.

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Meanwhile, the Clemens-Hentgen fiasco referred to by Griffin was an incident in which Johnson nearly bumped the struggling Hentgen from a start in favour of Clemens, despite it being Hentgen’s ninth year with the club, his sixth in the rotation, and despite the fact that he was rightly proud that he hadn’t missed a start in six years. No one had spoken to Hentgen about the plan, who was understandably angry when he learned of it.

The following year Fregosi was also “saddled” with Queen. Their relationship was perhaps a little bit better than Queen’s had been with Johnson – as demonstrated by the fact that Queen was with Fregosi in a Philadelphia bar in June of 1999 when the former Phillies manager got into a fight that police suspected may have involved members of the mob – but Queen would nonetheless be forced out the following season in a move that angered numerous players, including Hentgen. After managing the 1998 season with coaches he had inherited from Johnson’s staff, Fregosi was allowed by Ash to bring in his own staff for the ’99 season.

After Hentgen was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals in November of ’99, Tom Maloney of the National Post wrote about “a heated closed-door meeting with manager Jim Fregosi in mid-September left him feeling both furious and doomed. Hentgen thinks Fregosi considered him ‘too soft,’ and therefore a negative influence on younger pitchers such as Chris Carpenter and Roy Halladay.”

Looking through a modern lens one can’t help but wonder where on earth Ash was while all this was happening. Allowing it all to take place seems bafflingly out of touch. He had the authority to address many of these issues. The era of the manager as a tyrant was ending, yet despite his experience with Gaston, Ash chose to hire two men that demanded a big degree of autonomy. That can be considered another failure of communication failure: a failure to listen and understand where the industry was heading.

Growth (1)

I don’t want to be cruel, but it’s another sore spot. Ash was weak and indecisive as Gaston’s final season went off the rails, and he came off as equally weak in 2001 when he was burned by Ken Williams in the Wells-Sirotka deal. Ash hired three managers during his seven years in charge of the team. All three were disasters for one reason or another. Outside of the draft room, where his record is actually quite decent, he seemed to struggle to find trusted voices – be they doctors or a former Padres assistant-GM/pitching-coach who presumably pushed for the club to acquire Joey Hamilton.

That former member of the Padres organization was, of course, Stewart. At the time of Ash’s hiring, it was rumoured that due to his lack of scouting and on-field experience, the Jays might make Queen, who at that point was their farm director, an assistant GM. Instead, Queen moved into the role of pitching coach, and following the 1998 season Stewart became a key assistant for Ash.

The primary reason Ash scores so low in this category, however, has to do with the last point I made in the previous category. The small payroll Oakland A’s made the playoffs in each of Ash’s final two seasons running the Blue Jays. Through the ’90s in Cleveland, though they were running very high payrolls at the time, that front office was pushing the industry toward professionalization at the executive level. Baseball Prospectus was founded in 1996. And the Montreal Expos, faced with the same weak Canadian dollar as the Jays, and a far bigger crisis in terms of their ownership and stadium, were hardly thriving, but at least rethinking how to approach their business.

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Ash’s Blue Jays never seemed to think outside the box. The Jays never adopted the kinds of strategies that were starting to prove fruitful in other challenging markets.

You could make the argument, in fact, that the Sirotka trade is a good line of demarcation between MLB’s back-slapping old world and its ruthless new one. Forced to move Clemens, Ash landed Wells. Forced to move Wells, Ash again tried to find a win-now piece in Sirotka, who was heading into his age-30 season. Not long after, clubs would start thinking about asset management and the aging curve in much different ways. Ash’s Jays also appear to have given no consideration to Roy Halladay’s service clock, for example. The notion of Shawn Green not becoming an everyday player until 1998, his fourth big league season and his age-25 year, is similarly quaint. “Caveat emptor,” on the other hand, only gets stronger and stronger as a piece of advice in a baseball world where we have front offices trying to remake themselves in the image of the Houston Astros. Trust no one.

Productivity (2)

The Blue Jays under Ash’s era suffered a great many self-inflicted wounds. Go through the list of transactions at the bottom of this piece and you’ll find several lopsided ones, and not in the Jays’ favour. Making so many lateral moves with extremely talented players – turning John Olerud, Woody Williams, Shawn Green and Roger Clemens into Robert Person, Joey Hamilton, Raúl Mondesí and David Wells (then eventually Mike Sirotka) — was disastrous asset management.

The high profile free agent signings I’ve listed below – Clemens, Erik Hanson, Benito Santiago, Darrin Fletcher, Randy Myers and José Canseco – produced more of a mixed bag of results. Clemens was otherworldly for two years before demanding that the Jays honour Beeston’s promise that they would move him to a contender if the Jays hadn’t become one. Canseco and Fletcher were fine, though the Jays’ low-ball offer to bring Canseco back for the ’99 season did them no favours with Clemens.

“Here’s a guy who I begged and pleaded to come play in Toronto, to have a presence and help the young players step it up – and he signed for next to nothing, in relative terms,” wrote Clemens on his official website, RocketRoger.com, in November 1998. “And now, to offer him what they are offering … I won’t even call it a joke, because it’s not funny to him, or me. It’s very disheartening.”

