Alex Rios is having his worst season since his 2006 breakout, and his '09 performance apparently led the Blue Jays to believe he is no longer worth the $60 million he's owed through 2015. Just 28 years old, ostensibly in his peak years, Rios has shown more power and ability to hit for average than he's showing this year, and I'd bet on his future performance coming in above his 2009 rate stats. The White Sox can also extract more value from Rios than the Blue Jays could by returning Rios to his natural position of center field, where he should be no worse than average and could easily end up plus. Center field has been a chronic problem for the White Sox for years, and they don't have a clear everyday center-field solution in their farm system, making Rios an ideal fit. And even a weakened farm system like Chicago's can afford the price of "no players" demanded by Toronto, which really drove a hard bargain here with a salary dump to make the 1993 Padres proud. The White Sox have about $34 million coming off the books after this season, freeing up room to absorb the salaries of Rios and Jake Peavy. But this raises a much bigger question about general manager J.P. Ricciardi's tenure in Toronto, which increasingly has been marked not by bad baseball decisions, but by bad financial ones. The decision to give away Rios indicates that the Jays' front office believes the contract extension the team gave Rios -- heavily back-loaded, as is every deal Ricciardi has handed out -- exceeded his current market value. In other words, the Blue Jays screwed up and overpaid him. (Either that, or they just screwed up by giving him away for nothing.) This move comes just a few weeks after they released B.J. Ryan, who was in the fourth year of a five-year contract; in effect, Ryan was paid $47 million for two good seasons of relief work (2006 and 2008). He missed most of 2007 due to injury and has struggled this season.Ricciardi's financial follies go on, from the $12.4 million paid to Corey Koskie for about a half-season of work, to the $85 million owed to Vernon Wells from 2011-14, a balloon payment that makes Wells one of the most immovable contracts in the game -- and that's ignoring various smaller deals that were similarly ill-advised (Billy Koch, Dave Berg, Scott Schoeneweis). Clearing Rios' salary from the books will give Toronto more flexibility to add some offensive pieces to field a more competitive team in 2010 -- but if the contract is that bad now, shouldn't we question why it was handed out in the first place?