THE CANADIAN PRESS
TORONTO — Outgoing Rogers Media boss Tony Viner believes the Toronto Blue Jays are positioned for long-term success both on the field, and as a business, thanks to the franchise’s sweeping changes over the past two years.
The 63-year-old president and CEO of the division responsible for the club at team owner Rogers Communications Inc., is retiring and will hand over the reins to successor Keith Pelley next Monday after 11 years in the role.
During that time the Blue Jays were added to his portfolio and he’s overseen their reformation from the fiscal basket case they were when purchased from Interbrew S.A. in September 2000, through the tumultuous J.P. Ricciardi years, to the current return to the franchise’s roots under team president Paul Beeston and GM Alex Anthopoulos.
Criticism of the Rogers ownership has come, gone and returned as spending on players was cut, increased then cut again, and fan frustration went into overdrive after the gut-wrenching trade of beloved ace Roy Halladay last December.
But the change in direction implemented by Anthopoulos after he replaced Ricciardi last September and the restructuring of the business operations by Beeston leaves him convinced the Blue Jays are set up organizationally better than they’ve ever been since Rogers took over.
“You don’t change a winning strategy — you change a strategy that’s not winning,” he said of the transformation in an interview with The Canadian Press on Tuesday. “We firmly believed, and J.P. believed, the route to success in the American League East was to invest fairly heavily in high-profile and highly paid players, and because the resources are finite, a significantly higher proportion of the investment went towards that.
“As it transpired, and it’s no one’s fault, we all signed on to it, that strategy didn’t work. … There was no magic bullet (to build a winner). So we were far better to do it the old fashioned way, which is build a strong foundation and enjoy the benefits of that foundation over the years.”
To that end, Viner bought into the plan presented to him by Beeston and Anthopoulos last fall proposing to invest heavily in scouting and player development as a way to obtain and mould elite talent. Money from the big-league payroll (US$80.5 million last year, $62.7 million this one) was shifted to signing draft picks and international free agents — $10 million alone was spent on Cuban shortstop Adeiny Hechavarria — allowing the team to compete for talent it could not chase for in the past.
“There’s really been very little change in the total level of our investment, it’s just a question of where that investment has been made,” said Viner.
“This year, we decided we were going invest in the basics of the business. The number of scouts that we now have, our minor-league organizations, all those kinds of things, we invested in really trying to build the team from the ground up. We’re trying to be fiscally prudent and it has worked beautifully.
“We feel so much more confident about the team going forward than we ever have.”
The Blue Jays also seem to be integrated across the Rogers business plan more than ever.
Speculation abounded last year that the Blue Jays were being prepped for a sale amid the turnover atop Rogers following the death of Ted Rogers. The stripping down of the team and a lockdown on payroll only added fuel to the fire, as did the fact that in recent years some media companies have sold off their sports teams.
Instead, the company finally began using its various media arms to better promote and make use of the team, something that took surprisingly long to happen.
“Absolutely, it’s taken us a little while to sort of make sure we could co-ordinate everything,” said Viner. “In part, that was because of certain contractual obligations we had to other people, it took us a while to ensure we had all the broadcast rights, and that we could use the Jays for our clients, for our wireless customers, really across all the platforms that Rogers has, that we could leverage the Jays as an important part of our community relations and our promotional support.”
Now that Rogers is doing that, the Blue Jays seem firmly off the market.
“We are an unusual company in that we have not only content — which really baseball, or sports in general, is fantastic Canadian content, it is something people are very, very interested in — we have not just media, we have a number of other distribution platforms,” said Viner. “Maybe the answer is we are better able to leverage the sports franchise than others might be.”
That’s a far cry from where the Blue Jays where in 2000, when Rogers bought 80 per cent of the club for $120 million and later acquired the remaining 20 per cent in 2004 for an undisclosed sum. They were a big money loser then, although the losses ebbed as Ricciardi aggressively cut payroll from 2002-05, and the Canadian dollar rose amid other changes.
“It was in tough shape — I’m not going to say it was a disaster — but it was in tough shape,” said Viner. “Interbrew owned it, it was languishing a bit, we bought the team but we didn’t have control or own the building, there were a number of issues we were facing that didn’t allow the team to progress.”
One significant fire he leaves for Pelley — who comes over from his role as a CTV executive and president of Canada’s Olympic broadcast media consortium — is the growing anger over the switch of some Blue Jays games from the regular Sportsnet channels to the new digital Sportsnet One.
While the network is previewing for free, non-Rogers clients have been shut out as the country’s other cable and satellite providers have yet to pick up the channel. Viner feels Rogers’ rivals are using the ensuing fan outrage to make his company look bad.
“Oh sure,” he said. “People are upset because they don’t fully understand it. What we’ve done, and we were careful about this, Sportsnet One is available free to any cable or satellite company that wants to pick it up throughout the course of the baseball season.
“There’s lots of to-ing and fro-ing, but the truth is they have capacity, it’s in HD, they can pick it up and they can show it across Canada. We understand, but it’s the cable and satellite companies that have made the decision not to pick it up because it’s available to them free.”
But by next week, it won’t be his problem any more.
Viner will stay on for about a week of crossover with Pelley before starting his retirement.
“I’m going to try and gain a bit of weight,” he said with a laugh.
