Roy Halladay remains a Blue Jay after today’s 4 PM Eastern non-waiver trade deadline passed and nobody “wowed” GM J.P. Ricciardi. However, his teammate Scott Rolen was moved to Cincinnati pending the waiving of a no-trade clause.

What a curious day. Don’t be confused by the Rolen trade: it’s a straight salary dump. The Jays are getting Edwin Encarnacion (and his Mendoza-line statistics) and minor league reliever Josh Roenicke in return for the Reds taking Rolen’s $11 million price tag for the rest of this year and next. Keep in mind that Rolen, a consistently solid defensive third basemen and one of the few Jays who can hit over .300, was only acquired a year and a half ago in the trade that shipped Troy Glaus to St. Louis. Glaus, of course, was acquired only two years before that for defensive wizard Orlando Hudson and pitcher Miguel Batista.

It’s a revolving door there at third base with no immediate and satisfying solution. I’m glad that all the talks of contending in 2010 cover up the fact that now the team has no one at third and a declining Lyle Overbay at first. I mean, if you’re hanging onto Roy Halladay because you think you have a shot next year, and you refuse to trade him when his value is ostensibly the highest it’s going to be, you immediately trade your most consistent bat, right?

You too can trade for Scott Rolen! Just call up J.P. and tell him you’ve got a spare bag of baseballs.

So Halladay sticks around for at least another two months and we get to root him on, which is fine for morale, I suppose, but it doesn’t help future Jays squads. The trade of Rolen demonstrates a willingness to be cheap, not a willingness to win. So why the mixed signals?

B.J. Ryan was released a few weeks ago because he was a terrible reliever, but we shouldn’t be so naive to think that his $12 million annual salary wasn’t just as good of a reason to let him go. Ricciardi has promising young pitching locked up at an extremely reasonable rate (Marcum, McGowan, Litsch, Purcey, Cecil, Richmond), so why the sudden urge to be cheap elsewhere?

It’s a head-scratching day in T.O. I can only assume that the Jays brass has some incredibly crafty plans for the offseason (here’s a tip: try signing a free agent or two!), otherwise it’s going to be a long stretch of hoping the young guns can work wonders.