No offense, but one of my pet peeves is listening to call-in shows up here with callers talking about trading for draft picks. This is not hockey, football or basketball, this is baseball: you cannot trade for draft picks. Period. Sorry to unload on you. It’s my frustration with the daily ignorance I hear up here and unfortunately for you, you get to bear the brunt of it.

I think this is kind of the sticking point , the biggest value for the Jays would actually be if they could get rid of Wells, but it is absurd to trade a Roy Halladay just to get rid of a contract. and whats worse is that Wells contract is so bad. that even the Yankees / Red Sox would have a hard time accepting such a deal.

What’s probably worse is that the Jays are locking 1/4-1/5 of their payroll in the next few years just on Vernon Wells. who is playing at a sub replacement level so far this year. and another 1/6 or so in Rios. who is only playing better relative to the Vernon Wells standard.

One quibble is that while there’s less risk in shorter contracts, you’re also paying the current dollars-per-WAR rate. If we assume that number goes up 10% each year and it was at $5M pre-2009, that puts it at $8M per WAR in five off-seasons (pre-2014.) So $30M bought 6 WAR before this season, but it’ll only buy 3.75 WAR pre-2014. To over-generalize, the expected loss of player talent matches the increase in price-per-WAR.