The Hanson, Santiago and Myers deals, meanwhile, blew up in Ash’s face. Particularly Myers, who was awful during his brief time here, feuded with manager Tim Johnson, then was shipped out in August 1998 less than one year into his three-year deal. The only saving grace for Ash was in the fact that San Diego was willing to take him and the rest of his contract off the Blue Jays’ hands. Myers didn’t pitch again after the 1998 season.

Every GM is going to have some questionable transactions on their resume, but failing to add younger and cheaper talent when moving guys such as Clemens, Wells and Green, at a time when it had become abundantly clear that the glory years were over, seems particularly egregious. As does the choice to send prospect Michael Young to the Texas Rangers for Esteban Loaiza in July of 2000.

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That said, there was reason for the Jays to be buyers as the trade deadline approached in 2000. On the day they made the deal for Loaiza they were 51-45, just 1.5 games behind the Yankees in the AL East, and tied with the Red Sox at a half-game back of the Angels in the AL Wild Card race. The Yankees took the division crown that year with just 87 wins. The Blue Jays, however, finished with 83.

The club’s Pythagorean record in 2000 was 77-85, meaning that they were certainly overachieving. A year earlier, they were a game better, but finished 10 games out of the Wild Card spot. Still, 2000 was at times a fun year for the club on the field, even if by then fans had grown weary of Ash and Interbrew.

The 1998 season under Johnson, despite the tumult going on behind clubhouse doors, was also an enjoyable one on the field. Yes, the Yankees ran away with the division that year, winning 114 games on their way to a second World Series title in three years (and their first of three straight). But the Blue Jays at least made things interesting, going 32-15 over their final 47 games of the season, moving from 11 games back of the Red Sox in the Wild Card race to finish just four behind by season’s end.

A couple of so-so seasons doesn’t make the era any less frustrating or forgettable, but my point is that it wasn’t all bad on the field.

There were other good points, too.

In December 1999, with just one year remaining on his contract, the expectation was that Delgado was a $15 million per season player but that he likely wasn’t going to see that money from the Blue Jays. Surprisingly, though, Ash managed to extend Delgado for three years at just $36 million. The deal contained a clause that allowed Delgado to ask for a trade after the 2001 World Series, but in January of that year they signed him to a new four-year, $68-million extension.

The personal connection between Ash and Delgado seemed to be the catalyst for the first deal.

“Talks between Ash and Delgado’s agent, David Sloane, were in a valley when the player stopped by the executive’s office for a conversation the other day,” explained Gare Joyce of the Ottawa Citizen at the time. “Delgado happened to be in town for a charity dinner and denied that he was trying to do business behind the agent’s back. Ash denied that there was anything untoward. And Sloane roundly denied that relations between client and agent were ever strained. But the private discussion set in motion events that led to the new deal.”

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Roy Halladay, of course, was drafted under Ash. And when Halladay struggled in 2000, requiring him to re-build his mechanics in the minors, Ash was able to lure Queen out of retirement to help re-work his delivery and mental approach. The reconstruction of Halladay is perhaps the Ash era’s greatest accomplishment.

Overall, the draft is one area in which Ash’s Blue Jays actually performed quite well.

Ash Era Top Picks and Notable Draftees

That may not look like a ton of talent to have accumulated from seven drafts, but landing a Hall of Famer, a true franchise great (albeit for the Texas Rangers), and a pair of guys in Wells and Ríos who were deemed worthy of $126 million and $70 million contract extensions, respectively, is a pretty incredible haul. Not enough of one to move our grade for his productivity up to “meets expectations,” but credit where it’s due.

Areas of strength

• Perseverance: Ownership’s desire to maintain stability while the club was up for sale may have helped Ash in this regard, but it must also be said that Ash did incredibly well to hang on to his job for as long as he did through so many high profile debacles. It’s partly a reflection of the trust that Gillick and Beeston so clearly had in him and the kind of high regard in which those two were held in Toronto and across baseball. But Ash worked his way into earning their respect and trust. That fact alone is enough to give one pause before placing too much blame on him for how badly things went sideways in his years at the helm.

• Persistence: His rise through the organization and thirst for learning the ins and outs of the baseball industry displays an impressive form of persistence, but it’s also important to point out that he was equally persistent in putting together rosters that were designed to win. Yes, the club took a major step back in terms of payroll in 1996, but only temporarily. Ash attempted to build a winning club around Clemens, continued to do so after Clemens forced his way out, and he managed to push payroll from $46 million to $77 million in 2001, the first year of Rogers’ ownership. Sadly for Jays fans, the team’s five highest-paid players after Carlos Delgado that year were Mondesí, Hamilton, Gonzalez, Loaiza and Fletcher.

• Drafting: As stated in the section above, the Ash era produced a number of quality big leaguers, including a Hall of Famer in Roy Halladay.

Opportunities for development

• Hiring: As someone who didn’t have a playing or scouting background, Ash had to rely on others to serve as an authoritative voice in the clubhouse. When he was appointed GM, the expectation was that he would be able to synthesize the information provided to him by his trusted lieutenants and take decisive action. Whether or not he knew how to choose those lieutenants perhaps should have been a bigger question.

