The Tao of Stieb

Omar's Coming, and That Other Signing

2012-01-24T10:07:00.007-05:00

The more rational side of our brain is chastising the goofball side for giving any consideration to the Blue Jays' signing of Omar Vizquel to a minor league deal. (Especially given the news much more significant deal that dropped at almost the same time.) And yet, we just can't help ourselves.

The truth is that we'll be somewhat surprised if Vizquel actually makes the team out of Spring Training. On the other hand, the Jays have a dearth of depth in the middle infield, and we wouldn't mind if they need to keep Vizquel on the bench for the occasional pinch-running/bunting/late defensive replacement role. In other words: The Johnny Mac Role.

Moreover, Vizquel's OPS in over the past two seasons as a bench player is .647, which is better than that of whippersnappers Mike McCoy (.546), Luis Valbuena (.528) and even John McDonald (.637).

Speaking of Johnny Mac: If you tilt your head and look at this the right way, it's like the Jays have let Luke Skywalker go but managed to pick up Obi-Wan Kenobi. Vizquel was John McDonald's mentor when he was scuffling early in his career, barely keeping himself above another assignment to the Buffalo Bisons, and McDonald always spoke well of him whenever they met again on the field.

Funny, but in spite of his 23 years in the Majors and 11 Gold Gloves, we figure that every second question that Vizquel will field when and if he comes to Toronto will be: "So what's Johnny Mac really like?"

What's In a Number?: For the most part over his career, Vizquel sported number 13 in honour of Venezuelan shortstop hero Dave Concepcion. That's with the exception of last season, when manager Ozzie Guillen - another Venezuelan shortstop - had beaten him to the punch. As a result, Vizquel requested and received a special dispensation from Chicago White Sox legend Luis Aparicio - another Venezuelan shortstop - to wear his retired number 11 last season.

It seems unlikely that the Jays would have Brett Lawrie give up his uniform number for the sake of a bench player, especially after having printed up and shipped thousands of "Lawrie 13" jerseys and t-shirts this offseason. We half-joked on Twitter that maybe Vizquel could make a request to wear Robbie Alomar's number 12 next season, just to keep that particular streak of un-retiring numbers alive.

Perhaps the most fitting tribute that Vizquel could pay in these parts would be to wear John McDonald's number 6 next season. We can hardly think of a way that he'd endear himself more to the fans.

How Old Is He?: Not to bag on Vizquel too much for his age, but we'll confess to have completely forgotten about his five year stint in Seattle at the start of his career. But can you blame us? It happened 23 years ago!

A quick bit of perspective: Vizquel's rookie season took place five years before 41 year-old Darren Oliver's rookie campaign. As he headed north for the first time as a big leaguer, the number one song in America was Mike + The Mechanics' "The Living Years", and the number one movie at the Box Office was "Fletch Lives".

In his first game against the Blue Jays on April 26, 1989, he faced Dave Stieb and a lineup as follows: Lloyd Moseby, Rance Mulliniks, Ernie Whitt, George Bell, Fred McGriff, Pat Borders, Nelson Liriano, Rob Ducey, Jesse Barfield and Manuel Lee. Vizquel struck out twice, once at the hands of Stieb and again at the hands of reliever David Wells.

When Vizquel played his first game in Toronto on May 8th of 1989, the Jays' home park was still Exhibition Stadium.

And his first big league homer? July 23rd, 1989 against the Blue Jays, off of Jimmy Key.

That Other Signing: There are few Jays who we root for more than Brandon Morrow. Before last season, we sincerely thought that 2011 would be a revelatory year, and that he'd bust out into a full blown ace by the season's end.

Of course, it didn't play out that way, though we continue to take solace in the nerd stats (of which we possess the most tenuous understanding), which seem to indicate that Morrow's been incredibly unlucky in recent years. With the backing of a better outfield defense, especially with Colby Rasmus in centrefield, we're optimistic that there are better years ahead for Morrow.

Moreover, with the signifcant packages of propects that teams are giving up for Mat Latos or Gio Gonzalez, we're happy to have Morrow in the fold for the next three or four seasons. A quick scan of the ratio numbers posted by the three pitchers might lead a homer like us to believe that the Jays didn't need to empty out their farm system to get an emerging top-of-the-rotation starter.

Morrow - 10.2 K/9, 3.5 BB/9, 2.94 SO/BB

Gonzalez - 8.8 K/9, 4.1 BB/9, 2.16 SO/BB

Latos - 8.6 K/9, 2.9 BB/9, 2.98 SO/BB

If the Jays didn't already have Morrow in their system, there's a lot of us who'd be salivating at the prospect of acquiring him right about now.

The Little Things We Love About Baseball

2012-01-23T09:41:00.007-05:00

It's been a long winter already, with still two more months to go until the real games get started. And boy howdy, we're bummed out about it.

The notion that we'll spend another month talking in negative terms - what the Jays haven't done, who they haven't signed and what they won't achieve next year - is enough to make us barricade ourselves in the basement under a pile a pillows and stuffed animals, waiting for warmth of the spring to come rouse us back to a happy place.

In the midst of this pity party, we noticed a handful of fine baseball-loving folks feeding their sunnier thoughts about the game into Twitter yesterday, under the #WhyILoveBaseball hashtag. Those cheerful notions made us reflect on the little things that we love about the game, and what we look forward to seeing soon. We've collected a few off the top of our head to share with you.

Gappers: This isn't to diminish how awesome it is to see players smack-a-tater, but there's something sublime about the mounting excitement that builds when a well-hit ball gets into the outfield gap. It takes an extra second or two to figure out if any of the outfielders have any sort of play on the ball ("That ball's gonna get down!") and then the fun starts ("And it's gonna get to the wall!") If there are runners on, you've got motion around the diamond and players scoring and guys taking extra bags and cut-off throws and sliding plays at the bases. How much fun is that?

Lefty Pick Off Moves: We grew up watching Jimmy Key confound runners who attempted to distinguish between his move to first base and his move home, and there are few plays that we enjoy more than a well-executed pick off. (Skip to 1:26 of this video, from Key's induction into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame, to see Otis Nixon get got by a quick and deceiving move to first.) Conversely, nothing is quite so infuriating as to watch your own runner be picked off or lean back to the base unnecessarily. It's always a little disappointing these days to see the number of lefties who don't tend this skill, and who do little more than monitor the runner and chase him back with a soft toss.

The Number 42: We always find it a little weird when watching another sport and seeing someone wearing Jackie Robinson's number. But during the baseball season, we always like whenever a camera shot wanders over towards the retired numbers in the ballpark and finds number 42 among the local squad's honourees. It's seems to us to be a good and fitting tribute to the man, and a reminder of what to us is baseball's greatest shame.

Players Acting as Impromptu Base Coaches: Occasionally, you'll catch either the runner coming around third waving the runner behind him in to score. More often, a runner who's already crossed the plate looks back and signals to the runners behind him when and where to slide. Sometimes, a committee comprised of runners and on-deck batters gather to provide voluminous feedback to the baserunners. And sometimes the "hands-up, stand-up" signal morphs perfectly into a congratulatory high five.

Uniforms and Flair: If you've read our blog for any amount of time, you've probably picked up on how much we love baseball uniforms. The different permutations and the peculiar, one-day one-offs that pop up throughout the season are fun to see. But we also love seeing the multitude of ways that players make the uniforms their own: Wristbands, armbands, high socks, baggy pants, long sleeves, eye black, shades on, shades off, flip-downs, flat brim, taped wrists, shin guard, pine tar stains, double ear-flaps, mutli-coloured cleats and Franklin batting gloves. Just to name a few. They might not always be what we'd wear on the field of play, but the way a player dresses up his uniform always helps to differentiate him from every other player. It's always nice to see some personality out there.

Inning Ending Strikeouts: Especially as games reach their later stages, and the outs become more important (meaningful?), having your pitcher get the better of the batter is great fun. Whether if it comes from extracting a swing at something nasty or freezing the batter with an unexpected breaking ball in the zone, nothing elicits a fist pump quite like a K to end a frame. (Bonus points for the strikeouts that come accompanied by the pitcher hopping off the mound.)

That's our list, and we feel a little bit better just having shared it. How about you? What warms your baseball heart on these cold winter nights?

The Significance of Yunel Escobar

2012-01-22T21:36:00.006-05:00

The Boston Red Sox traded ex-Blue Jay Marco Scutaro to the Colorado Rockies the other day. You may be asking yourself, “Why? Who’s gonna play shortstop for them in 2012?” and you wouldn’t be alone. Unless you believe that the team is making a won’t-take-no-for-an-answer push to re-acquire Hanley Ramirez, the move doesn’t seem to make a great deal of sense for the Sox for 2012.

The players equipped to defensively handle the shortstop position are quite often poorly equipped to hit at the major-league level. Those whose bats stand out at the position often get moved elsewhere on the diamond (see Rodriguez, Alex and Cabrera, Miguel). Scutaro adequately did the job in the field and at the plate – and even though he’s clearly on the back end of his career and coming off some injuries, he’s still better than most. It’s a tough position to fill, so trading a capable shortstop and not getting one in return has the potential to be a blow to a major league roster.

Mike Aviles and Nick Punto are useful-enough big leaguers, but there’s a reason Boston is looking ahead to a platoon arrangement for the two of them: because neither of them are good enough to do the job for 140+ games on their own. Frankly, it’s a situation Jays fans know pretty well.

There was a bona fide decade of darkness in Toronto at the shortstop position until Alex Anthopoulos swung the deal sending Tim Collins, Tyler Pastornicky and, most significantly, Alex Gonzalez to the Braves for Yunel Escobar (oh, and Jo Jo Reyes too, but never mind that).

Gonzalez was really just the latest in a revolving door of marginal big league talent that had cycled through the position since the turn of the century. Setting aside our beloved John McDonald (and forgetting, as so many do, about how dismal with the bat he really is, as his career .275 OBP illustrates), the rogues’ gallery included:

Scrappygritty David Eckstein;

Prospect bust Russ Adams;

Chris “Hey, Remember Chris Gomez?” Gomez;

Chris Woodward;

A 37-year-old Mike Bordick; and

A couple partial seasons from Felipe Lopez before he was shipped out of town.

(Funny thing: Felipe Lopez was traded in part because there was a perception of middle infield depth in the system at the time. Worked out real nice in the subsequent years, dontcha think?)

Before all that, we were treated to the Other, More Handsome Alex Gonzalez, and a season of really fun craziness from Tony Batista.

In 2009 and 2010, the team basically fell ass-backwards into some above-average contributions from Scutaro and Gonzalez, but neither was a long-term fix at the position.

That never came until Gonzalez was flipped for Yunel Escobar. And since there’s Sweet Fuck All else going on in the baseball world in the depths of January, I’m going to sing his praises a little bit.

I think we take for granted just how important an addition to this team Escobar has been. In the mighty American League East, you can make a compelling case that he’s the best every-day shortstop in the division (matched up against weaker platoons in Boston and Tampa, a declining Derek Jeter, and a more one-dimensional J.J. Hardy, on whom Escobar has 40 points of career OBP at the same age).

Escobar can be penciled in at the top of the lineup card for the foreseeable future, getting on base at a respectable clip, and playing solid defensive at a premium defensive position. That, as a lot of other teams know and the Jays experienced for far too long, is worth a whole lot in the major leagues.

When the Jays do take that next step into the post-season and greater glories (as I think they will), I’m convinced we’ll look back at the Escobar acquisition as a turning point. For those of us who believe that the team is making clear, significant strides to building an organization that can reach the Holy Grail of “sustained success”, Yunel Escobar is Exhibit A.

Instant Upgrades

2012-01-15T20:40:00.004-05:00

There’s a very specific feeling I get whenever the Red Sox or the Yankees make major player acquisitions to improve their respective teams. It’s something close to pure viciousness in its ugliest form. I have friends who are Red Sox and/or Yankee fans, and in these instances my feelings toward them move beyond mere annoyance, into the realm of wanting to swing heavy blunt objects into the hoods of their cars.

Eventually I calm down, of course. Even though I’ve learned that life is one crushing defeat after another until you just wish Flanders was dead, it’s hardly worth losing sleep over something as inconsequential as baseball.

I was at a function on Friday night (ed: Oh, la-dee-da, a “function”? Hope you didn’t spill any wine spritzer on your good Metallica t-shirt), so my Twitter obsession had to take a back seat to making small talk and eating while standing for a couple hours. When I got a chance to catch up, that old familiar feeling was there waiting for me. The New York Yankees had acquired potential perennial star pitcher Michael Pineda from the Seattle Mariners, and then they went out and signed another more than serviceable arm in free agent starter Hiroki Kuroda.

Instantly, the already-toughest team in the AL East got even tougher, going from a rotation that was going to consist of CC Sabathia and no small amount of hope to one that is likely to make life pretty difficult for opponents at least 80% of the time.

Once I worked through my usual stages of rage, frustration, and resignation, I got to thinking less about how brutal it might be in 2012 for the Blue Jays to face the Yankees, and more about how the Blue Jays themselves could make a similar instant upgrade to the rotation.

If we’re to believe the scuttlebutt, Alex Anthopoulos has been burning up the phone lines in search of another reliable starting pitcher to slot in among Ricky Romero and Brandon Morrow for 2012, and perhaps beyond. And we all know what 2011’s rotation looked like apart from those two. Yes, we saw the emergence of a potential contributor in Henderson Alvarez and the feel-good story of Dustin McGowan’s return near the end of the year, but we also saw backward steps from Brett Cecil and Kyle Drabek; 110 forgettable, negative WAR innings from Jo Jo Reyes; and a selection of bullpen fill-ins and minor league call-ups rounding things out.

One can easily understand AA’s apparent eagerness to acquire an arm with more staying power, like a Mat Latos or Matt Garza. I have a certain amount of support for the idea myself, but I don’t think it will be catastrophic if it doesn’t happen before the start of the season – precisely because those remaining in-house options represent a certain amount of opportunity.

I’m not betting on all of Brett Cecil, Kyle Drabek and Dustin McGowan to step into 2012 and make big impacts. But a really oversimplified (and probably incorrect) way of looking at it is that there’s a 33.3333% chance that one of them will. A resurgent McGowan/Drabek/Cecil would mean a great deal to this team. If one out of the three were to somehow become a consistent, 2-3 WAR pitcher in 2012 (coupled with a decent full season from Alvarez and no unpleasant surprises from Romero and Morrow), the team would suddenly have four pretty nice options out of five in the rotation.

It might sound like a stretch, but Cecil put up 2.6 fWAR in 172.2 innings in 2010 before last year’s regression. McGowan, in his last mostly-healthy season in 2007, put up 3.9 fWAR in 169.2 innings, which was right there with Felix Hernandez (4.1 fWAR in 2007), Justin Verlander (also 4.1), and Cole Hamels (3.8) – all of whom pitched more innings than him. Even in 2008, he put up 2.3 fWAR in 111.1 innings. And that’s not to discount Drabek, who was one of baseball’s most highly regarded prospects for a very good reason.

If two of them were to ascend (or re-ascend) to such levels, well, in the words of the immortal Carl Weathers, baby, you got a stew goin’.
It would create the type of major-league rotation depth that most teams simply don’t have, and if they do, it’s not matched by the kind of pitching prospect depth that the Jays have also built – the kind that AA has been hesitant to part with in rumoured trades this offseason.

With this in mind, missing out on the acquisition of a starter in the off-season begins to concern me less, because it’s become apparent that AA sees mid-season and specifically the trade deadline as the time when the true impact deals can be made in his situation. He’s consistently thrown aside the notion that only “contenders” can improve when the market heats up mid-summer.

With hoarded pitching depth from which to deal at the deadline, AA’s hand would be even stronger, his flexibility and leverage greater, and the available arms to acquire possibly even more plentiful.

Friday Buffet - A Little of This, A Little of That

2012-01-13T10:12:00.004-05:00

We could have offered up another long, ponderous discussion of the relative merits of prudence versus boldness, but it's Friday, and you deserve better. Follow along as we dip our tongs into some tasty morsels.

All the Young Jays: We're not sure where in recesses of our memory last year's rookie familiarization tour has gone to hide, but we were pleasantly impressed to be reintroduced to the concept once again for the first time yesterday. (For more of the particulars on who came and what they had to say, see Mike Cormack's piece on Sportsnet.ca, and hear some of the audio gleaned from the players by Mike Wilner and Kayla Harris on Fan590.com.)

There's a reality to being the lone MLB team outside of the U.S., which is that few young players have a clear sense of what sort of city Toronto is, and what it truly means to play in Canada. For many young men who have never left their home country before their first trip across the border, demystifying the process and letting them get a taste of what awaits them when they make it to this side of the great frontier might be just enough motivation to focus their minds in the final year or so of minor league ball.

It's one thing to have a great system, but we're impressed by the forethought the Jays' management is showing in preparing the next crop of players before they get their call to The show. If nothing else, it seemed to work well for Brett Lawrie and Eric Thames last year, neither of whom would have been counted on to contribute double-digits in homers last January.

The Next Johnny Mac?: Stemming from his invitation to the Rookie Orientation, there's been a bit of chatter about Jonathan Diaz, who garnered comparisons to John McDonald for his defensive prowess.

(Which, if you think about it, is just about the highest praise that can be doled out in this part of the baseball world.)

It seemed to us as though Diaz has been scuffling around the Jays' system since our blog was in short pants, and though we remember Diaz looking good in the field in a few Spring Training contests last season, it wasn't enough to make his name pop into our head at any point in the interim. Upon a glance at his Baseball-Reference.com page, and we've come to find a different comp for Diaz: He might just be the next Mike McCoy.

Diaz is already 26 (turning 27 by the opening week of the season), which puts him into the same category of "late bloomer" as McCoy. Moreover, Diaz has shown a significant skill in getting on base (.363 OBP in six minor league seasons, .357 at Double-A and .343 at Triple-A), but he seemingly gets the bat knocked out of his hands when bringing it through the zone, slugging at a .296 clip over his minor league career.

He's managed eight homers in those six seasons and 78 doubles over those six seasons, and his base-stealing tool doesn't seem refined enough to compensate for the lack of pop in his bat (31 career steals versus 25 times caught). For comparison's sake, Mikey Mick put up a .375 OBP and .369 slugging in ten minor league seasons, getting his first taste of MLB action at the age of 28.

The Jays aren't especially deep up the middle, and one collision in shallow centrefield could see them starting McCoy and Luis Valbuena for an extended period of time next season. In that context, we could see dropping Diaz into the number nine slot and letting him bunt people over for a few weeks. Just like Johnny Mac did.

