Jays’ Off-Season Shopping Wraps with Vintage Buys

As if managing the day-to-day operations of a baseball club and facing questions about his (lack of) off-season activity aren’t stressful enough, Jays GM Alex Anthopoulos is growing self-conscious about his age as he approaches the big 3-5 this year. Okay, I don’t know that to be true whatsoever, but how else do you explain the sudden stockpiling of greybeards to fill holes in the roster? Each of Anthopoulos’ five most recent acquisitions (Darren Oliver, Nelson Figueroa, Chris Woodward, Omar Vizquel and, reportedly, Francisco Cordero) have been older than the GM. We’ve already discussed Oliver here and – let’s be honest – it’s hard to muster up any kind of reaction on Figueroa or Woodward, so we’ll focus our discussion on the most recent signees, the 44-year-old Vizquel and 36-year-old Cordero. When I finally stopped snickering about the thought of a 44-year-old manning the middle infield for Toronto and actually started making s...