Toronto Blue Jays General Manager Alex Anthopoulos is like the new kid in school with all the best toys. As the most recent man in baseball to be given the “GM” title, all eyes were on the 32-year old former scouting coordinator. However, that’s not why other GMs were interested in the kid. The fact that he held Roy Halladay, arguably the most valuable player available this offseason, made Anthopoulos and his Blackberry the most important man of the hour.

At last week’s Winter Meetings, Anthopoulos shopped Halladay around to any interested club and took in a number of offers from teams like Boston, New York, Anaheim and St. Louis, just to name a few. If anybody expected Anthopoulos to make a deal last week, not only were they proven wrong, but they also saw that Anthopoulos and his youth weren’t going to be taken advantage of. He has been groomed for his position for years, but not even he could have anticipated having the best card to play this winter.

Former Jays general manager J.P. Riccardi was let go with just days left in the 2009 season, after a near-mutiny in the clubhouse against current manager Cito Gaston spilled into the media. To deflect attention from it, Riccardi was relieved a couple of days earlier than anticipated and Anthopoulos, Riccardi’s assistant, was given the interim GM job, and a few weeks later, the “interim” was removed from his title. Now, Anthopoulos is the biggest fish in a small pond.

Halladay himself had said that if he remained a Blue Jay by Spring Training, he would remain a Blue Jay throughout the entire season. It was certainly in Toronto’s best interests to move him before then, to ensure that the Jays get something other than two draft picks in the 2011 draft, if even that. They say that whoever gets the best player “wins” the trade, and Anthopoulos knows already that he’s going to lose. He’s just trying to make sure that once the dust settles, the Blue Jays – and their fans – can carry on.