Wow...did our generalize anxiety just crank up a notch or what?

The Yoenis Cespedes Myth Machine: We have a theory about Cuban cigars, and it goes like this: Dominicans are often better, but the mythology that's built around Cubans because of how unattainable they are to Americans makes many over value them.

(Which reminds us: We really shouldn't compare human beings to tobacco products, should we?)

We'll confess to having been sucked into the hype around Cuban outfielder Yoenis Cespedes in recent months. His bizarre showcase videos (replete with Christopher Cross musical interludes, leg pressing a full stack plus two grown men, shout outs to Ahman Green and his mom and the roasting of beasts) were amusingly amateurish, and yet, they sold us.

As Cespedes saw his first action in the Dominican Winter League yesterday (three strikeouts in three at bats), Clay Davenport worked through a rough estimate on his blog of how Cespedes' Cuban league stats would translate into the Major Leagues. The article is interesting for those of you who statistically inclined, but for those who'd prefer to cut to the chase, Davenport figures Cespedes' Equivalent Average (EqA) would be around .267. (This would be an OPS around .774
with somewhere between 25 and 30 homers.)

What's intriguing to us about this is that even if the Jays were to throw themselves into the Yoenis Sweepstakes, he's likely find himself in the crowded competition for the starting left field spot, up against Eric Thames, who is two years younger (so far as we know) and posted a .263 EqA last season. Cespedes would seem from some descriptions to be a much better fielder than what we've observed from Thames, but considering the hefty price tag that the Cuban is looking to have met, this is just another expensive free agent deal that the Jays would be wise to pass up.

Catching Up - Is This It?...And Other Imponderables

2012-01-10T10:02:00.005-05:00

Having cut ourselves off from the trickle of news for the past few days, it's time to examine the droplets that have just managed to cover the bottom of our cup whilst we were out of data range.

The End of the Winter: It's difficult for us to get a decent read on yesterday's conference call with the GM, given that we picked up on it via a handful of tweets that came blasting into our mobile device once we re-entered cell range. There was a tone of resignation that came across in some the subsequent reports, with Alex Anthopoulos seemingly admitting that there wasn't much left that the Jays could reasonably accomplish, while at the same hinting that there's more that he'd like to do.

To us, the most salient quote that we read from yesterday's chinwag (as conveyed by Sportsnet.ca's Mike Cormack) was this:

"There are a lot of things we could have done this past off-season to say that we did it, but I don’t think they would have been good timing or good trades for us…I think they would have been bad."

While there are still some fans who have visions of "proven" "big bats" dancing in their heads, we appreciate the discipline that the front office is demonstrating at this point. They seem to know that there are improvements that could be made in a few areas, but they're not going to allow themselves to operate "on tilt", making dumb moves for the sake of "showing something to the fans". That's how teams end up trading for Vernon Wells. Or how someone is going to find the rationale to acquire Alfonso Soriano.

We realize prudence and forbearance aren't the things that are going to get those who are exclusively focused on a playoff berth revved up for the new season, but we've started to realize that those kids are never going to be happy, so trying to satiate their unending desire to spend someone else's money is a losing battle.

Sneaky Bullpen Signings: Even with their impressive numbers, Sergio Santos' and Darren Oliver's names were nowhere to be seen on the wish lists of fans at the conclusion of the season. And yet, those additions, along with the repatriation of Jason Frasor, will give the Blue Jays a much stronger and deeper bullpen.

Santos, Oliver and Frasor will be joined by a number of intriguing bullpen options, including Casey Janssen, Carlos Villaneuva, Joel Carreno, Jesse Litsch and Luis Perez. Moreover, there are a number of fringe arms that have the potential to contribute next season, including Trystan Magnuson (quietly reacquired in November from Oakland), Danny Farquhar and Alan Farina may fill in where injuries or performance necessitate changes.

The bullpen was probably the most glaring area in need of a fix coming into the offseason, and it appears as though the Jays have managed to find solutions for 2012. And as someone who was not always a fan of John Farrell's bullpen management last year, we'll be interested to see how he acquits himself with a stronger collection of arms at his disposal.

As for the line that was tossed about concerning Darren Oliver's league-leading intangible awesomeness in the clubhouse and his recording-setting camaraderie, the line that kept running through our head as we read those remarks were: "He has a great personality." Which is not the sort of praise about which we get excited.

Jays in Ottawa: It's somewhat well know that we make our home in the national capital, and while we weren't around for the arrival of the Winter Caravan this weekend, we were impressed with the turnout of Blue Jays fans who flocked to a local mall and lined up for hours to meet their heroes.

There's a nice video summation of the trip on the Blue Jays' website, though those who are fans of Toronto pro hockey franchise might want to avert their eyes about midway through, when the boys sport the Ottawa Senators' nifty retro jerseys. (And even if our loyalties lean towards our hometown team, we'll give J.P. Arencibia credit for demonstrating a certain amount of discomfort at wearing the uniform of his beloved #TeamUnit's rivals.)

We'd probably be getting way ahead of ourselves to hope that this augurs well for the return of an affiliated minor league team to the Capital, since support on a single winter's day doesn't mean that you'll be able to sell 250,000 tickets per year. Still, an Ottawa baseball fan can dream.

They're Doing Something Right

2012-01-08T20:58:00.004-05:00

I don’t know what the baseball offseason is like in, say, Arizona, where it stays warm all year round and a person could conceivably step out to the backyard and have a game of catch in early January without thinking twice about it.

I do, however, know what the offseason is like in Canada. In case you hadn’t noticed, it gets really freakin’ cold here. And there’s snow. And it lasts forever, or at least that’s what it feels like.

Let there be no doubt that those who settled this country a few hundred years ago were crazy people, which would be forgivable if they had foreseen that something as glorious as baseball might come along later. But they missed that too.

So today, there’s no skipping out to the neighbourhood park in January to chuck the ball around. Your ball glove is more likely packed away in the garage behind bags of salt to de-ice your driveway, a few snow shovels, and that huge box for your artificial Christmas tree.

It would be awfully easy for Canada’s only major league baseball team to just disappear from our frozen wasteland, both physically and mentally, until the spikes can at least penetrate the soil under the outfield grass again.

In fact, that’s exactly what they had been doing for several years. The season would wrap up in September; the casual fans would turn their attention to hockey or football or curling or whatever; and come April they’d need reminding that the Toronto Blue Jays still exist and play 162 baseball games every year.

The more obsessed fans, like yours truly, don’t go through this cycle, but make no mistake that a huge number of fans – and potential fans – still do. Simply allowing it to continue would represent a big missed opportunity for a team that has free rein to market itself coast-to-coast-to-coast to more than 30 million people.

The Jays used to run their “Winter Caravan” in years past as a way to try to connect with some of us, drawing us out of our igloos and ice fishing huts and what-not. For some reason, they stopped for a long time. Maybe it wasn't as successful as they'd have liked for the money they spent; I don't know. But it was an effort. Even if it was just the most dedicated fans that turned up to see a couple major-leaguers up close, at least they got the chance.

So when I took the eldest of the Org Kids with me to St. Laurent Centre (a run-of-the-mill Ottawa mall) this afternoon, I similarly expected to see maybe a few hundred hardcore fans on hand to have a brief interaction with Casey Janssen, Ricky Romero, Brett Lawrie, and J.P. Arencibia.

We got there at 12:20 for an autograph session that began at 1:30, and we were lucky to get in line in time. The lineup snaked down the mall and kept building for at least two more hours. Blue Jays caps, jerseys, t-shirts and other paraphernalia, old and new, were abundant. One guy wore a batting helmet with two Jays flags taped to it. I had no idea this kind of excitement about the Jays simmered under the surface in my city, and here it was on display.

It’s really easy to gripe about the state of the Toronto Blue Jays, the lean years since the glories of 1992 and 1993, those cheap fucks at Rogers, or the price of beer at Skydome. We generate, and are exposed to, more negativity about the game and team we love than ever before.

But today, a huge number of fans stood in line for hours to get a chance to meet four Toronto Blue Jays and maybe have them sign an autograph. I’d wager most of them didn’t get a chance, but lined up anyway. But standing there in line, I didn’t hear grumbling or moaning about Prince Fielder, Yu Darvish, or some other outrage of the week. People were just excited about the Blue Jays in Ottawa. IN JANUARY.

My five-year-old got a hug and a high-five from Ace, did the fist-bump-blow-it-up thing with Arencibia and Lawrie, got an autographed ball, and I don’t think I’ve seen him happier since he opened his presents on Christmas morning. He can’t wait for baseball season to start so he can see those guys play.

Oh, and we both got a free toque.

Sometimes we ought to recognize when this team is doing something right.

New Year, New Tweet Bag

2012-01-03T08:53:00.002-05:00

Is it back-to-work already? Oy. Upon returning to the cold climes of our home and native land last week, we were fully prepared to burrow into a hole and let our body sustain itself on its holiday meals for the next two months. Alas, duty calls.

We spent a good amount of time monastically pondering the Blue Jays over the past week or so, but before we share what we think passes for insight, we figured we'd take the pulse of the merry masses and answer some tweeted questions that have built up over the break.

First up, a two-parter from @fivetoolfitness: A. Bailey went for very little. Jays could have offered more. But so could 20 other teams. Why did he fetch so little? Same could be said for Carlos Quentin. Is there something wrong with those 2 players.

The Red Sox got Bailey for Josh Reddick, a young left-handed hitting outfielder who is about on par with Eric Thames offensively and much better defensively. For a one-inning relief pitcher with a history of elbow trouble, that sounds about right to us. Hindsight is 20/20, and we're sure that some would now be willing to offer up Travis Snider in exchange, but we're frankly not sure that the A's would have been willing to do that deal.

We like Bailey, but there is something that has bothered us about the discrepancy between his strikeout-to-walk ratio at home versus on the road. For his career, he has a 5.58 K/BB ratio in Oakland, and a 2.27 K/BB ratio everywhere else, and there's something about that discrepancy that would have scared us away from offering something better than Thames or Snider in return for a guy who might throw 60 high-leverage innings.

As for Quentin, we'll confess to not knowing much about the package that is going to Chicago in return for him, but we'd offer this as an explanation as to why it might seem underwhelming: Jays fans aren't as plugged into the prospect speculation in the Padres system as they are to their own, and it could be that those a halfway decent pieces.

The question unasked but implied here is: "Should the Jays have made a move to acquire these players?" Given the moves to bring in Jason Frasor and the previous move to acquire Sergio Santos (who we like a lot more than Bailey), and given the logjam of bats that need to get playing time at DH and LF, we'd say no.

Next up, two related questions. @GrubersMullet asks: Which of Drabek, Cecil or McGowan would be best suited as a reliever? Also, @jleegoldstein asks: Where do you see McGowan next year? Also, if Drabek doesn't have a great spring, we he be at AA or AAA?

Before we answer the questions, indulge us as we point out the depth of the Jays' pitching corps. No, the Jays did not acquire Gio or Yu or whoever else became and overnight must-have. But there's tremendous depth to the Jays' pen, with some decent options at the back of the rotation.

As to which of the three starters would be best suited as a reliever, we'd lean towards McGowan. We still think that Cecil could be a good starter if he comes into the season in shape and with his head screwed on right, and given his success last July (2.19 ERA in 37 innings), there's still reason to be optimistic.

Drabek had too much trouble throwing strikes last season for us to even ponder having him come out of the pen, and his delivery seems to take a lot of effort and is rarely repeated from what we've seen. He could very well come back this season with a clearer mind and a quieter body, but our guess is that he's sent to Las Vegas for a month (while it is still something less than scorching hot) until the Jays need an additional arm.

As for McGowan, his inspirational story overshadowed the fact that he had lots of trouble finding the strike zone in his return, though his pitches still had some heat (93.0 MPH average on his fastball) and nice tailing movement. McGowan still seems like he'll be a bit of a long shot to make the rotation, and the Jays may prefer to just establish him as a reliever and let him spend the year in the pen, crowded though it has become.

You can never have too many pitching questions, so @kyleruta asks: Do you see the jays signing a SP for a one year plus option(Francis, Oswalt etc) till the younglings are ready?

Yes, we can absolutely see the Jays taking a run at a starter who would be a third or fourth in the rotation for a year or so. Roy Oswalt will have a lot of other options, and given what's become of the starting pitching market, we'd assume that a deal with a second year or options won't be out of the question for him. Would that be something that would interest you?

Oswalt's lost something on his fastball (1.2 MPH, on average versus 2010 according to Fangraphs), but wouldn't be the worst option for the back of the Jays' rotation. Jeff Francis, on the other hand, may well be the worst option for anyone's rotation at this point. Francis strikes out fewer than five batters per nine innings (4.48/9, if exactitude is your thing), and lobs in his fastball at 84.7 MPH. You remember the Jays' former lob-ballin' lefty Brad Mills? His fastball averaged 85.6 MPH, and he got his weak stuff crushed all over the yard. Francis is not an option.

More pitching questions? But of course! @brendon_corbett asks: Joel Carreno - SP? RP? Swing man? I feel like he has the k numbers to be a closer but will he get the opportunity?

Oh, my. How we love Joel Carreno. Could he start? Absolutely. Swing man? Yes, please. Close? Sure! Why not? Ultimately, a good pitcher serves the team best by pitching as many innings as possible for them, so the preferred landing spot for Carreno if he pitches next season the way he's been hurling in our head all offseason is in the rotation.

On the other hand, we fully buy into the Earl Weaver edict that the best training ground for a young pitcher is in the bullpen, and if Carreno were to be used as a swing man or long reliever to start the season, it would give the Jays a better opportunity to assess his ability to get out big league hitters.

Those 15 innings of work for Carreno last season were pretty sterling, but the likelihood that he'll post an ERA in the low-1.00's going forward is more than a bit far fetched. He'll need to face a lot more tough hitters over a lot more innings before we can truly assess what we have in him.

And have we mentioned how much we love the idea of 100-inning relievers lately?

Apparently, the only one who cares about the offense is @sporkless, who asks: Assuming no more roster moves, is Lind is a lock to start all year? Can he lose his job by not hitting first couple months?

Yes, sort of, but yes. In spite of the fact that every jokester and pundit has already cleared out first base for any number of other options (but mostly, Prince Fielder), it seems to us that the Jays are at least committed to starting the season with Lind as the everyday first baseman.

We're still convinced that Lind's back hurt him for a significant part of last season, and that he never fully recovered from the work that he did in Spring Training to prepare for his new role at first. (Paging Dr. Tao!) Moreover, we think that in a better lineup where he can slide down to the four, five or six hole, Lind may well be headed for a better season in 2012.

It's still hard for us to understand how a player can go from a full season of a .370 OBP to two straight seasons of sub-.300, though we understand why fans have a hard time getting enthused over the idea of Adam Lind in the middle of the lineup. But we're fully willing to give Lind another shot to get back to being what we think he can be. The upside is worth it.

And that's your first tweet bag of 2012! Thanks for the questions, and feel free to give us your rational, constructive feedback in the comments.

Merry Christmas, My Babies

2011-12-24T05:18:00.002-05:00

May you all be safe and happy in the company of family and friends this holiday season.

Transcendental Blues - On Losing Darvish, and Reclaiming Perspective

2011-12-20T01:27:00.008-05:00

We can't say that we blame you if you went to bed or woke up disappointed with the news about Yu Darvish. A week full of groundless-yet-enthusiastic speculation had led all of us to the precipice of something that we thought would be great, but turned out to just another opportunity to feel your heart sink.

Still, it's worth remembering that the Darvish posting process was a far from perfect way to acquire a player, and while the Jays may have put forth a very aggressive bid, the shortfall shouldn't be held up as an exemplification of the team's unwillingness to get better. Things happen. It's a competitive marketplace, and the Jays are - as we've just found out - just one player among many trying to improve.

While you're swallowing hard and trying to keep a stiff upper lip today, keep these three things in mind:

1) The 2012 Blue Jays were already an improvement over last year's model. A full year with a focused Colby Rasmus, a bullpen that is a lot more settled than many of you give them credit for (Villaneuva-Perez-Litsch-Carreno-Janssen-Santos, with more to come), a full year with Edwin Encarnacion at DH (where he posted an .855 OPS last year), and a full season of Brett Lawrie is something that we want to see, and that we still contend can win 90 games without any further additions.

2) There are no guarantees. Maybe Darvish could have been the difference between the Jays running away with the East, or another third or fourth place finish. But it's unlikely that one player who had never so much as thrown a pitch in North America would be that difference-maker. Maybe he catches a spike in Dunedin, or maybe he'd only have been great in the Texas heat. We'll never know, and we shouldn't posture as though we do.

3) The offseason isn't over yet. There's still moves to be made, and you have to know based on recent events that Alex Anthopoulos will be working hard to bring another arm and another bat to the Jays before they congregate in Dunedin this February. Maybe there will be something marginal coming, or maybe there's a big deal to be signed or consummated before then. Either way, this is not the end of hope.

And that right there is the thing. Hope. It's as enthralling as it is infuriating. It's the thing that's kept us awake all night, blogging at 2 AM, trying to sort out what comes next. The trouble is that we can't pretend to know, as much as we want and feel like we need to.

But that's also the fun of being a baseball fan. If you need guarantee of meaningful games next year before you'll commit to coming along for the ride, you may well miss something extraordinary. We tweeted late last night that there is a certain amount of suffering that is implicit with being a fan, but that this is one of the great things about the game. As Bob Dylan sang: For those that lose now will be later win.

Transcendence - shedding what you are and becoming a greater version of yourself - is a painful process. It hurts. But the pain is there as a future reminder of what we've gone through, and what makes the greater moments all that they are.

After last night, we've all got one more scar. One day, we'll all compare them, and celebrate them, and recognize them as a signpost on the road in our rearview mirror. And this one will barely register as much of anything at all from that perspective.

This is all prologue.

A Few Things About Yu

2011-12-19T10:21:00.005-05:00

We were always told that there's a treacherous distance between a cup and a lip, so we've spent much of the past two days bringing down our heart rate and bracing ourselves for bad news on the Yu Darvish front.

In the absence of leaks or information upon which to report, virtually every story over the past week has taken it as a given that the Jays were going to be aggressive in their bid for the Japanese hurler, and likely more so than anyone else. Those comments are mostly just baseball's chattering class spouting off conventional wisdom, but Blue Jays fans (yours truly included) have let the possibilities dance about our heads like so many visions of sugarplums over the past week.