• Decision-making: Standing by Johnson, deferring to Gaston, re-hiring Gaston despite a frosty relationship with Green, taking Kenny Williams at his word, siding with Fregosi over Hentgen and plucking Buck Martinez out of the broadcast booth to become the team’s manager. All bad decisions.

• Creativity: Ash’s failure to see the changes that were coming to the game, and his adherence to an approach that amounted to “let’s try this again only with worse players,” rather than attempting anything particularly innovative, was undoubtedly a major flaw.

Final Thoughts:

I came into this willing to be sympathetic to the idea that it was possible that Ash has been unfairly maligned because due to the aging team and ownership situation he inherited. And while those were huge challenges, to be sure, they were not necessarily unique ones. It would be unfair to expect Ash to have reinvented the wheel, especially when that wheel ran very smoothly for the Blue Jays up until the end of ’93. It would also be unfair to label his approach as hopelessly outdated, considering that plenty of old school types would continue to have success running baseball teams for another decade after he was let go – Pat Gillick among them.

But Ash failed to respond to the many challenges in front of him with any sort of creativity. He was so often undone by his own poor decision-making and faulty short-term thinking, that the lack of ownership support seems almost incidental. I don’t know if anybody could have made the Blue Jays a success during the Interbrew years, but I do know that Ash couldn’t.

Overall score: 6/16

Manager _________________   Employee _________________

Addendum: Ash’s Major Transactions

Trades: 

• Acquired Paul Quantrill from the Philadelphia Phillies in exchange for Howard Battle and Ricardo Jordan (Dec. ’95)
• Acquired David Cone from the Kansas City Royals in exchange for Tony Medrano, Dave Sinnes and Chris Stynes (April ’95)
• Traded David Cone to the New York Yankees in exchange for Mike Gordon, Jason Jarvis and Marty Janzen (July ’95)
• Acquired Orlando Merced, Dan Pleasac and Carlos García from the Pittsburgh Pirates in exchange for Jose Silva, Brandon Cromer, Jose Pett, Craig Wilson, Abraham Nunez and Mike Halperin (Nov. ’96)
• Traded John Olerud to the New York Mets in exchange for Robert Person (Dec. ’96)
• Traded Paul Spoljaric and Mike Timlin to the Seattle Mariners in exchange for José Cruz Jr. (July ’97)
• Traded Juan Guzmán to the Baltimore Orioles in exchange for Nerio Rodriguez and Shannon Carter. (July ’98)
• Traded Woody Willams, Carlos Almanzar and Peter Tucci to the San Diego Padres in exchange for Joey Hamilton (Dec. ’98)
• Traded Roger Clemens to the New York Yankees in exchange for David Wells, Homer Bush and Graeme Lloyd (Feb. ’99)
• Traded Dan Pleasac to the Arizona Diamondbacks in exchange for Tony Batista and John Frascatore (June ’99)
• Traded Shawn Green and Jorge Nuñez to the Los Angeles Dodgers in exchange for Raúl Mondesí and Pedro Borbón (Nov. ’99)
• Traded Pat Hentgen and Paul Spoljaric to the St. Louis Cardinals in exchange for Alberto Castillo, Lance Painter and Matt DeWitt (Nov. ’99)
• Traded Michael Young and Darwin Cubillan to the Texas Rangers in exchange for Esteban Loaiza (July ’00)
• Traded David Wells and Matt DeWitt to the Chicago White Sox White Sox in exchange for Mike Sirotka, Kevin Beirne, Brian Simmons, and Mike Williams (due to undisclosed injuries at the time, Williams and DeWitt were sent back to their original teams) (Jan. ’01)

Free Agent Signings and extensions:

• Signed Erik Hanson, three years, $9.4 million (Dec. ’95)
• Signed Benito Santiago, two years, $6.5 million (Dec. ’96)
• Extended Pat Hentgen, two years, $17 million (plus two club options) (Dec. ’96)
• Signed Roger Clemens, three years, $24.75 million (plus one club option) (Dec. ’96)
• Signed Darrin Fletcher, two years, $4.35 million (Nov. ’97)
• Signed Randy Myers, three years, $18 million (Nov. ’97)
• Signed José Canseco, one year, $750,000 (plus $2.5 million in performance incentives) (Feb. ’98)
• Re-signed Alex Gonzalez, four years, $20 million (Feb. ’99)
• Extended Carlos Delgado, three years, $36 million (Dec. ’99); four years, $68 million (Jan. ’01)

Hirings and Firings:

• Fired Cito Gaston (Sep. ’97)
• Hired Tim Johnson (Nov. ’97)
• Fired Tim Johnson (March ’99)
• Hired Jim Fregosi (March ’99)
• Fired Jim Fregosi (Oct. ’99)
• Hired Buck Martinez (Nov. ’00)
• Hired Cito Gaston (as hitting coach) (Nov. ’00)

(Top Photo: Jeff Goode Toronto Star via Getty Images)

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