Blue Jays: Would management take on bad contracts to gain prospects?

For a losing team in the age of modern baseball, it’s not always about winning a trade for today’s team, but rather finding creative ways to make your team better for the future.

It’s safe to say that the trend of signing 30 plus year-old players to long-term contracts may be coming to an end in baseball. Yet, many of these types of contracts remain laid over from past general managers botched decisions.

The Blue Jays are positioned well to eat some salary if the right prospects were to be included in a trade, so it could be plausible that an expensive aging veteran could find his way onto the Blue Jays roster come this trade season.

Currently, the Blue Jays payroll of $115 million sits well below the $164 million spent last season, so management could afford to add a few bad contracts if they wanted to. When you consider that the Blue Jays will likely be sellers for its pitchers this trade deadline, which is an area already on shaky footing ground with injuries and lack of reserves, it makes it entirely possible that the Blue Jays could bring on some unfavourable contracts as a means of landing top-tier pitching prospects from competing teams. That type of move could help secure their rotation for contention years in the future, which might be worth the short term pain in eating salary.

Here is a look at some bad MLB contracts the Blue Jays may consider taking on if the right prospects were included.