As apprehensive as we have been to give into it completely, Yu-mania has been a welcome respite from the offseason of anger and recriminations over the perceived lack of commitment on the part of Rogers to empty out their bottomless buckets of cash for this guy or that one, and mostly, the fat expensive one. Getting excited about the possibilities with Darvish in the fold is undeniably fun, and incredibly contagious.

Making the speculation all the more compelling is the fact that even a blowout deal for Darvish could be less expensive than Fielder, and a smarter investment for the Blue Jays. It's possible that Darvish might find North American umpires less in awe of his pitches on the edges of the strikezone, or that his fastballs up in the zone get hit harder than he could ever have imagined. But even if that is the case, the posting fee paid by the Jays will be a front-end sunk cost, and the contract won't be so onerous as to impede them from either moving him should the need arise.

You see what we did there? We don't even have Yu Darvish, and already, we're speculating on moving him. That's the insanity of this moment.

Mini-Tweet Bag: Answers to a Few of Your Tweeted Questions
Because it's been awhile, we figured we'd answer a few tweeted questions, especially since there are so many pertinent questions to be answered.

@VictorVitaliano asks: If the Jays land Darvish, do you think they should go all in on Fielder?

No. We don't think the Jays should go all in on Fielder, regardless of what happens with Darvish. Fielder wants too many years, and we don't want to see the Jays as the team paying him $25 million six or seven or eight years down the road. If something under five years for Prince were to pop up, we'd consider thinking about it. But we're beyond exhausted with this discussion.

@bwoolley12 asks: What's a reasonable amount of years/dollars for this guy?

Assuming "this guy" is Darvish, we'd think five-to-six years at $12-to-14 million per year. Somewhere just under the money that C.J. Wilson received, though we think that Darvish will be the much better purchase.

@captainlatte asks: In 30 days, will Prince still be available?

We'd guess that a deal gets done before then, but not by much. If the Jays get their man in Darvish, we'd guess that the Rangers may take a run at Fielder. But we think that Scott Boras will keep Prince out on the market as long as possible to make him some team's last desperate gasp this winter.

@djanssen4 asks: Who hits more home runs next year, Kelly Johnson or Colby Rasmus?

Barring injury, we'd say Rasmus by a fairly comfortable margin. People forget what a coup it was acquiring him, and he'll be a significant contributor to the Jays' success this year.

@PrinceDeRozan asks: If the #Jays get Darvish are they done improving the team this off season?

No, we think there is still another deal to bring in a bat, either by free agency or by trade. And there will be a few additions to the bullpen which we think will be marginal, but who knows. We've been shocked by Alex Anthopoulos before.

Mood Music for the Yu-letide
Fox Sports' Jon Morosi noted that the announcement of who's bid won should come this evening, perhaps around 9 pm. In the interim, we'll be blasting Europe's The Final Countdown all day to get psyched for the hopefully positive news.

'Twas the Night Before Darvish-mas

2011-12-18T22:27:00.003-05:00

It occurred to me, as the last weekend before Christmas flew by in a blur of sugar cookies, Bailey’s and Pot of Gold chocolates, that this was likely going to be the last time I rapped at ya for 2011. I’m probably not going to get to a weekend post over Christmas, nor over New Year’s. You’ll have to find something else to occupy yourselves. Family, maybe. I dunno.

(Thankfully our host the Tao has improved his labour practices ever since the Ack filed that grievance over being chained to a radiator and forced to blog every weekend under threat of having his legs crushed the same way Kathy Bates did to James Caan in “Misery”. My punishment for taking the Christmas season off will be limited to a standard bullwhipping.)

Besides, it would be a bit anticlimactic for me to post something on the Christmas weekend when we’re all finding out by Tuesday whether we got just what we wanted, no? The Yu Darvish posting. It’s the Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle of this Blue Jays offseason. It’s the one piece of news for which we are all waiting and salivating, like a pack of pathetic dogs.

Of course, there are always a few party-poopers. The rational part of me wants to nod knowingly with those who are trying to warn me about a Darvish let-down.

But the fan part of me – and I am a fan, first and foremost – wants to see the team get better. And this is what has me so conflicted about the Darvish thing. As excited as I am about the prospect of a potential ace joining the Jays’ rotation, the fact that the ace in question is shrouded in such mystery has rendered me somewhat unsure. In my gut, I think the team would be a helluva lot better with Yu Darvish toeing the rubber every fifth day. But I don’t know that.

If the team were looking to add a CC Sabathia (or reacquire a Roy Halladay), I would know, based on reams of facts, that those players would improve the team. I would pencil in a certain number of wins, just based on their expected contributions. But for a player who has never played Major League Baseball, those facts are less copious, and by extension the expected contributions are more of a guessing game. So I have a lot more trouble getting that kid-before-Christmas feeling for Darvish as I might for an established major leaguer.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t loads of fun, though. There’s really no comparison in any other sport to this enigmatic posting system. Yes, for me, the secrecy of the process and the unfamiliarity with the player create a certain ambivalence. But all the same, it’s pretty damn riveting to follow. I didn’t pay much attention to the Daisuke Matsuzaka posting when it happened so I don’t now what the rumour mill was like around that, but holy cripes has this Darvish thing been a hoot to watch – and we still don’t even have a result.

Tuesday is going to be another crazy, exciting day, whether the Jays land the rights to Darvish or not. A hundred different storylines will spring from it, depending on what happens. As a blogger, and a baseball fan, that’s the kind of early Christmas present I’ll always put at the top of my wish list.

Two more sleeps.

Ben Francisco Is...Something?

2011-12-13T16:00:00.000-05:00

Life in the Era of Alex Anthopoulos is a stitch, isn't it?

The Jays acquired outfielder Ben Francisco from the Phillies yesterday afternoon for pitcher Frank Gailey. (And seriously, who on Earth is Frank Gailey?) Before we'd even made it through 50 characters of the tweet officially announcing the transaction, we were short of breath, dizzy with the possibilities of what the next move in the sequence might be. Was this Travis Snider's final moments in our laundry? Was Gio Gonzalez on his way to walk 90 batters in a Blue Jays uniform next season?

By the time 5 pm rolled around and Alex Anthopoulos' conference call comments began getting tweeted out, and it was clear that there were no subsequent moves to come, we were more than a little confused. So, Ben Francisco is really here to stay?

In trying to wrap our heads around the move, we thought for a moment about Earl Weaver, and his notion that a team needn't have more than nine pitchers, including four starters. That's a tough sell now, but having six position players on the bench so that you can work platoon advantages in your favour is not the worst idea we could think of. Sure, you might wish that Travis Snider would learn to hit lefties, but let's pretend that a pool of rabid gators is going to be let loose on your meaty posterior unless the Jays win 94 games: Would you run Francisco out against left-handed pitchers? Yer darn tootin' you would!

(Setting aside, of course, the bizarrely even platoon splits that Francisco himself has, he would be a better option against the southpaws than Snider, Thames, or maybe even Rasmus.)

Not that we think that any of this actually happens. We're still doubtful that Francisco - supposing he even makes the team - plays as often as Corey Patterson did last year, and we're still assuming that John Farrell would prefer more choice in the bullpen than on the bench. But the notion that the team might work in some regular platoons at first, second and in left appeals to us. If that's where this outfield pileup nets out, we'll be happy to see it.

Scrap Heap Dreaming
There were 29 men set loose and left untendered at the deadline to...um, tender. It's an inauspicious list, though if we had to pore through it (and why wouldn't we?), here are a few notable names that we might consider.

-Hong-Chih Kuo: Sky high walk rates (7.0/9) and injury derailed him in 2011, but for a modest contract (something under the $2.75 million he made last year), we'd think he'd be a decent fit towards the back of the Jays' pen.

-Ryan Spilborghs: Because who couldn't use one extra outfielder in the mix? We like the .360 OBP in 2010, and wouldn't mind him as a bench player.

-Eli Whiteside: Not so much for his bat or his ability to handle pitchers. But he couldn't be that much worse than Jeff Mathis, and he has the most awesome surname-to-hair relationship in the Majors. He could be a Bond villain.

-Joe Saunders: Or as we'll affectionately refer to him, "Joe-Joe Saunders". (Incidentally, Jo-Jo Reyes IS available. But let's not go there.) Saunders is a classic innings-eater, and wouldn't be much more than a fifth starter, but he wouldn't be a bad option to have around given the questions around Kyle Drabek, Jesse Litsch and Dustin McGowan going into the season.

-Jeremy Hermida: We'll always advocate for Jeremy Hermida. We always add him in deep fantasy leagues and on video games, and we'll always remember the year he hit 84 homers for us in a season of 2K baseball. Sign him up, because we can't quit Hermida.

Money on the Bench

2011-12-11T19:46:00.006-05:00

In the mass panic and outrage surrounding the Toronto Blue Jays' obstinate refusal to improve their team by dropping a pallet of Robert Borden-emblazoned bills in Prince Fielder's backyard this past week, a few folks put their pitchforks and torches down long enough to pop over to the invaluable Cot's Baseball Contracts, where they discovered (or were reminded) that Mark Teahen remains the second-highest paid player in the organization. (He can be expected to fall behind Kelly Johnson once his compensation is settled either through arbitration or another contract.)

I was half-joking when I tweeted, "I always forget about that guy", but the fact is, for a player slated to make $5.5 million this year, he's not exactly top-of-mind.

Teahen's presence as a Jay, of course, is part of the price the team was willing to pay to acquire Colby Rasmus at last year's trade deadline, along with having to sit through a certain number of excruciating outings from the likes of Brian Tallet and Trever Miller. Teahen had been having an abysmal season with the Chicago White Sox, a team that faced no shortage of highly-paid underperformers. Teahen wasn't (and isn't) getting Adam Dunn or Alex Rios money, but he'd played himself out of a full-time job despite his contract. He didn't have a full time job awaiting him in Toronto either. This was a straight case of the Jays taking on a not-so-good contract to grease the skids in acquiring the player they really wanted.

Yet surprisingly, in some circles Teahen's salary was highlighted last week as an example of just how unwilling the Jays' ownership is to "spend to contend". How, the thinking goes, could a team with a true commitment to winning make such a cast-off its second-highest paid player? Surely the dollars are there if they're willing to spend so many of them on a glorified bench player like Teahen.

To me, though, this is yet another obvious illustration of an INCREASED willingness to spend in order to get the players that the team feels it needs to set a foundation for that Holy Grail of "sustained success". It jibes completely with sending extra money to Philadelphia to get premium prospects back in the Roy Halladay trade; being aggressive and spending big in the draft; beefing up the entire scouting department and going hard after international free agents.

I don't intend to get into an argument here about whether I'm right about the team's willingness to spend. That ground has been well covered by plenty of smart people.

Regardless of how much any team spends, it's never a good investment if the money doesn't see the field. Even Yankee and Red Sox fans get a little bent out of shape over big-money deals that don't produce on-field results, and if you don't believe me, ask a Sox fan what they think of the John Lackey contract, or a Yankee fan to chat over coffee about the AJ Burnett contract.

So what do the Jays do, now that they've got another ugly contract on their hands for Teahen? Well, on the plus side, it doesn't look much like the guy's been promised anything, and the contract runs out at the end of this year. He can play a few positions; he seems reasonably healthy; he's only 30 years old; he's had a decent amount of big league success. There are plenty of teams with far worse bench options than him.

Still, it would seem to be at odds with the Jays' broader modus operandi to have a rather bloated price tag attached to such a marginal player. But the saving grace is that were he on the roster at this time last year, there's a fair chance he would have been seen as an everyday player at some position -- which speaks very highly of the upgrades the team has made since.

Just trading the guy is easier said than done. The reasons he's not filling any gaping needs in Toronto are the same ones that make it hard to find a match elsewhere. Moreover, if the Jays were resigned to simply DFAing him and eating the rest of the contract, I have a feeling they would have done it already.

As fans, it might be best to shift gears from fretting about this depressed and overpriced asset, toward hoping he can rebuild some value. Andruw Jones, for instance, acquitted himself nicely as a part-time player in New York, to the point where bringing him back in a similar role seems more like a value play than a scrap-heap guessing game.

When those guys start eating into playing and development time for younger and more promising players (see Patterson, Corey), that's a problem. But maybe we shouldn't mind if the team keeps a veteran bat like Teahen around, even at $5.5 million, to spell the ultra-intense Brett Lawrie from time to time, or grab some DH at-bats. Maybe he embraces a new role and provides a certain spark in the action he gets. Maybe he becomes a useful throw-in for one of those mid-season trades that Alex Anthopoulos loves so much.

Why not find out? You're on the hook for the money anyway.

On Payroll, Mixed Messages and Marginal Improvements

2011-12-09T11:01:00.006-05:00

Coming at it purely from the fan's point of view, it's hard to make heads or tails of this week's Winter Meetings.

The Blue Jays certainly were able to address the two primary areas that required tending when they made an astute trade for closer Sergio Santos and had Kelly Johnson accept arbitration, presumably to fill their hole at second base. In a vacuum, we'd be happy with those developments, and look forward to perhaps another deal or two to come to fruition before pitchers and catchers report. But in the wake of a Winter Meetings which returned to its former glory as a jamboree of signings, we've been flooded over the past week with angry tweets and notes focused on what the team didn't do, and how through their reticence to engage in the free agent market, they've failed to keep pace.

Our primary interest in the Blue Jays' success remains on the field, and we want to see the team built into a perpetual contender. This is not just about wanting to see "meaningful games" one year, but about building the foundation for a team that is always in the mix. That means spending on scouting, buying lots of lottery tickets in the form of draft picks and international free agents, and signing those emerging stars to club-friendly deals early on. From our perspective, the long term success of a team comes from within, and not by adding big contracts to demonstrate a "commitment to winning" to the fans.

But tied into the team's fortunes is its success off the field, and what frankly scares us going into the 2012 season is that a step back on the field could be disastrous to the team's conversational capital in the inherently cynical and nasty Toronto sports market. The smart moves made by the new regime and some exciting play on the field has brought back a set of fans who had checked out over the past decade or more. But spending money - BIG money - on free agents still seems in the mind of so many fans to be the exemplification of commitment, and a demonstration of the team's readiness to compete.

For those who had made the signing of Prince Fielder to be a moral imperative for the Jays, any step back,status quo or even gains that are too modest will constitute an abject failure to capture the moment. "You gotta spend if you want to compete with the big boys", they tell us.

(This morning's announcement that Rogers will buy a portion of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment only serves to further muddy those waters, and leave Jays fans apprehensive about the ownership's interest in the baseball team's success.)

It bears a mention here that the Boston Red Sox have made more splashy big offseason moves than any other team in baseball, and yet, they have missed the playoffs for two consecutive seasons and haven't won a playoff game since 2008. Carl Crawford, John Lackey, Adrian Gonzalez, J.D. Drew, Bobby Jenks, Marco Scutaro...all were considered big deals when they were acquired, but none of them have contributed to the team's relative success as much as the homegrown core of talent, including Dustin Pedroia, Jacoby Ellsbury, John Lester and Kevin Youkilis. And none of the acquisitions were enough to "guarantee" success, as many have attempted to convince us that the signing of Fielder clearly would for the Jays.

To be a bit less charitable to the Jays front office, we'd point out that they are beginning to reap the fruits of a media and fan relations strategy that is elusive at best, and illusory at worst. The desire to keep the team's budget a mystery is understandable from the point of view of the competitive marketplace, but the artfully dodgy allusions to growing the Major League player budget leads to an increased appetite to see that growth happen sooner. If you tell the fans and media that you can and will increase payroll when needed, the message that is sent when the payroll is not expanded is: "We're not ready to win yet."

We're not sure that giving a hard, self-imposed cap number would necessarily be more beneficial, as it might just feed the cynicism by making the gap between the Blue Jays and the bigger payrolls more obvious. But floating the $120 million figure, as Paul Beeston has on numerous occasions, has only served to create a desire to hit that number as soon as possible, whatever the consequences for the team.

Spending like sailors on Fleet Week is not the path to long-term, sustained success. We'd far prefer for the Jays to sign deals like the five-year, $14 million deal that the Rays just signed with Matt Moore as opposed to the five-year, $77.5 million deal that the Angels signed with C.J. Wilson. This isn't just a matter of being cheap, but it's a matter of maximizing every dollar spent for a team that doesn't have unlimited resources.

The deals that the Blue Jays have made over the past week were astute, and make the team better. So why the misery?

On "Parameters": The payroll elusiveness mentioned helped to fuel the parsing of the word "parameter", when it was dropped by Alex Anthopoulos earlier this week. We'll defer to some of the reporters who were on site, because they look the GM in the eyes when he talks about these matters and probably have a far clearer tableau from which to read than we do. But our initial take on the use of the term was this: The Blue Jays have several interwoven budgets, which include all aspects of the team's operations and which have clear dollar figures attached. However, they also have the ability to come back and make budgetary adjustments throughout the year if they can make a case that a modest investment in mid-stream could provide a short-term return.

In plain English: They'll be able to add a player with a large salary in mid-season if it provides a reasonable expectation of added playoff gates to the bottom line.

This is why we think Anthopoulos tends to punt discussions of bigger acquisitions to the trade deadline. It seems like an entirely defensible policy, though it won't do much to warm the hearts of Blue Jays fans through the Winter.

Observations on the Winter Meetings from a Distance

2011-12-06T12:16:00.007-05:00

(From a distance...do we all have the sounds of hoary Bette Midler treacle assaulting our brains now? Awesome...)

We're miles and kilometres and then some away from the action in Dallas, so all of our Winter Meetings observations are being made through eyes that are straining to keep up with every tweet and bleep that pops across our screen. Most of this is conjecture and speculation at this point, but we'd offer a few thoughts that have coalesced here, far from the action.

Big Deal! Jays trade Nestor Molina for Sergio Santos: This deal popped up just as we were about to joke about the lack of action, so it goes to show what we know.

The curious aspect of this deal is the fact that Santos is returning to the Jays after having been in the organization as the prospect thrown into the Troy Glaus deal. We remember subsequently seeing Santos as a SS-converted-to-3B with the Syracuse SkyChiefs, and thinking that while he had a great build, the finer skills (infield footwork and strikezone judgment) eluded him.

