Dumping Thomas a Bad Move for Jays

For any one incident to rank as the lowest point of J.P. Ricciardi's tenure as general manager of the Toronto Blue Jays, it must be magnificent. In 2006, Toronto's manager, John Gibbons, attacked pitcher Ted Lilly during a game; he's still running the team. That same year, Ricciardi signed the second-best center fielder on his own team, Vernon Wells, to a $126 million contract. The year before, he personally overruled his scouting director, who wanted Troy Tulowitzki, and chose someone named Ricky Romero with the team's first-round draft pick. These are just a few highlights.

Still, in releasing designated hitter Frank Thomas yesterday, and eating the rest of the $8 million the team owes him to do so, Ricciardi may have committed a botch to top them all. Some rational, internally coherent defense can be made of Ricciardi's other inane and dunderheaded moves; getting rid of Thomas just makes no sense at all, on any level. Maybe getting rid of one of his better hitters will propel Ricciardi's team past the Yankees and Boston Red Sox, and on to October glory; certainly far stranger things have happened in baseball. More likely, the Blue Jays will muddle on, short a bat, and Thomas will kill the ball for some other, better team. Perhaps Ricciardi's employers will even notice.

As the story goes, Thomas was angry with being benched Saturday and suspected that the team was more concerned with his total number of at bats than with his current batting slump. The way his contract is structured, if he had reached 376 at bats with Toronto this year, he would have been guaranteed $10 million next year, when he'll be 41. This gave Toronto a motive to try to suppress his playing time.

If I were Thomas, I'd be angry and extremely suspicious, too. The future Hall of Famer is still an excellent hitter. Since the beginning of 2003, he's hit .265 BA/.384 OBA/.530 SLG. (David Wright, by way of comparison, has hit .312/.390/.538 in his career.) Thomas's OPS, adjusted for park and league average, is 16th-best among all hitters with at least 2,000 plate appearances over that time. Last year, he hit .277/.377/.480 and led Toronto in home runs, runs batted in, walks, and on-base average. He isn't a great player anymore, because he's not a truly elite hitter, he can't play the field, and he's an ungodly bad base runner. But he can still help any team in the American League. There are two rejoinders one might make here. The first is that Thomas is hitting .167/.303/.333 this year, and that he'd gone 4-for-35 in the nine games immediately preceding his benching, so that Gibbons was merely exercising managerial discretion in sitting him down to give his at bats to Matt Stairs, another 40-year-old DH with nothing like Thomas's track record, and Rod Barajas, a third-string catcher. This is dumb; as Thomas told the Associated Press, "Sixty at bats isn't enough to make that decision." Hitting .167 through 16 games means nothing more than hitting .467 would.

The other is that, while the statistics aren't inherently meaningful, they could just reflect Thomas being shot. He is, after all, 40, and an enormous man, the kind whose reflexes you'd expect to go all at once. This seems like a fairer point, but it's just another shading of the same argument. I cued up some of Thomas's recent at bats on MLB's Internet service, and he indeed looked horrible — hesitant and tentative, seemingly far more eager to work the count for its own sake than to find a pitch to hit. I then cued up some video of Jose Reyes from before his recent hot streak started, and he looked equally wretched. Thomas is hitting .167; to say that he looks done is just to offer a tautology. No one looks good when they're hitting .167.

All of this means that there are really two possible explanations here, one of which makes Ricciardi look like a snake, the other of which makes him look like an imbecile. The first, which Thomas seems to believe, is that, having realized he had signed a dumb contract that would commit him to pay a 41-year-old DH $10 million if that DH could manage to play a bit more than half a season, Ricciardi seized on a meaningless slump as an opportunity to cut down his at bats. The second is that he not only honestly thinks two weeks of lousy hitting are more telling than the fact that Thomas has been an excellent hitter when healthy, even in his old age, but that Thomas is a lesser option than Rod Barajas, whose career OBA is 14 points lower than Thomas's career batting average. Either way, whether or not this is actually the most ludicrous thing Ricciardi has ever done, it may be the most typical. It makes no sense, it seems to have been done in a fit of random, arbitrary pique, it makes his team worse, and it will likely make some competing team better. Winning in the American League East is never easy; Ricciardi seems determined to make it even harder than it actually is.

tmarchman@nysun.com