If there was ever a time to be upset with the play and/or management of a team, now is the time for the Toronto Blue Jays. They came into Boston Thursday night, two games behind the Red Sox for second place in the AL East. They weren't really in the playoff hunt, but not really out of it either. The Red Sox lineup is being held together with crazy glue and duct tape. Their two best hitters are out, and one of their young pitching prospects has cancer. They just traded one of the few starters performing well over the last month. They're starting Julian Tavarez and Kyle Snyder in games one and two. It's time to move up!

But your ace gets hit in game one and you lose. Kyle Snyder looks like Pedro Martinez for a night a you lose. You put your best lineup on the field, your 1 and 3 starters and your team gets outscored and out-pitched, and dropped out of the playoff race! And what does Ricciardi say (love the title, by the way)?

"I think they're playing their butts off," Ricciardi said before last night's 2-1 loss to the Red Sox. "They're trying real hard. I think the harder we try, the worse we get."

No, if you get shutout by Kyle Snyder for seven innings, striking out eight times, you're not playing your butt off. And this:

"I don't think you're going to win this division on $70 million," Ricciardi said. "I don't think you're going to make the playoffs in this division on $70 million. You can be competitive and I think you can have some good years.

"But I just think those two teams (New York and Boston), with what they drive payrolls (to), it's going to be really tough to catch those guys if we stay at a $70 million payroll. It doesn't mean we can't be good and we can't compete. But I just don't think you're going to see a chance to win 95 to 100 games."

Tell that to the Marlins. The argument just doesn't fly. This Toronto team should have walked all over the lineup the Red Sox put out there the last two nights. There's no excuse for that.

Maybe, in fact, it is Gibbons. Maybe the Billy Martin manager doesn't work anymore. It failed for Lou Piniella in Tampa. It's failing for Gibbons in Toronto.

In Bill James' wonderful book, The Managers, he talks about families of managers, and how most managers today are descended from Ned Hanlon (the mentor of John McGraw). He goes into great detail about this family, but also mentions another, the Branch Rickey family. We may be seeing some evolution involving these two families, and the focal point is Joe Torre.

Torre, like so many working today, played baseball under Hanlon managers. But his MVP year was under Red Schoendienst, and Schoendienst managerial history can be traced back to Branch Rickey. Joe's bench coach was Don Zimmer, who came out of the Branch Rickey Dodgers (where Bill considers the Rickey family to have started). That duo produced two managers so far, Willie Randolph and Joe Girardi. Willie played for Billy Martin, but coached for Joe for years. Joe Girardi came up under Zimmer, but had great success under Torre. I wonder if we're seeing a new family being born, the Joe Torre family, which is a combination of the best of the Hanlon and Rickey families. Certainly Torre, Randoph and Girardi are experiencing great sucess in 2006. (Ron Gardenhire played for Torre early in his career, so you might include him in this group as well.)

Maybe it's time for the Jays to move away from the Hanlon managers (especially the confornational kind embodied by Billy Martin) to a Rickey/Hanlon hybrid. Francona has a little Rickey in him. Wedge, Scioscia, Maddon, Melvin and Baker are purer Rickey descendants. I don't hear much player griping about any of these men, and when they do have problems with players (Sosa, Milton Bradley), they seem to handle the situations with dignity. Maybe it's a direction Toronto should try.