In his new role as a power reliever, we'll confess to having a twinge of jealousy having watched him evolve into a big nasty hurler who throws mid-to-high 90's with a nasty slider. So there is some satisfaction in repatriating him. We love those crazy strikeout per nine numbers (13.01!), though the high walk totals (4.12 per nine) might have a tougher time playing in the AL East. (Where umpires defer their decision on close pitches to the Red Sox and Yankees' batters. Bitter!)

The cost - 22 year-old Nestor Molina - is probably a little higher than we'd have liked, especially since we'd started to consider him as THE pitching prospect in the Jays' system. Still, Santos is signed to a very club-friendly deal (three years, $8.25 million with club options that could make it six years and $30 million), and we'd guess that in spite of an all-out delivery, his arm doesn't have that much wear and tear on it. Yet.

Mostly, though, this is the "proven closer" deal for which the casual fans clamoured. Are you happy?

And now, second base: The main observation that we'd had before the Santos news broke was how many potential second base names were being floated as possibilities for the Jays.

We'd mentioned the White Sox' Gordon Beckham as a possibility last week, and part of our subsequent reaction to the Santos deal was that it likely closed the door on more dealings with the Southsiders. However, intrepid Fan 590 radio reporter Mike Wilner tweeted that Jays GM Alex Anthopoulos mentioned that other deals between the two teams are still being discussed.

Aside from that, the names of the Braves' Martin Prado and Angels' Alberto Callaspo have been mentioned as possibilities through the digital scuttlebutt. We've got a soft spot for both players - they often make their way onto our MLB The Show franchises - and both are cheap and controllable, which is something for which Anthopoulos has a sweet spot. Callaspo made $2 million last year, and has two more arbitration years remaining, while Prado is in the same situation and made $3.1 million. (All contract details come from Cot's Baseball Contracts. Much thanks and praise to them.)

Another aspect of their games that Prado and Callaspo share is that they are jacks of all trades in the field, though masters of none. In fact, both do quite poorly in UZR/150's assessment of their work up the middle, with Callaspo posting a -6.8 for his career and Prado even worse, at -8.4. (Callaspo had great numbers at third base, but given how antsy we feel about UZR in the first place, we're not certain whether if that is as a result of a flaw in the formula,for better or worse.)

The other name popping up was the Mets' 26 year-old Daniel Murphy, who posted a very respectable line of .362 OBP/.448 SLG/.809 OPS in 2011. On the other hand, it seems as though the Mets have tried to hide him all over the diamond, and might we remind you that they thought so highly of Murphy's second base word last year that they started the season with Brad Emaus as their everyday option?

All of this discussion is academic should Kelly Johnson accept arbitration by midnight ~~tonight~~ tomorrow. But suffice to say that even the decent options at second are flawed, and another year of Johnson might not be the worst chioce for the Jays.

Because we know you're obsessed, a thought on Fielder: We'd actually started to cave earlier this week, and started to make the argument for going to get Prince Fielder. For the right deal, we supposed, he might just be worth the risk. And with it possibly being a buyers market, couldn't the Jays manage to get him on a shorter (i.e. five-year) deal?

But where this falls apart in our mind is that we suspect that any deal that the Jays could make, the Brewers could and would match. We're finding it hard to imagine the Jays finding the minute point of distinction that would be within their means and their philosophy but above the Brewers' capacity.

And besides, the Cubs and Cardinals might both be looking for a big first base bat, and we suspect that both would go six years or more at top dollar for the big man.

Smart Shopping

2011-12-04T21:27:00.005-05:00

Before the Org Wife and I got married and had kids, I had a different view of what I was willing to spend for things I wanted, based on the reasons I wanted them. For instance, in those days we could pack up for a cheap-ish Caribbean holiday and not worry too much about how many stars the resort had. As long as there was a beach, an all-inclusive food and adult beverage plan, golf, warm weather and transportation to and from the airport, we didn’t require much else.

When you have kids, though, the calculation changes. Your quick, last-minute jaunt down south isn’t so easy, and to find a vacation that meets your needs, you can’t skimp on the extras you didn’t need six years ago. We’re way more willing now to spend some extra cash on a freakin’ Disney cruise, because it seems like a better way to manage the rugrats than leaving them in a Dominican “kids club” that may or may not be a cover for a child-trafficking ring.

As the Winter Meetings kick off, it remains an open question as to whether the Toronto Blue Jays are in the mindset of the carefree young couple, willing to pay the minimum just to be a part of things, or if they’re maturing and becoming more discriminating in their tastes, matching their specific needs.

If you judged by their most recent acquisitions, you’d guess that they haven’t quite moved up to shopping at Holt Renfrew after years at the flea market. They needed a second baseman; they paid next to nothing to get Luis Valbuena out of the Indians organization. They needed a backup catcher; they gave up a Quad-A lefty soft-tosser to get the much-maligned Jeff Mathis (much-maligned because he is, by most reasonable assessments, a horrible baseball player).

They had gaps to fill, so they filled them with a couple of the cheapest passable options available. To further torture the domestic metaphor, their old IKEA end table had a leg break off and the lamp that sat on it fell and shattered, so they went back to IKEA and bought a cheap new table and lamp. The new table is too short and the new lamp is kind of ugly, but they’ll work fine until they break and they need new ones again.

In a lot of other ways, though, this team has been buying like grown-ups. They’ve spent their biggest money in smart ways – on players like Ricky Romero and Jose Bautista. When they’ve taken on riskier players, the money and terms have been aimed at mitigating that risk (see club options on extensions signed with Adam Lind and Yunel Escobar), making the players more easily tradable or otherwise expendable.

Alex Anthopoulos has said on more than one occasion that he’s not inclined to force things when it comes to making a deal for any one player that the organization somehow becomes convinced it must have, because that’s a recipe for bad deals. Anthopoulos has a well-known reputation for being interested in every single player, checking in on them and knowing that there’s a top-end price he’d be willing to pay based on what their talent level is, and what they might bring to the Jays. Smart shopping, in other words.

That doesn’t mean that signing a guy like Prince Fielder would somehow be dumb shopping. The Jays wouldn’t necessarily be shelling out too much money for too long, taking on too much risk. It’s just that you don’t shop for guys like Prince Fielder at garage sales or funky little consignment boutiques. You’re shopping in the swankiest stores on the High Street, and dealing with commissioned salespeople. And they’re not offering you a ten-year warranty if you make the purchase – you’re on the hook for better or worse. So you better be sure of what you’re getting, and comfortable with what you’re paying.

Teams shouldn’t let those kind of higher stakes push them into a mode of perpetual bargain hunting, though, and I don’t think that’s all Anthopoulos will be doing at the Winter Meetings and beyond. As cynical as I am about the rumour-mongering done by agents through the media, it’s impossible to say that the team isn't in on the biggest names out there.

But the criteria for acquiring elite talent have to be, in the end, fairly simple, and the same as the ones used for picking up cheap replacements: the right player, and the right price. That’s a pretty good motto. Hope the Jays stick to it.

Winter Wonderland! Tao's Wish List for the Winter Meetings

2011-12-02T11:42:00.002-05:00

You may disagree for your own reasons, but we happen to think that we've been a pretty good boy all year long. As such, we feel well within our rights to make our wish list for theWinter Solstice Baseball Festival of Signings and Meetings a long one this year. So with the meetings starting this weekend, here are a few of the little goodies that we'd like to find in our stirrup socks, currently hung by the mantle with such care.

(And by the way, did you realize that the original Santa Claus was Greek, just like our beloved GM? Nikolaos of Myra. You can look it up.)

As we are avoiding a discussion of some of the larger free agents - quite literally larger! - we'll confess that some of the names here come off more as though we were spitballing over late round picks in our forthcoming rotisserie draft. Still, with so many of the starting slots on the roster mostly occupied, the name of the game remains finding under-appreciated assets and getting maximum return for them.

This list is in no way intended to be predictive of what will happen, but merely a few of our humble requests.

Trade for Gordon Beckham - This is probably a reiteration of last year's "trade for Alex Gordon" request, but the rationale remains the same: Beckham is reaching the bottom of his value, with declining returns over the past few seasons. It's hard to parse through his stats and find the upside, but on the other hand, he's still just 25, and his worst output an OBP of .298. He'd be a 10-15 homer guy who could play the field well and as a number 8 or 9 hitter in the Jays' lineup, there would be little pressure on him to live up to any "top prospect" reputation. We'd give up two sacks of magic beans for him.

Trade for Howard Kendrick - We've always had a soft spot for Kendrick, and as he enters his final season in his current contract with the Angelenos, we wonder if the Jays may be able to pry him loose for something in the range of two and a half sacks of magic beans. He emerged last year as a bit more of a power threat (18 dingers), and UZR loved him as a second baseman this year (19.7, after a -7.3 the year before). Second base is pretty thin, and his output would rank him in the top third for the next few years. Can also play first and left field in a pinch.

Trade for Andrew Bailey - There's something that we don't trust about pitchers in Oakland, given the number of times they are saved by foul balls that don't make it to the stands. (Argue of you must, but we're absolutely convinced that this shaves a full run off their ERAs.) Nevertheless, Bailey still strikes out close to a batter per inning, keeps his walks down and slings it in the mid-90's. If the Jays need to rebuild their bullpen, going with a 27 year-old option might make more sense than an aged "proven" closer.

Trade for Huston Street - For some reason, we were convinced that Street was an old geezer, perhaps because he's been around so long. But when the season starts, he'll only be 28 - if you can believe his Texas birth certificate - though his price will likely be higher than Bailey (four satchels of pixie dust?) Street's numbers stand up pretty well 8.49 K/9, 1.39 BB/9 last year, throwing a fastball with an average velocity of 90.1 MPH, which is about on par with the rest of his career. And he's managed to do well for himself in Coors Field, for whatever that's worth.

Sign Joel Zumaya - Zumaya's 2010 was vaguely disastrous, when he lost all control of his pitches and began walking 6.39 batters per nine. But the 27 year-old came back to respectability last year with a line of 7.98 strikeouts, 2.58 walks and 0.23 homers per nine. As a power arm (his fastball still averages 99.3 MPH), Zumaya would be a decent pick up, provided the market doesn't push him into the three-year contract territory.

Sign Relievers to One-Year Deals - David Aardsma (29) can still hit the mid 90's, and might not merit a two-year deal. Mike Gonzalez (34) held lefties to a .574 OPS last year, though he is repped by Scott Boras and the Yankees are apparently interested. LaTroy Hawkins (37) isn't the worst idea we could think of. Chad Qualls might be worth a cheap and short deal as well. Really, they could just walk the streets of Dallas and look for someone who wears their pants better than Shawn Camp.

Sign a Backup Catcher- Chris Snyder seems to be the preferred option from what we've seen around the other Jays blogs, and his career .333 OBP is probably worth a year-plus-option offer, supposing the Jays want to go that far. Otherwise, Kelly Shoppach looked like one of the cast of extras from The Walking Dead last year, though without all the walking. Ivan Rodriguez hasn't really had a good season at the plate since 2004, but as a one-year option to step in be a catch-and-throw guy, we wouldn't mind him as the short-term solution.

So you see: We're not asking for much. No big blowout signings and no trades to empty the system of our lottery tickets for the next three years. Just a few parts here and there, just to fill the team out for the first few months of the year.

Now feel free to launch your litany of tirades over our lack of interest in the shiniest of the holiday toys. We understand their appeal, but we're simple folk around here.

The Eternal Internal Conflict over Eric Thames (and What It Means, If Anything...)

2011-11-28T16:57:00.007-05:00

There is no player over whom we've agonized more this offseason than Eric Thames. In fact, we've likely pondered the sophomore outfielder more than all other Jays combined since the season's end. It's somewhat maddening.

We've actually begun writing this piece and set it aside a half-dozen times, because we never felt like it was that worthy of being written in the first place. Or we had never quite sold ourselves on the notion that we were expressing ourselves correctly when trying to figure out why we're so fixated on him.

It's taken some time, but we ascribe our exceeding interest in Thames to four things:

1) His position relative in the pileup of players who might get playing time in left field this season: The Blue Jays are going to have to find room for Thames, Edwin Encarnacion, Travis Snider, and Rajai Davis to get at bats this season between the DH and LF. Were we to come into this equation after a year's coma, sorting out who slots in where would be fairly simple, with EE getting the DH at bats, Rajai getting pinch running duty, Thames taking the everyday at bats and Snider plying his trade in Las Vegas or elsewhere.

Of course, we've a five-year history with Travis, and we keep finding the reasons why he makes sense for the future of the franchise. Add to that the fact that Rajai has probably produced more than either of the youngsters, and our dubious view of Thames' defense, and somehow, it still seems muddled.

2) The discrepancy between the general perception and our perception of him: This has more to do with the casual manner in which Thames has been dismissed as a lousy outfielder with a poor OBP who doesn't merit a slot in the lineup of a team that fancies itself as a contender for a Wild Card spot in 2012. (More on that below.) We hope we're not creating a straw man to scorch, but our sense is that Thames doesn't have a widespread base of support amongst the Blue Jays blogging cognoscenti. But when we watch that quick bat go screaming through the hitting zone, and when we see Thames square up the ball and hit it as hard as anyone outside of Bautista, it seems to us though he has the most important tool in his arsenal, and some remaining headroom before he reaches his ceiling.

Thames' .333 weighted on base average was the fourth best among Jays with more than 200 at bats last year, trailing José Bautista by nautical miles, but also trailing Yunel Escobar (.345) and Edwin Encarnacion (.344) by a somewhat slim margin. His isolated power of .193 was third-best, behind Bautista and J.P. Arencibia, and ahead of Escobar, Encarnacion and Lind.

In fact, it is hardly a stretch to state that Thames is the fourth best bat on this team as it stands today. The .313 OBP is not great by any means, but it bears mentioning that Texas corner outfielder Nelson Cruz actually posted a .312 OBP, and we're pretty certain that there would be joy throughout the land if he were to suddenly find his way into the Jays' lineup next season.

3) The Blue Jays no longer have the luxury of lollygagging around waiting to see if some of this potential turns into something tangibly valuable: Further to what we stated above, the Eternal Building Process seems to have been cut short in the minds of many fans over the past few weeks, and there is a greater urgency for 2012 to be a year in which the Jays move to the next level. So to go through a season of bumps and feeling out contenders for a regular spot in the lineup seems antithetical to those ambitions. Taking several months to figure out who fits where and how is not on the agenda for most fans this spring.

4) What about Travis? To chose to go forward with Eric Thames seems like a repudiation of the rosy-cheeked carnivore. If they both break camp with the big club, the Jays will be left to choose between the two left-handed bats on a daily basis. And while injuries will happen and a five-man outfield would still result in 300-plus plate appearances for each, it still seems as though a choice will have to be made between them.

Snider is better base-stealer and a better defensive option, is almost two years younger and his 82-game 2010 campaign (.255/.304/.463, .331 wOBA, 14 HR, 1.2 fWAR in 319 PAs) compares pretty favourably to Thames' 2011 (.262/.313/.456, .333 wOBA, 12 HRs, 0.9 fWAR in 394 PAs). The big distinction between the two at this point, we suppose, is their strikeout rates. Thames posted a not-great 22.3% K-rate to go with a subpar 5.8% walk rate last season, while Snider put up a team-worst (200 PA minimum) 27.7% K-rate and a 5.4% walk rate.

Though we think there are few who can claim to be bigger fans of Travis Snider than us - we spent years giving him nicknames and praising him in spite of his output - it seems to us that if you were to take your affections out of the equation, the choice for the starting left field job seems pretty evident. We're just not sure that we're comfortable with the answer.

Brett Cecil's New Normal

2011-11-27T20:54:00.004-05:00

For some reason, I’ve been thinking about Brett Cecil lately (though perhaps not as much as some have in the past). More specifically, I’ve been thinking about what exactly could have happened to him through Spring Training and most of the early part of the season last year.

In March of last year, he told the National Post’s John Lott that his fastball was averaging about 87 miles per hour, although, according to him, “Everybody knows (he) can throw in the low 90s.”

The diminished velocity, and all-around lack of effectiveness, was well-documented. It got him sent to Vegas, and led to him putting up numbers that were a clear step backward from his previous season. There was a time when smarter people than me would have taken Cecil over Ricky Romero (Keith Law says as much in this chat from only two years ago) . The whole episode makes me wonder how many would do it today.

Lots of theories have been put forward about Cecil’s 2010 issues, from a possible undiagnosed injury, to a mysterious dead-arm problem, to a mechanical issue in his delivery that needed to be fixed.

But one other theory has stuck with me. I don’t even remember where I saw or read it, and it might have only been just one time in a comment section somewhere, but I found myself nodding along with the idea – having been through it myself and seeing the effects in had on my own day-to-day activities.

The theory: Brett Cecil had lost either his conditioning, or his focus, or both, as a result of spending more time last off-season occupied with his new baby.

Absurd, right? I mean, it’s not like Cecil was the first player in history to be a parent. Plenty of ballplayers have plenty of kids (some of them will even admit to being their fathers… hey-o!). I don’t know if any of them ever saw an impact, positive or negative, on their baseball performance.

But anyone that has ever gone through the experience of having a baby in their life for the first time knows that it has an effect. If you’re one of those parents who claims that it never fazed them in the least and your work output never once changed except for the better, then I’m prepared to call you a big fat liar.

When the Org Kids came along, I was pretty much a disaster for a good nine or ten months after each of their births. When you’re a new parent, you don’t sleep at night. You don’t eat properly. You don’t have time to work out.

And you can’t wait to get back home from whatever’s taken you away from those kids to go through more of it.

Cecil at one time had a Twitter account, and his followers got to see just how excited he was to be a new father. There is little doubt that the guy is a committed, doting dad and husband. I followed him, and even though he’s younger than me, I could seriously relate to things he was expressing about his life and growing family.

But even the most enthusiastic and energetic new parents need to re-invent their entire routines around the kids, and inevitably, things get dropped out of the old routines. I don’t know everything there is to know about a left-handed pitcher’s offseason training regimen, but I could certainly envision myself eliminating the 6AM run from the daily calendar if I’d been up four times during the night to calm a crying baby. But eventually, you figure it out. Your life never gets back to the way it was, but a “new normal” sets in and the upheaval subsides – mostly.

I don’t know; maybe it’s a bullshit theory and Cecil never missed a beat in terms of conditioning or focus. Maybe the things that more-or-less suddenly troubled him last spring were as mysterious as they seemed. Baseball is a weird game that way.

Besides, it’s not like there’s any way to find out if the new-parent theory is true. I certainly would never expect a major league baseball player to tell a beat reporter that the reason he couldn’t pick up the spin on a breaking ball out of the pitcher’s hand that day was because he was awake all night washing puke out of his baby’s crib blankets.

