I have to say, I don't understand this situation. Blue Jays management is known to be some of the worst in baseball, their training staff even worse.
The industry has generally had a fair amount of praise for team management (excepting Scott Boras, but who cares, Boras would run down his own mother if it got his clients a few extra million or initiated some franchise making a knee-jerk reaction to spend). It's the fans that believe that they suck. The training staff issue is more questionable since it's hard to assess how much of injury problems comes from the trainers and how much comes from the players just getting hurt.
Also there has been training staff turnover in the last couple years and guys still got hurt. So that would seem to indicate that maybe it's not all the staff's fault?
He's an All-Star shortstop, you paid him big money, he should at least get a chance to earn his position as he went down with an injury. If after a couple of months, release him. It's the same outcome but at least you get to see if he would be able to produce or not. Asking him to move is premature when he lost so much time due to the injury. If he was not going to play, sit him out the year. It's a tougher situation if he absolutely wasn't going to come back, but he wasn't, let the insurance pay his contract then.
1) He's not an all-star shortstop. He wasn't for several years before the Jays acquired him. He's a broken shell of what he once was and is currently basically borderline unemployable at the MLB level if his defence slips even a little bit
2) The Jays didn't pay him big money. The Rockies did. The Jays simply decided that they'd rather pick up the Rockies' tab more than they wanted to hang onto Jose Reyes
3) He sucked well before the injuries. He hasn't been what people picture when you mention Troy Tulowitzki since 2014. 2013 if you want to consider that he played barely half a season in '14.
4) The team has more than enough 2B/SS/3B types on the 40-man, never mind the wave of guys coming up who can fill those roles. The younger players need a chance to prove themselves more than Tulo needs a chance to get back out there. Gurriel needs a full season of MLB development more than Tulo does. Travis needs one last chance to prove himself worthy of a starting gig more than Tulo does. Drury needs to find a place to play before and after Guerrero arrives more than Tulo does. These and playes who can come up from the system are more important to the team moving forward into its next competitive window than a degraded husk of once-upon-a-time All-Star Troy Tulowitzki.
5) They can't let insurance pay him out becuase he's probably healthy enough to play eventually, just not necessarily healthy enough to play well. He's going to be 35 by the end of next season, hasn't played an MLB game since July 2017, and hasn't played a reasonably full season since 2011. the
best case scenario for him is probably a small but noticeable step backwards in his overall play on both sides of the ball. The more likely case is that he's going to show a noticeable lost step defensively (thereby tanking most of his remaining value) and his bat is going to continue its downward trend (as it was already mediocre-to-poor for his entire Blue Jays run)
What do the Jays get in return for letting him go?
They get:
1) a spot on the 40-man roster
2) no distraction from the issue of having the most expensive player on the roster probably riding the pine for stretches this season or being trotted out to start even if someone else deserves the job more because of some sunk cost BS.
3) Potentially some yearly monetary relief because while we know they're paying out the whole salary left on his deal, we don't know how. Maybe they pay it all out this year and are off the hook for 2020/21 seasons. Maybe they spread it out longer and don't have to fork out so much every season. Maybe they Bobby Bonilla'd him and we'll get something to laugh and joke about from now on.
4) The goodwill from giving Tulo a chance to find a team that wants him instead of sitting him at home and not playing because there's no room for him.
Do fans who bought his Jersey and who might like him want to come to the ballpark?
If there are hypothetical fans whose decision to watch/not watch the Jays is entirely based on whether Troy Tulowitzki is present, I would argue that perhaps they aren't fans worth caring about in the grand scheme of things. Not that what the fanbase wants is worth caring about in a management decision-making process anyway (becuase the goal of management is to achieve as much sustained winning as possible. Fans want wins. You don't make personnel decisions based on fanbase favoritism to players or the like unless it also aligns with "is this going to help my ballclub win now and/or in the future?" Fans make favorite players out of guys who do well and help them win games. You can have all the star players you want, but if the team has no hope and no future and sucks, players will turn on those fans. Fans were already turning on Jose Bautista before the bat flip heard round MLB. Fans turn on great players all the time because they can't singularly drive a team to success. And then they pick up the "not a winner" stigma and it gets held against them even though it's not even close to being entirely their fault.
Surely his replacement could DH or play another position and let Tulo succeed or fail at shortstop being this decision.
First, if there's one position more than 2B/SS/3B that the team has some issues with in terms of finding adequate playing time, it's DH. Morales is stuck at DH. Hernandez should possibly be a DH. Smoak will need some time at DH. Martin would probably get some DH work if he's still around. Lots of players need to be able to use the DH spot for a variety of reasons, so shoving Gurriel there to placate Tulowitzki doesn't seem tenable.
Second, shoving a 25-year-old, promising middle infielder who is likely to be a part of this team now and into the foreseeable future just so that they can give Tulo one last ride as a starter seems like poor management.
I like Anthopolous, I don't understand why they couldn't let him finish the job, he had the balls to make the big splash when it was needed and had back to back Final Fours. The players liked him and succeeded under him.
They were going to let him finish the job. He was offered a new contract as GM when his old one expired. He walked because he didn't like the idea that Shapiro as president wouldn't necessarily just let him do whatever he wanted. Like do the things that got us into this mess right now (becuase this is the price paid for those 2015 and 2016 playoff runs. Let's not pretend this would be any different if Anthopoulos was still here. Except that maybe we wouldn't have Guerrero/Bichette and others in the system to reinvigorate things over the next couple years because they would've been sold off to sustain a 2017 playoff run with a worse roster than what the team had in 15/16.)
We don't know if current management "has the balls to make the big splash" because the roster is not in a position where a big splash would do anything worthwhile.
But we do know they have the balls to cut a guy who has no place on the roster even if it means eating $38m in dead salary. So... they seem pretty ballsy?
Jays have poor ownership and the league knows it. Sorry.
Your whole thing was about management before, and now it's ownership? The ownership situation does suck. It sucks they're owned by a corporation that has to operate differently than a billionaire hobbyist owner. It sucks that they're owned by a
media corporation that makes them take a bath on the biggest potential revenue stream (TV deal) in the name of corporate synergy. But nothing your really talked about was even about ownership. Well, except that apparently ownership was cool with lighting a giant pile of money on fire to make Tulo go away. So I guess Rogers isn't really as cheap as they tend to get made out as much of the time.