The Jays are imposing their own trade deadline, and confirming my long-held suspicions about the unlikelihood of trading Doc Halladay:
Blue Jays general manager J.P. Ricciardi still hasn't received an appropriate trade offer for Roy Halladay, and has set a July 28 deadline to complete a deal for the 2003 Cy Young Award winner.
"At this point, it's probably unlikely that we'll trade Doc," Ricciardi said Tuesday.
Ricciardi says that the the early deadline is necessary because any Halladay deal is going to be complicated, but my suspicion is that it serves two other purposes, one kind of minor and one a bit more significant.
The minor one is that it creates a bit more pressure for teams that really want Halladay to get moving. The more significant one is to give Ricciardi a couple of days to gut the rest of the roster if Halladay is, in fact, traded. Because let's be honest, if Halladay is gone, the fans are going to stop showing up, there will be no need to keep up appearances, and the Jays will deal anything that isn't nailed down.
But I think the real thing to take away from this is that Ricciardi isn't getting anywhere near the offers he needs to unload Doc, and for that reason, he's not likely to be dealt.
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Another possibility is that JP is trying to flex some muscles/assert some authority that he only thinks he has, but doesn't really.
I suspect that, in the end, he's going to realize that his demands are way too high and instead make a panic trade as the deadline (the real one, not his fake one) approaches. I would hate to be a Blue Jays fan as that happened...
Yeah, especially since Halliday isn't intrested in an extention of his contract with the Blue Jays... http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090722&content_id=5996230&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb (Halladay not interested in extension)