All I’m saying is I’m prepared to cut Cecil a break if being a new dad took a toll on him that he wasn’t quite ready to deal with or admit. If he’s like the rest of us, once his new normal is established, chances are he’ll be better than ever.

Fresh Starts

2011-11-20T18:27:00.004-05:00

There’s really not much to add to what ended up being the biggest Blue Jays-related story of this past week – the new branding scheme and uniforms. I like the new stuff. A lot. The next couple of years of Org Family gift-giving will be predictable indeed.

As is my wont, however, I’m going to use the re-brand as a source for hackneyed symbolism, however tangential you may find it. You all should be getting used to this from me by now.

One of the things that struck me most about the Friday unveiling of the snappy jerseys, caps and associated goods was the level of enthusiasm there was, not just among the fans, but among the players themselves. Twitter was full of the players’ own pictures, with lots of exclamation marks and #BeastMode / #TeamUnit sloganeering. These guys were geeked up about having a new look.

The uniform launch felt like… well, it felt like a launch. The start of something. Especially in an off-season where a whole lot of not much has really happened so far with the Blue Jays, it seemed to put a spring in the step of the faithful.

It got me thinking about how important a fresh start can be. When the Org Kids get up on the wrong side of the bed and catch hell from the Org Wife and me first thing in the morning for misbehaving, we’ll often send them back to their room and have them try it again. Usually works like a charm.

It’s tempting to try to excuse a baseball player’s underwhelming performance by throwing around the old “he needs change of scenery” argument. We can never really get in a player’s head to know whether that’s remotely true. But at the very least, the “fresh start” can be like a bowl of hot chicken soup when you have a head cold: might help; couldn’t hurt.

When they start stretching, sprinting and spitting tobacco juice in Dunedin in a few months, some potentially key pieces of this Blue Jays team are going to be hoping that a fresh start cures what ailed them in 2011, or even before. From where I sit, how those fresh starts turn out is going to be a significant part of the 2012 Jays storyline.

Here are a few of who I mean:

Colby Rasmus

This is fairly obvious, but the very reason the multi-tool talent who will be patrolling centerfield for the Blue Jays is no longer doing it for the St. Louis Cardinals is because someone – Tony LaRussa, John Mozeliak, Alex Anthopoulos, or all of them – thought he needed a fresh start. The start he got as a Jay in 2011 was abbreviated (although long enough to allow Barry from Oakville to bellow his disapproval on the Jays Talk and yearn for the middle relievers he cost to acquire). A full season of the 2010 vintage Colby Rasmus would be a significant piece of an improved 2012 Jays team (again, this is obvious). I hope that starting the season knowing he’s not going to have a manager breathing down his neck with threats to start Jon Jay in his place might make Rasmus a bit more comfortable and a bit more effective.

Travis Snider

Travis Snider is going to turn 24 in February, yet he’s already spent parts of four different seasons with the Major League team. You can argue either side of the more-time-in-the-majors vs. more-time-in-the-minors argument, but one thing the kid hasn’t had at any point in his Jays career is some certainty. A fresh start for Snider can come in Toronto or in Vegas but he should know going in that it’s gong to be a full time job, with an abundantly clear description at the start of 2012 of what is demanded and expected of him, regardless of where he’s plying his trade. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching Supernanny, it’s that kids need structure. I’m sure this sounds incredibly condescending. I don’t really mean it to be. These players are all grown-up, professional athletes. But sometimes the most precocious talent is the kind in most need of discipline.

Kyle Drabek

A variation on the Snider theme is applicable to Kyle Drabek. Like Snider, he’s shown flashes of meeting the high expectations so many have had for him ever since entering the organization. Despite his youth, he’s not thought of as a prospect, as much as a promise of All-Star performance unfulfilled. As with Snider, I’m not going to lose much sleep if he goes to Vegas or Toronto out of Spring Training, as long as he gets to tackle whatever has been plaguing him with a knowledge that he’s going to get time to do it.

Spring is a fresh start for everyone, really. There are plenty of others on the roster (for the time being) who could similarly benefit: Frank Francisco, for a chance to start 2012 like he finished 2011; Adam Lind, to start a season healthy, strong, free of expectations that he needs to carry the team offensively and with some confidence at the plate that would come with that.

We’ve seen fresh starts work before. Yunel Escobar is one example of a guy for whom his first day in a Blue Jay uniform was the first day of the rest of his life. I’m really, really hopeful that April 1 will be the same kind of rebirth for some of the Jays who need to capture, or recapture, the kind of performance that we know is in them.

The New Jays Logo

2011-11-18T11:47:00.004-05:00

Whomp. There it is.

It was entirely likely that we were going to like these new uniforms by sheer force of will. But there was a gnawing feeling that we had in the lead up to the announcement that there would be something weird or untenable about the new look.

As it turned out, we needn't have turned off our critical faculties to enjoy the rebrand. The uniforms are classic, and look pretty sweet. The font is actually a lot nicer than we had figured after catching a brief glimpse of it in the teaser video, and the player's numbers with the white inline are absolutely fantastic. And the blue! So much blue!

The alternate blue jersey is especially on point, and actually nicer than any dark jersey in the history of the franchise. We can see that a lot of fans will gravitate towards it when making their apparel choices.

The sweet new duds won't be worth much in the win column, and they won't make balls fly over the fence or whoosh past the opponents' bats. But they feel right. They look like the Blue Jays are supposed to look.

And in our mind's eye, we can see players wearing that uniform in a celebratory pile. That's the warmest fuzzy of all.

New and Blue! Frame-by-Frame Analysis of the Jays' Teaser Video

2011-11-16T12:17:00.010-05:00

Are we a tad obsessive about the Jays' new uniforms? Just a tad. A smidgeon more than a tad.

Time is at a premium, so let us walk you through what we've picked out from the teaser video above, posted on the Blue Jays' site today.

First out of the gate, at 0:01 in, we see Ricky Romero in a blue (BLUE!) jersey, which appears to a light blue. It could be that the flashing strobe effect here has made a royal blue look lighter than it is, but we at least figure that the alternates will be something other than black. Which was probably a given, but a relief nonetheless.

A mere second later, we get a view of what we initially thought to be José Bautista, but we now figure to be Adam Lind, as he is the only Jay who wears Reeboks. (And yes, we notice such things. Also, the Hickory bat.) It's hard to tell because of the dark lighting, but it appears as though the pant striping has two tones of blue divided by a white stripe, which is pretty much exactly the same as the 1991-1996 iteration. Also, blue shoes. Yay.

We're not certain whose arms these are, but you can once again see the striping on the cuffs. From this shot, it appears as though both blue stripes on the cuffs are the same tone, which makes us wonder if we're seeing double-blue on the pants where there is none. Again, a fleeting dark look, so hard to tell.
Skip ahead a bit, and you can see the new nameplate lettering on Adam Lind's back. This appears to be a standard block lettering, which we likely would have expected anyways given the goofy bubbly font that they are replacing.

Okay, a quick couple of shots of Bautista, which give you a much clearer sense of how blue the Blue Jays will be. This appears to be exactly the same colour as the classic Jays look. And then...

Boom! There's the new logo font, with a sharp serif coming off the "T" in "Toronto". (A sincere blue cap tip to Chris Creamer for pointing this out on Twitter.) We're not sure that we're crazy about the serif font, but we'll reserve judgment until we see the final product. In any case, there will be a newish look across the team's chest next season, and not just the old font recycled.

And if you're learned nothing else this afternoon, you should have learned that 1) we have have dodgy photo editing skills and 2) we're a little too enthusiastic about this rebrand. But then again, we've never claimed to be all that objective when it comes to the home team.

Above all, we're a fan.

Cheering for Laundry - In Anticipation of the New Unis

2011-11-15T15:03:00.004-05:00

If you've been reading this blog for awhile or follow us on Twitter, you know that the aesthetic considerations weigh heavy on our pointy head. The look and feel of the team's brand matters to us. The proper execution of high socks - one which doesn't lead to the ridiculous pantaloons like those Shawn Camp has sported for years - matters to us. Having a blue ball cap - any shade will do! - matters to us.

So the news that the Jays will unveil a brand new brand this week ranks as a high point in the offseason for us. Finally! We can say goodbye to the absurd Black Jays lids, and goodbye to the black alternate jerseys. We can set aside the Angry Jay logo, and the Toothpaste T-Cap. The cartoon-ish, Comic Sans-like sparkly numbers and names on the back of the jerseys will have taken their final bow as well.

And not a moment too soon, because we had begun to get accustomed to some of the lousy design of the previous iteration of the team's playing duds. (A couple of moments of weakness popped up, where we almost considered a black cap. Almost, not quite.)

There's a cycle that we recognize across baseball of teams changing aspects of their uniforms every few years. Teams will introduce a new uniform - often referring to a "modernizing" of the look and feel - with a minimal amount of input from the fans. This strikes us as the brand managers within the organization getting bored with what they see on the field, or attempting to impose their vision onto the team's work wear.

And while some of these rebranding exercises work - like the Miami Marlins' vibrant new South Beach influenced look - there are many cases where they simply fall flat or leave fans clamouring for a return to the old look. On the other hand, a team who does it just about perfectly when it comes to its uniforms is the Boston Red Sox, who never radically change brands, but who add on features (such as the red and blue jerseys or the "hanging sox" caps) that seem germane to their historical look.

The branding cycles of teams seem to have become shorter in recent years, with teams introducing the "new modern feel", only to bring back the "retro feel" at the behest of the fans within four or five years. It should have surprised no one that when the Blue Jays reintroduced their powder blue uniforms a few years ago, the fans adopted it almost immediately as the primary colour scheme for their merchandise purchases. If you looked through the Rogers Centre over the past few seasons, you would find far more powder blue in the stands than black, and far more retro caps than the new and allegedly improved black ones.

(BTW, if you were curious to see just how delighted we were by the return of the powder blue unis, check out this piece that we wrote for Big League Stew at the time.)

The journey of the Jays' brand over the past two decades has been an interesting one, in that there have been numerous changes and adaptations and tweaks and reformatting, and yet the logo and look to which the fans innately relate are those that the team sported in the World Series years. The new uniforms introduced in 1997 never seemed to gain much of a heartfelt following, even as the team tweaked them for the better in subsequent years. We not-so-secretly loved the 2003 version, which was the only season in which the T-Bird acted as the primary logo for the team. While we've generally heard nothing but guff about the T-Bird, we fully attribute Roy Halladay's Cy Young that season and Vernon Wells' best offensive performance to the plucky determination and cartoony muscle of the T-Bird.

(If you want a full rundown of all the permutations of the Jays' uniforms over the years, Chris Creamer's Sportslogos.net has an exceptional accounting of all the elemental changes over the 35 seasons.)

So what do we hope to see when the new look is fully revealed? We know with some certainty that the logo leaked a month back will likely be the main emblem going forward, and it seems just about right to us: A smart update on the classic 1992-1996 look. We'd like to see an blue alternate jersey, which could be powder blue, though a darker royal blue would be fine as well. We'd like to see a font that evokes the old school script with the white inline, but does not absolutely revert back to it, as we find it a bit flat and sparse by the time it makes it onto the chest of a player.

But mostly, we're dreaming of blue. Lots and lots of blue.

Offseason Dispatches - Email Chatter on the State of the Jays

2011-11-10T16:20:00.003-05:00

In which the Editor-in-Chief and Blogger Emeritus the Tao of Stieb and weekend intern The Org Guy hunker down at their respective teletype machines, and ponder all of the off season ponderables...

From: Tao of Stieb
To: The Org Guy
Date: Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 10:22 pm

Org Guy,

Free agent frenzy!!! Woo! Can you feel the excitement? It's been a good week or so since the free agency window opened, and all we can say is thank goodness there isn't a panel sitting in a studio staring at their mobile devices, waiting for the signings to come pouring in. Because those guys would smell pretty rank by now.

We're pretty sure that the way baseball approaches this is a good thing, but in the absence of actual news, we're left making up acquisition lists and checking them twice. What's the craziest thought you've had this week?

Tao

From: The Org Guy
To: Tao of Stieb
Date: Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 9:22 am

Tao,

When it comes to free agency, I keep having the same thought over and over again: as much as I’d like to see a big addition to the Blue Jays lineup through free agency, I wouldn’t want to be the guy who has to break it to Jose Bautista that despite having two of the best back-to-back seasons in team history, he’s not going to be the highest-paid player, despite just having signed an extension. That’s not to say I think Bautista would somehow object – he strikes me as a team-first guy as much as anyone. But the extension itself lays the organization’s cards on the table to a degree, putting a dollar amount and year term on what they believe a truly elite player is worth.

For that completely-pulled-from-my-ass reason alone, I take Alex Anthopoulos at his word that the team isn’t likely to make a huge free agent splash. For an armchair GM like me, it’s more fun to speculate on trades anyway. You want my craziest thought? Like, crazier than the idea I had to wear a paisley tie with a checked shirt? Here it is: with the Twins bottoming out in 2011, a new GM in place there, the Jays with a clear need at first base and prospects they can move, I can’t stop thinking about trying to buy low on Justin Morneau.

I figure I’m either a genius, or a maniac (maniacal genius?). Talk me out of this. Please. I think I need help.

Org Guy

From: Tao of Stieb
To: The Org Guy
Date: Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 9:53 am

Org Guy,

Are you on the bottle again?

Okay, that's a bit unfair, because truth be told, we've wondered about the possibility of taking the overpriced, distressed asset off the Twins' hands and hoping for a recovery. Morneau's got two years and $30 million left on that deal, and while that seems like lottery winnings to us, we're not sure that it would cripple the Jays if they got nothing on the field from him. It's not a smart deal, but it might not cost them a ton in prospects.

Which brings us to the other thought that we've been having: Is the system now sufficiently stocked so that the Blue Jays can begin dealing from it? We've heard how it is one of the top few systems in baseball, but it only takes a deal or two before the future starts to look bleak again. (Ask the Red Sox, since they were left trying to deal used batting practice balls for pitching down the stretch.)

We've never seen Drew Hutchison or Deck McGuire or Chad Jenkins or Nestor Molina throw a single pitch, and yet we feel about them the way that a lot of fans seem to feel about a certain hefty second-generation slugger: Like the Blue Jays need those guys.

ToS

From: The Org Guy
To: Tao of Stieb
Date: Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 10:55 am

Tao,

I made my feelings known in my last weekend post about whether we should get attached to the prospects the likes of which you mentioned. We should probably get a head start on the first stage of grief in the Kübler-Ross model, in preparation for when the team ships Jake Marisnick to the Royals in a Billy Butler deal.

It’s interesting, though, that you mentioned pitching prospects in particular as players that the team may simply need more. We know, intuitively, where the weaknesses in the batting order are and who’ll be playing where in the field. There are a myriad of possible solutions tossed around to fill the offensive and defensive gaps, all falling somewhere on the continuum between ludicrous and realistic. We don’t know who will be manning the right side of the infield come April 1, but it’s pretty likely it’ll be two guys with fairly significant big-league experience.

But the pitching staff is a different question altogether. Beyond Ricky Romero and Brandon Morrow, the rotation still has a lot of questions. The bullpen has a new coach, but it’s a real mug’s game guessing who he’ll be coaching – who might emerge, who will be signed, who will be converted from starting, and who might be stretched out to answer those aforementioned rotation questions. There’s a reason why those of us in the baseball business* say you can never have enough good young pitching.

In that respect, it probably shouldn’t have surprised me to see Anthopoulos say near the end of the year that some of the names you mentioned are likely to see some big-league time this year. I know you don’t like making predictions, but if there were a gun to your head, a knife to your throat, and an ACME-brand anvil dangling perilously over your toes, which pitching prospect will break into the big league lineup first? And what the hell is going to happen with Drabek?

Org Guy

*Yes, I consider anonymous Blue Jays blogging “being in the baseball business.” I also saw the Moneyball movie, and when I was nine, I put a whole pack of Big League Chew in my mouth at once.

From: Tao of Stieb
To: The Org Guy
Date: Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 1:34 PM

Org Dude,

We don't like being cornered into making predictions during the season, but during the offseason? It's like the Mardi Gras of postulation. You get beads! You get beads! You get beads! Woo! Show us your Low-A pitchers! Get us another Hurricane!

Our best guess is that Nestor Molina would be the most likely of the Four Aces (that's what we're calling them now!) to get the call in 2012. He's old enough that he wouldn't be completely out of his element, and there's a decent argument that he put up the best numbers out of the four last year. Based on the fact that he'll be 24 at the start of next season, we'd guess that Chad Jenkins might get a look at some point in the season, though his low strikeout numbers don't give us that much confidence that he'll stick in the bigs. McGuire will have to drop his walk numbers, but we'd guess that we'll see him in September of next year. Hutchison will likely get a full year of Double-A seasoning, given his youth.

As for Mr. Drabek, we're coming to have a sense that this is pretty much what he'll be: A guy who throws sorta hard but doesn't really know where it's going, and gets knocked around. We'd usually be the first to try to nuance such a thought and emphasize that there is still upside to the player, but the thoughtthat we keep coming back to is that baseball is a really hard game at this level, and if you don't show that you've got it early, you probably won't become a great player through force of will and time.

Maybe it's way too early to give up on Drabek or Travis Snider, but having seen what we've seen from them so far, there's precious little that demonstrates that they will be transcendent stars of the future. They might be able to be good, serviceable parts of a team, but we're more likely to think of them as the Danny Cox or Derek Bell of the future World Champion Jays, and less likely to see them as the Pat Hentgen or Joe Carter.

That's a bad analogy, isn't it?

Tao

From: The Org Guy
To: Tao of Stieb
Date: Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 2:41 PM

Tao-er of Power,

Given that you’re well known for hating Joe Carter with the heat of a thousand suns, should we not be glad that you don’t envision Travis Snider following in his footsteps? Also, I don’t think I realized until just now how good, and how important, Danny Cox was for the 1993 team (though I suspect you pointing it out meant you understood his value already). Most relief innings, a strikeout an inning, and an almost 3:1 K/BB ratio? With Mark Eichhorn and Duane Ward waiting in the wings? MOAR PLZ.

Frankly, this might even increase the aptness of your analogy. I understand completely the extra value a pitcher brings to an organization as a starter as compared to working from the bullpen. But it seems like Drabek may be in a strange sort of limbo (and Brett Cecil may be joining him there). Due to his struggles as a starter, a trade would not return anywhere close to what the team would like, so a move to the ‘pen may actually increase his value, if not on the trade market, then at least to the big league roster.

