In 2010, new CEO Paul Dolan said that “it was not time to spend” on big-ticket acquisitions coming off of consecutive seasons of more than ninety losses under respective Eric Wedge and Manny Acta regimes.
At the time, the painful slog of player development and good, old-fashioned games of chance and hope seemed like a safe and prudent way of conducting and operating a baseball franchise that had no real hope of contending anyway, as much as we fans as armchair GMs hated seeing stars and potential “cheat-code players” head elsewhere for the big paydays, and how we hated to admit that their penny-pinching way is probably the right call at the time.