TORONTO – The missing context behind Alex Anthopoulos’s mysterious concerns about “fit” began to emerge Monday during Mark Shapiro’s introductory news conference as Toronto Blue Jays president and CEO, provided not by the revelation of salacious detail but in a grand vision for the ball club’s future.

Words like structure, process, collaboration pointed to a new order, with the new boss not just laying down a vision, but dropping a philosophical blueprint for “an inclusive collective culture,” that works together, and not necessarily hierarchically at “arriving at the best decisions possible.”

From the sounds of things, the Blue Jays are going to be run much differently than they ever have before.

“There’s no GM in baseball that makes that call in isolation,” Shapiro said during an impressive 40-minute address with media in which he spoke confidently and authoritatively. “A good GM stewards a decision by gathering information, all the variables that exist – makeup, character, personality, medical, objective analysis, subjective analysis – they steward all that process, they arrive at a strong recommendation and ultimately I think if that process is good, my job to approve the decision is easy, it’s an easy decision.

“It’s all about the process.”

Now, it was all about the process before Shapiro, too, but before the process was established by Anthopoulos, within the parameters set by Paul Beeston, whose primary focus was on the finances. If the GM made a call and president made the money work, it happened.

The difference between the old and new processes very much hint at the “fit” issues Anthopoulos vaguely dropped as his reasons for turning down a generous five-year contract extension with an opt out after the first year. And given the mile-a-minute creativity that whizzes around the executive of the year’s brain, it’s possible he looked at the new organizational ethos and decided it doesn’t fit the way he operates.

One approach isn’t necessarily better than the other – both men have had success, but maybe they wouldn’t have functioned together.

“I don’t know any situation where there’s that much focus on pure autonomy,” said Shapiro, in response to a question about Anthopoulos’s autonomy. “Where I want to work and who I want to work with are people that are focused on arriving at the best decision. Whether that information, whether that input comes from someone in a cubicle, comes from a scout in the Pacific Northwest, comes from a trainer, comes from a strength coach in Dunedin, if it makes us better, if it helps us arrive at the best decision, that’s all that matters. I think Alex would share that.

“It’s not about autonomy, it’s about collective success.”

And really, whether the Blue Jays take the next steps on the field or not is where the ultimate judgment there now lies.

To that end Shapiro, true to his past tendency toward stability and continuity, installed Tony LaCava as interim general manager while he prepares to conduct a GM search, and announced that John Gibbons will return as manager for 2016, with the entire coaching staff also invited to return.

Good calls.

LaCava, along with assistant GM Andrew Tinnish, pro scouting director Perry Minasian and baseball information analyst Joe Sheehan, will represent the club at next week’s GM meetings in Boca Raton, Fla., charged with implementing an off-season plan started under Anthopoulos and being recalibrated under Shapiro.

While understandably vague about specifics, Shapiro made it clear he believes the Blue Jays are in the midst of a push period in their competitive window, although the depletion of the farm system’s upper levels this summer is clearly on his mind.

“It’s a team that has the capability, with a good off-season, to be a championship-calibre team next year. There’s no doubt about that,” said Shapiro. “At the same time, we’re going to seek to replenish tomorrow, six months from now, three months from now, two years from now, replenishing is going to be something we have one eye on. If you’re effectively doing your job, you’ve got one eye on today, and the urgency to win, and you’ve got one eye on the future, ensuring that you’re taking care of the future as well.”

How the Blue Jays do that will be no simple task.

They have the game’s best offence nearly entirely under club control, but will need to rebuild a starting rotation that right now has Marcus Stroman, Drew Hutchison and likely R.A. Dickey, who has a club option worth $12 million for 2016.

LaCava said the futures of Aaron Sanchez and Roberto Osuna as starters or relievers remains unsettled, but either way free agents David Price, Marco Estrada, Mark Buehrle, Mark Lowe and LaTroy Hawkins leave the entire pitching in need of significant work.

Do they ante up big to re-sign Price and Estrada? Do they dip into free agency? Do they reallocate some of their offensive assets into pitching?

“It’s situational, there’s not one way to answer that,” said Shapiro. “You build around your inherent strengths and you look to complement those strengths. In the reality of constructing a roster, unless you have an unlimited payroll, you can’t just say we’ll always have a dominant pitching staff. It’s easy to articulate what I’d ideally like to do, but in a perfect world you’re top five in runs scored and top five in runs prevented every single year. That’s going to give you a chance to be in contention year-in and year-out, you have a balanced team that both prevents runs and scores runs. If you have a prolific offence, you can build a team around a prolific offence, and this team wasn’t just a one-dimensional team last year.”

One relief for Blue Jays fans is that Beeston’s hated five-year contract max rule is gone, and while Shapiro noted that “by and large that’s probably a good stance to take,” he quickly added, “I don’t believe in absolutes.”

“In the right situation, in the right circumstance, I could foresee a seven-year deal,” he continued. “It would have to be a very unique situation and circumstance and the risk tolerance would have to be very clear in what you’re getting, but there are those situations which would justify that length of contract.”

Whether Price justifies one such situation is unknown, but it’s intriguing that Shapiro mentioned, in response to queries about whether he liked the Blue Jays’ July deal for the rental lefty, he noted that in his conversations with Anthopoulos, they discussed not only the short-term benefits but also “the long-term challenges that would need to be addressed by the organization moving forward.”

Those challenges would be no longer having the likes of Daniel Norris, Jeff Hoffman, Matt Boyd and Miguel Castro in the farm system to fill the pitching void the team faces right now.

Pitching is, of course, very expensive and difficult to get and the Blue Jays need a good whack of it.

As Shapiro put it, “We’ll maximize the benefits of those trades in the short-term right now, and we’ll continue as a baseball organization to manage against the long-term challenges. That’s just part of a baseball strategy. It’s not situational, it’s not about one person, it’s about building the best strategy to field a team capable of winning the World Series every year.”

Anthopoulos, you can be sure, had a plan, and Shapiro, no doubt, has one, too. We may never know the former, but we’re about to learn a whole lot more about the latter.

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