Fretting over the possibility the Jays may overspend on a relief pitcher this offseason has become a cottage industry. In my heart of hearts, I don’t think the organization will do it. What I don’t know is how seriously they might be considering moving some arms from the rotation into the bullpen. A great deal depends on Henderson Alvarez and Dustin McGowan, it would seem. Sustained health and tangible steps forward from each of them would provide so much flexibility, either to trade arms or move them into relief roles. Maybe the Jays can do the pitching staff version of Tampa Bay’s “shortstop at every position” – every pitcher is a starter, or could be.

I know that isn’t really how the world works, though. There’s far too much invested in these guys to just shuttle them back and forth to the ‘pen like you would in a video game. But it would seem a waste to let pitchers with big-league arms just get shelled in the Vegas sun all year. Unless they move the affiliate to Ottawa!

Org-ie Dougie

From: Tao of Stieb
To: The Org Guy
Date: Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 3:21 PM

We refuse to let you pull us back into the light. The cynicism has overtaken us, like we're Anakin Skywalker bitching about the Jedi Council's vice-chairmanship (or whatever the heck it was that led to him blowing up Dantooine.)

You mentioned a name that we've been thinking about a lot lately, and that's Mark Eichhorn. Part of what made his two spectacular seasons with the Jays so noteworthy was the fact that he pitched well over 100 innings in both of them. (157.0 and 127.2 respectively in 1986 and 1987.) It strikes us that in an era of unnecessary 13-man pitching staffs, there should really be some consideration given to having a pitcher or two on hand who you intend to throw out for 120 innings or more out of the pen. We love what the Red Sox did with Alfredo Aceves for about 25 out of the 26 weeks of the season, and we'd be interested in seeing either Cecil, Drabek, or McGowan take on that role.

(And we understand that everyone thinks that McGowan is now made of bone china, but if he's going to stick with the team, they shouldn't have to reorient their pitching strategy around his delicate physique. Either he can pitch, or they get his head measured for Ace the mascot's costume.)

The player who might fit best into that role is Joel Carreno, who had a pretty nice run with the Jays (1.15 ERA, 14 Ks / 4 BBs in 15.2 innings), and who pitched starters' innings for most of the year. Carreno name rarely gets mentioned in the mix of starters, but he could be a very useful "long man" for them, especially if they have a lot of 5th, 6th and 7th innings in which their starters aren't pitching.

(And isn't it funny how the term "long man" rarely gets used anymore? It's like no reliever is ever supposed to go more than two innings, ever.)

We should wrap this up, because most folks are snoring and drooling on their tablets at this point. But suffice to say, this doesn't strike us as a boring offseason ahead. By the time we hit Dunedin, no one will be talking about Corey Patterson/Scott Podsednik platoons. If we're lucky, we'll be talking about guys we like deservedly getting more time in the minors.

Sincerely,

The Taofather.

A Bird in the Hand

2011-11-05T15:46:00.004-04:00

As the Texas Rangers made their postseason run, a friend of mine asked me, in all seriousness, whether the Mike Napoli – Frank Francisco trade was going to become the second-most regrettable Blue Jay trade in history. Now, given the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments that stemmed from that deal for the better part of 2011, I was almost relieved to hear that he would only consider it the second-most regrettable.

After a less-than-inspired effort to talk him off the ledge, I started to wrap my head around the trade he considered to be the most regrettable, which also happened to involve the Rangers: Michael Young for Esteban Loaiza.

Even if you rightfully believe Michael Young has been overrated for a large part of his career, it’s still tough to defend the trade from the Blue Jays’ perspective (though it can be done, based on the fact that they were only 1.5 games back of the first-place Yankees, and thought they might catch them with another arm in the rotation to complement David Wells, Kelvim Escobar and Chris Carpenter, while a 23-year-old Roy Halladay sported a 10.90 ERA. There’s a fine recap of the trade here). A great many fans have pined for a decade over the All-Star, batting champion middle infielder the team let get away for a second-rate starting pitcher that never helped them reach the postseason promised land.

The Young deal is probably just the most glaring example of “the one that got away” for Blue Jays fans. It’s hardly the only one. In the above-linked article, it’s pointed out that the Jays traded away three other middle-infield prospects in the system at the time in Felipe Lopez, Cesar Izturis, and Brett Abernathy. There’s obviously been varying degrees of big-league success amongst those erstwhile Jays prospects, but the returns were indisputably slim, including the likes of Steve Trachsel, Mark Guthrie and Luke Prokopec.

I think my friend who still rues the Young trade to this day uses it as a proxy for what he would perceive as the team’s tendency to get very low value back for its prospects. Young is his talisman, representing the what-might-be for every Jays prospect past and present, the upside realized, every last drop of value squeezed from the talent the player possesses.

I can pretty much guarantee you, though, that in 2000, my friend wouldn’t have had a sweet clue who Michael Young was. The fact is, even today when minor league stats, scouting reports and video are more readily available than ever, most fans have a familiarity level with their favourite team’s prospects that’s comparable to my grandparents’ familiarity level with programming the clock on their microwave.

But if hindsight is 20/20, then prospect hindsight is, like, 20/10 – and everybody has it, even Frank Costanza. That’s because prospects develop actual track records over time, across whatever organizations hold their rights, and we can see perfectly how they developed and what they accomplished after the fact. But the ones we remember are the ones that actually develop into big leaguers. Fans can be forgiven for feeling like we’ve seen way too many of them go on to bigger and better things for other teams, even if it’s just patently not true. We still don’t want to let ours go.

It does seem that at least among a more modern generation of Jays fans, the tendency to overvalue the team’s own prospects is beginning to wane. We can be forgiven for harbouring an unhealthy prospect infatuation here and there, but many of us are coming around to the idea that some prospects just aren’t going to be Blue Jays.

Maybe our added peace of mind with trading prospects comes from knowing that it’s Alex Anthopoulos who will be doing the trading. Before he’s done as General Manager of the Toronto Blue Jays, he’s going to make some bad trades (and it can be argued he has done so already). But for now, he seems to be pretty good at it, and he gets the benefit of the doubt more times than not.

That might be something we should all bear in mind this offseason. One thing I’ve noticed about Anthopoulos is that, while his forays into the media are occasional and vague, he usually does what he says he’s going to do. If he says he’s not going to break the bank for a top-tier free agent, I’ve seen nothing in his work as GM that should lead a fan to not believe him. Conversely, if he says he’s going to explore the trade market, and that not all the elite prospects in the system are going to be Toronto Blue Jays at the big league level, I believe him there too. He’s already shown he’ll make those moves. So we better not get too attached to those prospects as we get ready for more deals.

It’s entirely possible that this off-season, Alex Anthopoulos will trade another Michael Young out of the Jays’ farm system. Some fans, two or five or ten years later, are still going to have big problems with that. That’s fine – second guessing the GM is part of the fun of being a fan. But we should probably at least mentally prepare ourselves for the possible departures of our prospect man-crushes, and even the guys that we didn’t think would amount to much (the same way the Jays saw Michael Young back in 2000), and be reasonably comfortable that the Jays’ GM isn’t going to move any of them for another Esteban Loaiza.

No Johnny Mac Comeback, and Other Offseason Mumbo-Jumbo

2011-11-04T10:22:00.002-04:00

We're a couple of days late in posting something on the news that the Jays' emergency backup catcher for life and alternate mascot John McDonald opted not to return to Toronto. We're sure most everything has been said that needs to be said about it, but allow us to redirect the conversation in our own verbose manner.

Mostly, we hope that Jays fans see this as a good thing for all parties. Johnny Mac gets two more years of employment, and on a National League club, he'll have more opportunities to enter games as a pinch hitter/bunter/pinch runner/defensive replacement/double-switched-in warm body. And depending on the dodgy health of Stephen Drew or the D-Backs' ability to find a decent second baseman, he might get to start far more games than he would have playing in the guts of the American League East.

Given the level of competition the Jays face, the sentimentalism that might have brought McDonald back on a one-year deal would clearly not have been enough to get him the second year. The competitive imperative is dictating that the Jays improve on the four or five bench/utility players, and McDonald's tremendous defensive gifts could not overshadow the weakness of his bat.

In other words: If you love Johnny Mac, set him free.

The other side of this story is that given a clear-eyed look at it, it's surprising the extent to which we all took it as a fait accompli that McDonald would waltz back to the Jays following the season. One of the adjustments that will need to be made by Jays fans (and frankly, the media who cover them) is not to read too much into the some of the nicely bland assurances that come from Alex Anthopoulos or Paul Beeston. This new regime has a nomadic approach to their operational logic, which is to say that on principle, they refuse to settle on anything until they've settled on it, and they're not going to provide you with a self-imposed orthodoxy to which they can be held.

On a certain level, that's really pretty brilliant.

Other Off-Seasonal Greetings
The Blue Jays did about as well by Adam Loewen as a franchise could, allowing him to build himself into a position player with Quad-A abilities, and showcasing him at the major league level at the season's conclusion. We're not sure that the Jays owed him a spot on the 25-man roster, nor an opportunity to clutter the left field equation for 2012. The Jays might be able to re-sign him as a minor league free agent and put him on the Mike McCoy Shuttle Program, though we're sure that Loewen will want to exhaust all other avenues first.

The news (gleaned from Bob Elliot's Twitter) that the Jays are looking to bring in Chuck LaMar as a senior scout is good news from our point of view. Though his work as the GM in Tampa Bay at the dawn of the Devil Rays could be criticized, there's at least some evidence (especially in Jonah Keri's The Extra 2%) that the ownership of the team imposed itself on baseball operations to the detriment of the franchise.

Farewell 2011 Season, Welcome to 2012

2011-11-01T15:15:00.002-04:00

After a roaring end to the 2011 Major League Baseball season, the finality of it all has just started to strike us.

The season is long and intense, densely packed with 162 games over 26 weeks, plus the four weeks of postseason. The days without baseball between the spring and fall are few, and the season proceeds so relentlessly that there's barely time to digest the previous night's game and contextualize it. (Try as we might.) We all tend to get a bit lost in the moment.

So it follows that the moment they stop playing the games, the silence gets deafening. The vacuum that is created from the lack of games to discuss hisses and wheezes and begs to be filled. We would be better served to take some of the downtime to relax, recover and salve some of the injuries, including the repetitive stress on on clicking finger as well as the imagined bruises to our ego. But given the fact that being a Jays fan means fixing your gaze to the future on an almost perpetual basis, the start of the wintertime sabbatical is the time when we'll probably kick our hindsight-fuelled recriminations and unfounded speculation into overdrive.

Oh, the fun we'll have.

Thankfully, we haven't had any frost settle on us in advance of the long winter whinge, as the business of baseball cranked up the machine first thing Monday morning, in a hurry with a flurry. (The other flurry, you know.)

The Excercism of Edwin's Option - It was a no-brainer that the Jays should pick up the 2012 option on Edwin Encarnacion, whose bat carried the team for significant stretches in the second half. From June 1st onwards, EE posted a .858 OPS (.360 OBP/.499 SLG) and hit 16 of his 17 homers in the final four months of the season. As a full-time DH, occasional 1B and emergency 3B, Encarnacion could be a steal at $3.5 million for next year. (And apparently, he might possibly play left field, but more on that below.)

We couldn't be happier to see Edwin come back, as we thought that he endured an unfair onslaught of snarkily cynical scorn through much of the first few months of the season. We can't remember who called him "garbage" on Twitter, but we hope that person feels shame that eats away at their soul every day for such denigration.

We don't want to get ahead of ourselves here, but we still figure that Edwin could be a 30 homer, .850 OPS guy in the middle of the Jays lineup next year, even though we said the same thing last year. But this year, we really and truly believe it. For realsies, this time.

If You Like Tony LaCava, and Getting Caught in the Rain: So on the one hand, we hope that the casual fan appreciates the fact that other teams within their highly competitive division are looking at the non-player personnel of the Blue Jays enviously. Boston's potential interest in John Farrell (which we figure was nothing more than someone saying "Sure wish Johnny was still around") and the Orioles' pursuit of Jays GM Tony LaCava should indicate to one and all that the team is not administered by a bunch of nincompoops who stumbled accidentally into their position. These guys know what they're doing.

Moreover, the news from NBC Sports' Aaron Gleeman that O's Meddler-in-Chief and Chief Mediocrity Officer Peter Angelos was unimpressed by LaCava and thought his desire for greater authority over the baseball decisions in Baltimore was overstepping his bounds is a triple shot of happiness because:

1) It means LaCava might return to the Jays;
2) It shows that bad organizations don't appreciate smart baseball people;
3) Baltimore is looking for some stooge with shallow charisma and a desire to be Angelos' hand-puppet through another decade-long cycle of basement-dwelling.

That, kids, is what we in the business (which business?) call a "win-win".

Everyday People

2011-10-29T16:54:00.004-04:00

In the parlance of our times, to describe something as “everyday” is to diminish its value, uniqueness or strengths. Goofy magicians start their tricks with, “Behold! A common, everyday pack of playing cards,” before they make them disappear or make sparks shoot from the Queen of Spades’ ass or whatever. (It’s been a while since I’ve seen a decent magic show that didn’t involve coming back from a 10.5 game deficit in the wild card race, so I’m not really sure what the cool tricks are nowadays.)

But “everyday” means something entirely different when describing a Major League Baseball player. Being an everyday player on a big league roster means you’ve achieved a lot. For one thing, you’ve beat out every other aspirant in the bus leagues who would happily chop off a less-than-essential body part for a chance to be where you are. You’ve also beat out the collection of utility infielders, fourth outfielders, and backups who wear a big league uniform, yet don’t lay claim to an everyday spot in the batting order.

So perhaps it’s the very term “everyday” that leads us to underestimate just how good a player must be to meet that description. Hell, Lyle Overbay was the everyday first baseman for the Blue Jays for a long time, and he’s not exactly a superstar, but he was better than the alternative.

In the American League East, being an everyday player means you have to be something a little more than “better than the alternative”. You can go through other teams’ rosters and rhyme off their everyday players with relative ease – not just because of familiarity or media exposure, but because they’re generally excellent players, including names like Ellsbury, Gonzalez, Pedroia, Cano, Teixeira, Granderson, Zobrist, Longoria.

Can you do the same for the Blue Jays? We spend an entire spring every year speculating on who the everyday guys will be at every position on the diamond. The team settles on some, puts some form of platoon in place in others, and then goes with what they got – with an eye to improve where they can, when they can.

It’s been generally accepted amongst a swath of Jays fans (and been a source of extreme consternation amongst a seemingly much larger swath of others) that 2011 was a transitional season, a chance to see whether several players could be everyday guys over an extended period. That question, more than anything, seemed to inform the composition of the everyday lineup the team brought into April. The fact that the team looked as significantly different as it did by the end of September is a testament to just how transitional a season it was.

Our esteemed host Tao is promising to go through many of these examples in more detail, but let’s recap, at least offensively:

The everyday third baseman became the everyday right fielder and, granted, was pretty incredible all year.
The everyday shortstop was plagued by injuries here and there, but was otherwise a top performer in the division.
The everyday DH started very slowly, but from May 1 to September 30, he raised his OBP from .268 to .334, his slugging percentage from .346 to .453, and has a very reasonable $3.5 million team option for next year.
The rookie everyday catcher was solid, if unspectacular, putting up highly respectable power numbers, but less than sparkling on-base numbers.
The everyday left fielder was shuttled back and forth to Las Vegas.
The guys who got the most plate appearances in left field and at third base ended being guys who didn’t break camp with the club.
The everyday centerfielder got just over half the number of plate appearances as the everyday third-baseman-turned-right-fielder, and was replaced by a mid-season acquisition.
The everyday first baseman missed a month due to injury and his performance has many fans lighting candles in their windows in the hope a slugging free agent will follow the flame home.
The everyday second baseman struggled mightily as well, replaced late in the season with a player who, if re-signed, will open 2012 as the everyday second baseman.

Consider all that. It’s not a picture of consistency. There are a couple outstanding performances, but over the course of the season, changes had to be made to get the best out of almost every position.

This is not bad news, though. Getting better takes a long time, and fans aren’t naturally patient. Regardless, the changes made over the course of the 2011 season almost uniformly resulted in a better lineup. That’s progress, and a little bit of progress is much better than getting worse – and there are teams that indeed got worse this year.

It’s not always easy to recognize progress when you see it. It was a .500 season, and there are still be some easily identifiable holes to fill.

But by the end of this season, the Blue Jays had established a clear trend of adding players who are better than the ones who preceded them on the big league roster. There are fewer holes than there were at the start of 2011. The 2012 edition of the Blue Jays is going to have “everyday” players at almost every position who aren’t just preferable to the alternative. It’s not the end of the process, by any means. But it’s getting closer.

Less Than Perfect Is Perfectly Fine

2011-10-24T19:20:00.004-04:00

They say that baseball is a game of failure. The best players head back to the bench empty-handed six times out of ten. Good baserunners get thrown out. Good defensive players make errors, and good pitchers give up hits to bad players or walk players they shouldn't. Umpires miss calls. Managers get caught up in personal attachments or get lost in the action and make bad decisions. Front offices take chances by trading one asset for another, and sometimes, they get the wrong end of the deal.

This should not come as news, given that we've all watched the best teams in baseball stumble and fail and flail away over the past three weeks. Stuff happens, but teams move on to win another day. Ideally, we as fans should be able to slough it off, move on and accept that the other guys got over on us today.

And yet, to our eyes and ears, it seems as though the anger and disdainful, snarky exasperation has been cranked up to eleven over the past few months. Fans seem to want to hang someone by their thumbs with every outcome than falls for the other team. Take, for instance, Mike Napoli's big blast in Game Four of the World Series: While we heard a lot of praise, there was also a fair bit of blame being cast towards Tony La Russa for overmanaging - essentially, doing the same thing for which he was praised earlier in the week - and Mitchell Boggs was run through the wringer for throwing a pitch way up in the strike zone. Fire La Russa! Boggs is a bum!

For Jays fans, one big swing of Napoli's bat was enough to bring the self-appointed arbiters of the trade market out of the woodwork to emphasize how fallible Toronto GM Alex Anthopoulos is, given that he traded away Napoli for...what? Magic beans? 10 bonus airline miles? A $25 dollar credit coupon towards an oil change and wheel alignment, provided two other GM's also made the same trade?

