This afternoon the Blue Jays officially introduced former Red Sox pitching coach John Farrell as their new manager, but neither Farrell nor general manager Alex Anthopoulos were willing to disclose the length of his contract.
Anthopoulos told Jordan Bastian of MLB.com that the secrecy is needed because knowing contract details “creates unneeded speculation and takes attention away from the team.”
In other words, it’ll be harder for people to speculate about Farrell’s job status if they don’t even know how long he’s signed for.
If every detail of players’ contracts are made public it only seems fair that the same is true for managers and even general managers, but the whole secrecy thing with Farrell is particularly odd considering there’s almost zero chance of everyone involved actually keeping it a secret. Eventually someone involved with the Blue Jays will tell someone involved with the media, at which point the team’s attempts to keep the contract length under wraps will seem even weirder.