In hindsight, it seems so blatantly obvious that the Jays should have kept Napoli, ate into J.P. Arencibia's playing time, made Adam Lind DH more often, released Edwin Encarnacion and looked elsewhere for a closer. (Well, to some it does.)

(The same hindsight also makes it completely obvious what a trainwreck the Boston Red Sox season was, and how lacking they were in moral fibre given their affinity for biscuits and beer...but that's probably a whole other series of posts.)

So what's happening here? Are we really all this angry? Is it the water supply? An airborne event? Is there no room for nuance? Can't we all just chill a bit?

Our best guess is that none of this is new, really. Rather, the Twitter feeds and comments and multitude of pundits - both new and old school - means that we're instantaneously plugged into the heated reactions of people which, in another age, would have been taken out on the couch cushions. Also, a lot of the comments are obviously designed to get a reaction, and nothing gets a laugh like put-down. (We don't really evolve much past our days on the playground. We just take on debt and put on weight and get hairier.)

Another thing that we see is how the vastly improved and accessible metrics have created a greater sense of understanding about game strategy. The downside to this is that there's a streak of absolutism that runs through baseball's chattering class, as fans feel as though they can speak with something close to certainty as to what was the right call in any given game situation. We're sure that we've indulged in such a thing here and there, but we're trying hard as of late to be a bit more accepting of managerial decisions with which we are not in agreement, because we sense that the game moves pretty fast when you have some actual responsibility for its outcome.

But don't mistake that last notion for some luddite pining for a simpler time, when men were men and geeks occupied themselves with rocket surgery or other boring stuff. It's stupid not to use the information at our disposal, or to misuse some dumber numbers. But there is a dimension of the game that we don't necessarily see - players' health, their confidence levels, a hitch in their mechanics, the cut of their jib - which we are a bit more willing to acknowledge as a factor in decisions.

It's a long season. Sometimes you're up. Sometimes, you're down. A little indignant rant here and there can be fun, but a high-pitched fit of pique for seven straight months is exhausting. To us, it is. But don't let us stop you from raging on.

Coming Up...Looking Back, Looking Forward
As delinquent as we've been in our blogging duties in recent weeks, we aim to make it up to you following the championship season with a series a pieces that look back on the 2011 campaigns of some of the most intriguing Jays, and look ahead at what we expect from them in 2012. (Not that we have any powers of clairvoyance. We're just making most of this junk up as we go along. But hopefully you find it entertaining.)

Feel free to drop us a line and let us know if there are players in particular that you'd like to see at the top of the pile.

Enough About You, Let's Talk About Me

2011-10-22T13:35:00.003-04:00

When I watch the playoffs in any sport, they generally don’t feature any of my favourite teams. Yet I also feel awkward not cheering for someone, so after a short time, I usually pick one playoff team and halfheartedly root them on to victory. So, you know, GO RANGERS or something.

Besides, my thinking is that having complete and utter detachment from the post-season can put your mind in a very isolated place, and if you suffer from latent madness to begin with, it can lead you to do unthinkable things as a result. It’s the exact phenomenon we saw at play in The Shining.At least that’s my informed opinion as a certified psychoanalyst. (Note: I am NOT a certified psychoanalyst. But I did once run a roadside stand dispensing psychiatric advice for five cents a visit.)

Trying to generate one's own false attachment to the World Series has its drawbacks, however. For instance, it can lead to columns like this one from Damien Cox. He certainly heard the wrath of plenty of Blue Jays fans about his attempt to link the Cardinals' success to the Jays' perceived failures, and I don’t disagree with pretty much all of the criticism that was thrown his way. I thought the piece was uninformed by real facts, and delved into amateur psychoanalysis of clubhouse dynamics about which he couldn’t possibly have first-hand knowledge. (Note: As we’ve already clearly established, the amateur psychoanalysis should be left to me.)

But I’m also prepared to cut Cox a bit of slack. The fact of the matter is he’s hardly alone in trying to tie the sport's biggest event to the part of the sport with which he's most familiar (in his case, it's the Blue Jays, though you can quibble with how extensive that familiarity is).

Let's face it: the World Series is the culmination of an entire baseball season boiled down into seven games or less. Baseball is built around this, and MLB spares no expense or effort in trying to generate excitement about it – to try to make you, whether you’re a fan or a casual viewer or even a reporter or columnist, want to be a part of it. Major League Baseball wants you to feel like you’re involved, that you have a stake in the outcome, even though the chances are extraordinarily high that the team you support, or the team you cover, isn’t playing.

It’s only natural to want to be a part of the excitement. I get it. We wouldn’t be fans if we didn’t want to be part of it. Frankly, sports reporters would have never become sports reporters if they didn’t want to be part of it either.

The stakes are highly inflated around the post-season too. The language associated with it is rife with hyperbole: “The Fall Classic”, “Baseball’s Biggest Stage”, etc., etc. Even calling the championship “The World Series” has a certain false bravado to it, since it’s not like the winning team is going to have to face off against other international competition. If you’re not a part of it, if your team is out of it, it’s easy to develop a bit of an inferiority complex. And if there’s one thing Canadians, and Jays fans, know something about, it’s inferiority complexes.

In addition to this, one must consider the fact that all eyes in sport are on the exact same players, games, plays, pitches, and even post-game news conferences for the first time all season. Basically, it means everyone has to find a way to talk about the same stuff and make it sound relevant and interesting. Moreover, we generally try to do it in a way that we ourselves can relate to – as fans of other teams, as media from other cities, even as supposedly neutral observers.

Think about some of the things Jays fans have likely had rolling around in their heads the past three weeks watching postseason baseball. Cox was among many to question, based on remarks from Tony LaRussa, whether the Jays lost the Colby Rasmus trade with the Cardinals, who are now in the World Series. Maybe the Jays also blew it by dealing Mike Napoli to the Rangers after miraculously plucking him from the Angels. Or how about all those ex-Blue Jays who played for the Diamondbacks in the playoffs, while the Jays themselves sit another postseason out? The recurring theme is that we innately feel the need to somehow make the post-season about us.

The media want to make it about themselves too. Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports wrote a piece following World Series Game 2 that was similarly panned in the Twittersphere, blogosphere, and whatever other sphere you might care to name. His contention was that Albert Pujols, by not sticking around after the game to answer questions from the media in the wake of his costly 9th-inning error, showed a lack of leadership, but the prevailing reaction to the piece was that Passan was whining about his own plight as a member of the media. (To his credit, Passan responded to some of that criticism on Twitter today, reiterating that he didn’t intend to make it about himself.)

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel like you have your own personal stake in a major occurrence. It happens with more than just sports. How many people who never met Steve Jobs felt at least some personal sorrow when he died, however irrational that feeling might have been? Furthermore, those who dared to point out the absurdity of getting sad about the death of the guy who paid a Chinese manufacturer to build your cellphone were called insensitive pricks.

When it comes to baseball, I’m all in favour of absurdity and irrationality, even if it results in ridiculous sports columns or other awkward scenarios. Case in point: tonight, in Game Three, I’m probably going to cheer for the Texas Rangers again. I’ll get more excited than I should about Nelson Cruz at-bats, or Elvis Andrus defensive gems.

What fun would the playoffs be if I didn’t?

A One-Sentence Post on...Absence

2011-10-21T15:08:00.003-04:00

They say it makes the heart grow fonder...and given how much of our self-esteem is tied into your pageviews and praising comments, we're hoping that you miss us as much as we do you and all your questions about tubby free agent first basemen and other such nonsense.

Kicking the Door In

2011-10-15T13:33:00.005-04:00

The way-smarter-and-more-conscientious-than-me people who run the Sports Reference sites have sucked me into more than one wormhole of online sports geekery, but the one in which I found myself this week was of my own making.

The subject of my statistical spelunking was, of all things, the 1978-1980 Houston Oilers. In addition to having some of the sweetest uniforms in NFL history and arguably the game’s best player at the time in Earl Campbell, they also had the tobacco-spittingest, shit-kickingest coach that ever patrolled a sideline: Bum Phillips¹.

In 1978, Phillips’ Oilers went 10-6, good for second in the AFC Central and a wild card playoff berth. In 1979, they improved to 11-5, again securing second in the division and earning a wild card. Campbell would lead the NFL in rushing both seasons and earn an avalanche of individual awards.

But in both seasons, Houston lost in the AFC Championship Game. In both seasons, Phillips’ “Luv Ya Blue” squad were denied a trip to the big game by their division rival, the team that finished a game ahead of them in the standings two years running, the team that would go on to win back-to-back Super Bowls: the Pittsburgh Steelers.

After the second AFC Championship loss, in January 1980, Phillips told a capacity crowd at the Astrodome:

"Last year we knocked on the door. This year we beat on it. Next year we're going to kick the son of a bitch in."

And they tried, they really did. In 1980, they would again go 11-5 and make the post-season², with Campbell leading the way, and coming away with yet more accolades.

To shore up Campbell’s supporting cast for 1980, the Oilers made an attempt to squeeze one more season out of some Oakland Raiders outcasts. The defense got better, giving up the second fewest points in the league, after adding a 32-year-old Jack Tatum for his final NFL season. Tatum recorded 7 interceptions, more than he’d had in any other season. On offense, they added 35-year-old Ken Stabler to play quarterback, though he wasn’t quite the player he was in Oakland, with 13 touchdowns to 28 interceptions. For the last 10 games in 1980, the Oilers acquired eventual Hall of Fame tight end Dave Casper from Oakland. Casper made the Pro Bowl.

So: did Bum’s prediction pan out? With some proven veterans added to the mix, did they kick in that door? Another 11-5 season was great, but this year, it was ironically the Oakland Raiders themselves who dispatched the Oilers from the playoffs, this time in the first round, on their way to their own Super Bowl Championship. They may have tried to kick in the door, but their boots bounced pretty harmlessly off the doorknob.

And then they fell backwards onto their asses. The next season, Phillips was gone and the team went 7-9. They were 1-8 in 1982 before the season was called due to the labour dispute. Then, 2-14 in 1983, 3-13 in 1984… you get the picture. They didn’t have another winning season until 1987.

I’m going somewhere with this, I really am. I know that baseball and football are very different things, but those Oilers strike me as a team that fell into the mentality of seeing that they have a huge star on their hands and taking one big shot at a championship, consequences be damned. But it’s clear there are real risks to taking that approach to building a team, and those risks were realized in the subsequent years in Houston.

If your team doesn’t succeed in your one big kick at the door, it can be hard to marshal the resources to take another one. Sometimes you have to spend a few seasons just getting close enough to the door again for your foot to reach it.

Which brings me to baseball, and the Blue Jays. We’re about to enter an offseason where the discussion among many who follow the team is whether they can contend in 2012, or perhaps not until 2013. Me, I don’t want the people who run this team thinking about which year is the right one to take a mighty hoof to the door, because there is always going to be another team – maybe one year it’s the Yankees, maybe another year it’s the Red Sox or Rays – waiting on the other side. And those teams are likely to have made it to that side of the door not because they kicked it down, but because they continuously plan, use their resources wisely (whether their resources are vast or limited), and have cemented themselves as a perennial contender.

I don’t want the Toronto Blue Jays trying to kick in the door at all. I want them to be the team that’s always in the room on the other side of that door, waiting for some other team to take their one best shot. Sometimes, the team taking their one shot is going to be successful, sometimes they’ll fail and fade away. Regardless, I want the Jays to still be in the room when the next one-shot hopeful comes along.

1. Here’s an absolutely tremendous old article about Phillips. The sub-headline says it all: “Houston’s unflappable leader says the only things he understands are pickup trucks, beer, ribs, gumbo and chewing tobacco. But he knows enough football and psychology to make his Oilers contented contenders.”

2. Holy Crap! There were five teams in the three-division AFC in 1980 that finished 11-5. Have fun with those tiebreakers.

Four Random Postseason Observations

2011-10-14T10:08:00.003-04:00

We're just about halfway through the postseason, if our finger-counting math is right, so we figured we'd toss out a few top-of-mind reactions that we've had to what's rolled out so far.

As much as we've enjoyed the first round-and-a-half of October baseball, we seem to be focused on the shortcomings of the teams. It's not that we want to be a wet blanket about the teams who remain, but rather, it makes us respect how hard the game of baseball is and how much failure you have to be ready to withstand as a fan.

Even good teams look bad sometimes: Not that we're insinuating that each of the remaining clubs should be the picture of a perfectly crafted and balanced franchise, but when we see each of the four teams, we notice just how many weak spots are present. The Brewers' top of the lineup is funny-ha-ha (Nyjer? Kotsay? Those are your tablesetters for Prince/Braun?), their defense is porous, and they've pretty much wrung the lifeforce completely out of Shaun Marcum.

The Rangers' starting pitching seems sketchier now than it did in the regular season, and most of their lineup seems to be walking wounded. Which is more than we can say for the Tigers, who we occasionally forget are without Carlos Guillen and Brennan Boesch, which explains how a team has made it to within six wins of a World Championship with Andy Dirks and Don Kelly getting regular playing time.

As begrudging as we are to admit it -- given our distaste for Tony LaRussa and his dubious mythology -- the Cardinals may be a lot stronger than we'd imagined when they snuck into the playoffs on the weakness of the Atlanta Braves' shredded bullpen arms. It's not that the Cards blow us away (outside of Albert Pujols, naturally), but they also don't seem to have the glaring holes that we see in the Brewers or Tigers.

Okay, Skip Schumacher playing centrefield isn't exactly stellar. But you get the broader point, right?

If we were the type who traded in perpetual exasperated disdain, we're sure that the relative weakness of some of these playoff teams as compared to the Jays would drive us crazy. But we're really pretty chill about this now. Although the plan to cultivate "all-stars at every position" probably still makes sense for the local team, it strikes us that it is possible to win with some flawed players. If only they could get themselves out of the AL East.

Pedestrian playoff heroes: Further to the focus on all-stars, we get so focused on superstars and their acquisition throughout the season that we sometimes forget how fun it is to see the admin and support staff step up at this time of year. Don Kelly? We seriously thought he was a fictional player generated by our MLB video game until a week or so ago. Jerry Hairston? He's a guy we pick up in deep mixed rotisserie leagues, mostly because of his multiple position eligibility.

It just struck us last night that the NLCS is a rematch of the 1982 World Series, which is one of the first that we can remember watching with a fair degree of interest, having chosen to root for Robin Yount and the Brewers. And the one thing that we took away from that year's championship series was that an average player like the massively bespectacled Darrell Porter can have a great couple of games in October, and be remembered forever for them.

So obviously, we're putting a fin down on Yorvit Torrealba to be this year's World Series MVP.

Hooray for the schedulemaker (and Mother Nature): Some of the relative weakness of the rosters that has been drawn out through the past few weeks has to do with the mercifully compressed schedule and the weather delays and postponements. Playoff teams are having to dig further into their pitching staffs (see Kyle Lohse versus Randy Wolf, for instance), and benches (George Kottaras, personal catcher for Randy Wolf).

Where travel days and extra days off to sync up with television schedules allowed teams to rest their bullpens and recycle three starting pitchers all the way through the World Series, we're happy to see teams required to dig into their roster depth to win. (We'd attribute part of the Yankees' downfall to the fact that they had so little starting pitching depth, and only managed to get 8.2 innings out of CC Sabathia through the five game series.)

People can look back fondly on the 2001 champion Diamondbacks and appreciate the extent to which two really good starting pitchers like Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling could carry a team in the playoffs. But from our perspective, it's more fun to have to see a manager pull Phil Coke or Scott Feldman out to pitch important innings.

Managers, schmanagers: We'll confess to having consciously taken an amiable, happy-go-lucky tack when it comes to this year's playoffs, so we don't wring our hands and pound our fists on the upholstery with every managerial decision this post-season. But considering the near-constant uproar that we see on Twitter through the games and in the day-after analysis, we're led to make this conclusion: All four managers remaining in the playoffs are terrible.

Again, we don't necessarily espouse this opinion ourselves. But given the many people who are much smarter than me and, we gather, the remaining bench bosses, it appears that it's pure happenstance and lucky fumbling into success that has allowed Ron Washington, Jim Leyland, Ron Roenicke and Tony LaRussa to outlast their brethren. It's as though Chauncey Gardiner wandered from the grounds crew into the dugout in four different cities, and proclaimed "I like to manage."

This being the case, we wonder: How good or bad a manger is John Farrell? And does it matter? Because if any imbecile can manage a team through to the end of October, we're more than willing to offer up our own services. We imagine we'd look smashing in a pair of baseball pants and a windbreaker.

Gratitude

2011-10-08T09:13:00.002-04:00

Sometimes I find myself at a loss as to how The Org Kids ever put on an ounce of weight. The oldest one will sometimes go five nights in a row without eating a single morsel of food put before him on his dinner plate. The youngest has decided that it’s quite often more fun put a few bites in his mouth and then allow the partially masticated foodstuffs to tumble, saliva-soaked, back onto his plate. Delightful. At this rate they’ll be Ecksteinian, rather than Winfieldian.

I, on the other hand, don’t recall a time in my life when I didn’t love eating. As a younger man, I’d wear my appetite as a badge of honour, although I realized as I got older that it’s not a sustainable lifestyle if I wanted to, you know, survive until something close to retirement age.

Thanksgiving? Back in the day, Thanksgiving was my World Series. Time to leave it all on the field. Even now, I don’t play around. The Org Wife is pretty much the greatest cook in the world, so it’s no chore to load up plate after plate after plate of turkey, potatoes, stuffing, and even the odd vegetable. It’s not quite as gluttonous as the old days, but it’s still respectable.

(If Thanksgiving is my World Series, then my Winter Meetings are those little turkey buns I make with the leftovers. Dinner roll, mayo, leftover cranberry sauce and stuffing, some nice chunks of dark meat, salt and pepper. Repeat until supplies are exhausted.)

I already know what’s going to happen this Thanksgiving. Here’s THE NARRATIVE™: An incredible meal will be prepared. We will provide the tiniest of tiny portions to The Org Kids. They will pick at those portions. I will exhort them, plead with them, to eat. The Org Wife will do the same. I’ll go get a second plateful. I’ll finish that before the Kids have eaten four bites of their meals between them. I’ll get angry that the Kids haven’t eaten. Everyone will leave the table. Then I’ll finish the Kids’ plates too.

Man, it’s gonna be so great.

Since Thanksgiving is ostensibly about, er, giving thanks, let’s do that, shall we? Here’s what I’m thankful for as we watch teams that are not the Toronto Blue Jays attempt to win the actual World Series.

Alex Anthopoulos

The Jays’ wunderkind general manager has barely made a misstep since taking the reins of the team from JP Ricciardi. But forget about the miracle moves that come out of nowhere, the aggressiveness in the draft and in international free agent signings. I’m thankful that my favourite baseball team has a GM who, at the very least, seems eager and excited to please fans like me. He’s always unfailingly positive and upbeat, despite facing perhaps the longest odds of success of any GM in the game. It’s not uncommon for men in his position, in any sport, to come across publicly as smug assholes. He doesn’t – even after he’s done swindling some poor sap like Tony Reagins.

Jerry Howarth and Alan Ashby

I’m not about to invoke Tao’s wrath by pissing and moaning about the eloquence and wit, or lack thereof, of your Tim McCarvers and Buck Martinezes. I also can’t claim to have spent a great deal of time listening to the radio broadcasts of many other teams, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a treat every single time to hear Jerry Howarth and Alan Ashby call a Jays game.

It’s remarkable how easy it is for Jerry and Alan to trade off from play-by-play to colour commentary and back after every couple of innings. It’s unconventional, yet the transition is seamless. If the broadcasters themselves were any less capable, I’m not sure it would work. I can’t think of another regular broadcasting duo that could do it. Tom Cheek would be proud, I think.

October baseball

FACT: Every sport is better in shitty weather. The Tuck Rule game from the 2002 NFL playoffs would’ve been just another referee’s screw-up that nobody remembered if it wasn’t being played in a blizzard. People like my dad still talk about the Ice Bowl from 1967. Hell, you can even get Americans to watch hockey if they play it outside on New Year’s Day.

It occurred to me last week how much I enjoy bad-weather baseball as The Org Wife and I drove past two teams playing what surely had to be a season-ending softball game on a chilly Ontario autumn afternoon. No midsummer tank tops or shorts to be seen, but long pants on everyone and even a toque or three dotted the outfield.

“Damn, that looks cold,” I said, before muttering, “Wish I was out there.”

It’s a mundane detail about playoff baseball, the weather is. But damned if it doesn’t make it just a little more gripping. I love seeing the odd puff of fog in front of a batter’s face as he exhales in anticipation of a pitch, or an infielder wearing one of those goofy headbands that cover their ears. Or a pitcher rounding the bases with a warm-up jacket on. Those things, plus the Blue Jays not playing, really make it feel like the post-season to me.

I’m thankful for a lot more than those things, but I’ve already committed the weekend to brining my turkey. If you know what I mean. Enjoy the long weekend.

Weekend Whims and Notions

2011-10-07T09:28:00.007-04:00

In lieu of actual thoughts and ideas, we offer up something somewhere in the neighbourhood. Be thankful. Gobble gobble.

Ricky Romero Will Hang In There
If there is one notion about the Jays that has continued to resonate with us in the time since the season concluded, it's just how much we're impressed with the way that Ricky Romero pitched down the stretch. Over his first two full seasons, Romero scuffled down the stretch as he wore down, posting ERAs over 5.00 in August and September of 2009 and over 4.00 in the same months of 2010. This season, he kept a tight 2.05 ERA in August and 3.32 in September to bring his season into dry dock with a 2.92 ERA for the full campaign.

(You can feel free to quibble now with your xFIPpery and what not. We don't particularly care. We're talking about the past, not projections. But have at it if it makes you happy.)

The numbers are one thing, but what we find impressive in retrospect is the manner in which Romero pulled those last two months together. It seemed as though he struggled with his stuff and with locating his off-speed pitched as he wore down through the seasons end...and yet he was still able to pitch (P-I-T-C-H!) himself out of bad counts and jams with guile and by pounding the zone.

It's one thing to be able to utilize an impressive arsenal to blow away hitters, but when this Jays team ends up playing October baseball, they'll need a pitcher at the front of their rotation who will be able to get outs when he's bagged and ground down from an endless season. Ricky Ro is going to be that sort of pitcher.

Sympathy for A-Rod
As we watched Alex Rodriguez leave the field to choruses of boos after a couple of high-leverage strikeouts, we felt more than a tinge of sympathy for the Yankees star. (Wait...Can we call him a "Yankees Star" if he's not a "True Yankee"? We forget how that works.)

Rodriguez is an easy punching bag because he has been so nakedly desirous of the mantle of the Most Important Player in Baseball. He seemingly works hard to be liked, in spite of the fact that he shouldn't care because, you know...he's a really good baseball player, and that should probably be enough for him and the braying hordes in the Bronx. Of course, his desire for stature is what led him to take the money that, ultimately, only the Yankees could pay, so maybe our sympathy should be tempered.

In that moment of pathos, there was a vaguely insane and overly sleep-deprived part of us that started to ponder what a change of scenery might mean to Rodriguez, and what he might look like in a Jays uniform as he closed in on Barry Bonds' all-time home run record. We realize it's a kooky notion, though we actually think A-Rod would find something resembling a warm-ish welcome in Toronto. Or at least something more than outright disdain.

Rodriguez would likely have to move from third base (supposing that the hot corner remains under the dominion of Brett Lawrie), though a move to first base and/or DH over the next six years wouldn't necessarily be the worst thing for his health. There's also a small matter of the six years and a whole lot of money ($128 million, give or take) that it would require to keep A-Rod fed and watered over that time, and the trade off of having the Yankees eat any of that would be giving up prime prospects to a divisional rival.

Maybe we just want to see Alex Rodriguez scamper into the sunset without the litany of brickbats tossed his way. One day, he'll be gone, and baseball fans will have spent so little time appreciating what a great ballplayer he truly was.

New Unis Here, New Unis There
As we wait with bated breath for the next iteration of the Jays' logo and uniforms to be unveiled, we noted with interest the confirmation of the new Miami Marlins logo this week. We hadn't paid much mind to the initial leaks of the logo last month, but now that it seems to be the real deal, count us in the minority who really likes it. Both the art deco font of the logo's "M" and the orange and blue exude Miami's own particular style, and we're looking forward to seeing how they can be executed through the full uniform itself.

An odd sidenote to this is that many of those who we've read mocking the unorthodox logo and it's lack of adherence to classic style are precisely the same people who hurl stats and lampoon those who are locked into an old perception of how the game should be played.

Why are new metrics good, but new looks bad?

Other Tired Memes
You know what is more annoying than the play-by-play and colour guys in the booth this postseason (and frankly, throughout the season)? Hearing bloggers and reading endless tweets about how terrible these guys are. Stop and relax. You don't need to agree with every word that comes out of their mouths over the span of four hours, nor do you need to pull apart every statement made therein. If you think you're smarter and better informed than the people broadcasting the games, so be it. But keep it to yourself, because it's tiresome to read all of the quibbles over every syllable that Ron Darling utters.

We're not saying that we always agree with what's said. But this is just another area where the hardcore baseball fans get whipped up into meaningless tizzies for the sake of their own aggrandizement. That's cute and all, but save your disdain for the dude next to you. He might be able to tune you out better than we.

I Missed It

2011-10-01T22:36:00.005-04:00

When I laid my weary soul down to bed on Wednesday night, I was content. The Blue Jays had won earlier in the day, which always puts me in a pretty good mood. Later that evening, I got The Org Kids to bed, and settled in for some baseball. There were some rather important games on, you may recall. I wanted to catch as much of them as I could, knowing full well that The Org Kids would need to be fed and cared for the next morning before being shipped off to their respective educational facilities. The morning routine, as if often the case, limits my ability to watch baseball, or anything else, past about 10:30 PM.

So I watched for a bit, then went to bed. I went to bed with the New York Yankees leading the Tampa Bay Rays 7-0, and the Boston Red Sox/Baltimore Orioles game in a rain delay with Boston leading 3-2. In the National League, about which I care somewhat less, St. Louis held a 7-0 lead on Houston, and the Atlanta Braves were leading 3-1 over the Phillies (if I recall correctly. It may have been 3-2 for Atlanta at this point).

The worst case NL scenario was missing a Phillies comeback that would cap the Braves’ September collapse; otherwise, it’s a one-game Cards/Braves play-in. Worst case scenario for the AL: I miss an Orioles comeback after the rain delay, forcing a one-game Rays/Sox play-in, and unsheathing the rusty dagger that could potentially be plunged through the hearts of Red Sox Nation the next night.

This was my thought process. No matter what, I figured I would awaken to either:

the Sox and Cardinals having won their respective wild cards; or

a really awesome night of baseball coming Thursday night, with one or even two one-game showdowns.

I woke up to something substantially different, of course. I turned on the news and did a double take at the scrolling scores at the bottom of the screen. Then I got on Twitter, and it was like my friends had gone out to nondescript bar somewhere, I decided to stay home and take it easy instead, and then I found out later that The Who showed up and played an acoustic set. And also, my friends had come home and kicked me in the stomach several times while I slept.

***

It’s not always easy to be a Canadian baseball fan. It’s certainly not a very emotionally rewarding experience to be a Blue Jays fan, at least for the last 18 years or so. Those of us who follow the game, love the game, live for Opening Day – we’re not exactly the dominant force in the Canadian sports landscape. I’ve long since given up on explaining why I love baseball to those who ask how I can care so much for such a slow, boring game. From now on, I’m just going to carry around a copy of Joe Posnanski’s write-up from Wednesday night on laminated cards in my pocket and hand them out for those occasions.

I’m happy nowadays to simply feel like I’m part of a big, loosely-knit, yet dedicated club of Canadian baseball fans. We have our own inside jokes that devotees of other sports don’t get. Sometimes those jokes are at their expense; how many times have we taken the piss out of the people who call in to the Jays Talk to say the team should trade a player for draft picks? Most of our neighbours have never heard of the young prospects that get our hopes up, like Anthony Gose or Travis d’Arnaud or Jake Marisnick. Compare that to millions of hockey fans, both dedicated and casual, who’ve watched Nazem Kadri or Alexander Ovechkin or Sidney Crosby since they were 16 years old. Our enthusiasm for obscure-by-comparison prospects makes us feel like we’ve maybe got a bit more inside knowledge about our sport than they do about theirs.

Or at least that’s how I feel sometimes. I enjoy sharing these little idiosyncrasies with some like-minded people and not feeling like I have to apologize for it. Unfortunately, our clique is not often rewarded with big, amazing moments. As Posnanski said, “It’s all the years you spend waiting for Wednesday night that makes baseball great.” Wednesday’s baseball games are going to go down in history as some of the most stirring, memorable ones ever played. I had a chance to be part of it in a way that the non-fan isn’t. And I missed it.

When I tweeted this on Thursday morning, I was half-joking. I really did feel – I still do feel, in fact – like I missed out on something special.

In the end, though, I still got to wake up in the morning, hang out with my kids, and see them off to school. That’s a big, amazing moment I get to experience every day. They’re not big baseball fans, at least not yet. Maybe one day, they’ll get to see a night like Wednesday and won’t sleep through it like I did. I bet they’ll be two Canadian kids as hooked on baseball as I am.

That. Was. Awesome.

2011-09-29T09:50:00.003-04:00

We hauled our sleepy carcass into work late today, still shaking out the cobwebs and piecing back together the most exciting single day of baseball that we can remember. We're not sure if much of what we think we gleaned from the evening makes sense, but join us as we attempt to make sense of this Game 162 madness.

Love the Narrative. Ignore the Narrative: It's a bit odd as a guy who spends an inordinate amount of time punching out words about baseball to tell people not to follow the storyline of the season. We love the long and deliberate narrative to a franchise, with each season as a volume and each game a single page. At the same time, there are some standard lines that start to emerge that tell a much less interesting story about how this season reached the end of this chapter.

"Choke". "Collapse". "Destiny". Words that make it sound as though the postseason berths were lost or won based on a lack of moral fibre or the good graces of some benevolent overseer of the fates. But in the case of Boston and Atlanta, it was a dearth of decent starting pitching (or a lack of judgment on how best to use the pitching at their disposal) that really led to the teams' decline over the final month. Injuries to Clay Buchholz, Tommy Hanson and Jair Jurrjens left both the Red Sox and Braves scrambling to find starters down the stretch, while the Cardinals pitched okay enough and the Rays ran out a seemingly endless supply of strong starters night in, night out.

The Red Sox really seem to have a bare cupboard when it comes to starting pitchers, in part due to trades but also because they haven't seemed to really develop a top flight starter through the draft or their system since Buchholz. They also seemed unwilling to move Alfredo Aceves out of his long-relief role, even though he may have served them better starting some of the games they were doling out to Tim Wakefield (and his historic pursuit of a round number), Andrew Miller or Kyle Weiland. How many games did Aceves enter in the early innings to attempt to patch up the mess that those unworthy starters left ahead of him?

Meanwhile, Fredi Gonzalez had plenty of young starters who could have stepped in down the stretch, but chose to shunt them to the back of his pile while giving more innings to Derek Lowe, because of his "proven veteran" status. Julio Tehran, in particular, started the second half of a double-header on September 8th, then got just two subsequent relief appearances, while Lowe was rocked over his final five starts to the tune of a .985 OPS against and an 8.75 ERA. Would the youngster have been any worse than that?

You Don't Have to Be Rich...to Rule My World: Staying on the topic of pitching, it's worth noting (especially for Jays fans) that the Red Sox entered this season with expensive free agency acquisitions John Lackey and Daisuke Matsuzaka as part of their starting rotation. Both are locked up for next season at contracts worth about $16 million and $10 million respectively...and Lackey's deal stretches on to 2014. (With an option for 2015, which is just the unnecessary clown horn squeak at the end of the farce.)

And the man who couldn't make the sliding catch in left field to save the game for the Red Sox? Carl Crawford's taking home more than $20 million per year over the next six years as his reward for posting a sub-.700 OPS, which are marginally better numbers than Juan Rivera and Corey Patterson managed for the Jays.

Perception is a funny thing, and in those moments through the winter and spring, people couldn't conceive of a scenario where these Boston Red Sox weren't one of the all-time powerhouse teams, because of the investments they made. We were pounded all season long by fans who called us a shill or a sheep for refusing to wail at the Jays' ownership to spend at the same or a "competitive" level with Boston. In the end, the Jays managed nine fewer wins than the "greatest team of all time" in a transitional season.

It would be nice to think that the manner in which the Red Sox finished the season could tamp down a bit of the disdainful conventional wisdom, and the condescending "you gottas" when it comes to what the Jays do next. We're not banking on it.

Sharing the Impossible: Okay, we apologize for turning the visceral thrill of last night's games into another opportunity for us to be pedantic. Sorry. Because really, after a night like that, we should still be in a mood to bask in the incredible moment for a little while longer.

We listened to the Rays radio broadcast as we watched the game last night, and we're not sure that we'll ever forget the call by Andy Freed and Dave Wills. To hear them caught up in the incomprehensible moments, and to hear the fun that they had from the Longoria three-run shot to Dan Johnson's improbably two-strike, two-out, pinch-hit, game-tying homer in the bottom of the ninth, right through to Longo's game-winner in the 12th was a head-spinning experience, especially as they remarked about how different it was to observe all of the simultaneous online commentary from around the world. It was quite possibly the greatest game in the team's history, and we were happy to share with their fans, and with our many friends and followers on Twitter. It really magnified the moment.

The Rays are a rival, and we kinda hate those guys. But just for last night, it was pretty cool to root along with them. And while their success should give us pause for the Jays' chances over the next few years, we actually ended the night feeling a bit hopeful for what can happen when you build your team the right way.

September Call-up

2011-09-28T10:59:00.008-04:00

Pictured: 2002 Blue Jays September Call-Up

Although apparently nobody knows for sure why they ever started doing it, it has always seemed inherently logical for major league rosters to expand in September. Over the first 130-plus games, injuries pile up and starters wear down. By the stretch run, veterans need breaks and prospects need major-league at bats.

And let’s face it: for most teams (and I’m not telling Blue Jays fans anything they don’t already know), September games aren’t “meaningful”. That doesn’t mean they aren’t still important – as important as any games in April through August – but they are also as good an opportunity as any to try something new with the roster.

Applying the concept metaphorically to this blog, you may have noticed a certain, let’s say, intermittency from your esteemed host Tao. I can’t say I blame him.

So I approached him, to see if he’d be interested in some organizational depth – a replacement-level blogger who can take some platoon blogging at-bats and spell the seasoned but fatigued veteran from time to time.

The above-linked post points out that Lou Gehrig was a September call-up in 1923 and 1924. I ain’t Lou Gehrig, not from September of 1923 or any other time. Maybe Willie Bloomquist of 2002? I come in with a bang in my first crack at the blogging bigs, and then level off into a competent journeyman? That would be pretty cool.

In any case, I’m hoping to make an occasional contribution, ideally with a fresh perspective on the Blue Jays and maybe on baseball in general. I’ve been following the team for many, many years. For the last four or five, I’ve gradually grown into a pretty devoted Blue Jays enthusiast, learning more with each passing day about the team from top to bottom. I’m not a guy who can walk you through advanced statistics or how they’re developed, but I appreciate others who do, because they’ve helped inform my own thinking about the game.

I may not have paid my blogging dues, but I try to write as much as I can, professionally and just for shits and giggles too. I’ve taken my share of criticism, tried to learn from it, and tried to produce better writing as a result. If you like it, don’t like it, think it’s way off base, or pisses you off, let me have all of it in the comments. Consider it the September hazing. So zany!

On a personal note, I’d like to thank Tao for letting me in on this space. It’s among the best of a very strong group of Blue Jays-focused blogs, and I’m going to do my best to ~~drive it into the ground in return for a massive cash payoff from Dustin Parkes at thescore.ca~~ keep it that way.

Signed,

The Org Guy

PS. If you want to follow me on Twitter, you can do that too, but it's a nascent account. I'll have more to say there soon.

Where It All Changed - A Prelude to the Season's End

2011-09-27T13:36:00.007-04:00

You'll have to pardon the gratuitous Grateful Dead reference, but what a long strange trip the season's been. And somehow, it's still going.

We're working up to a piece that wraps the season up into a few pithy paragraphs, which we hope to have for you by the end of this week. But given our recent fits of delinquency on the blog, we figured we'd pull out a couple of the lesser strands from that piece for their own post. It's a little like watching the deleted scenes before you see the movie.

The most notable thing about looking back this season is that it's hard to find the beginning point of this year versus the closure of last year. In all likelihood, it went back before pitchers and catchers reported, and we suppose you could figure that the calendar truly flipped when the Jays named John Farrell as their manager on October 25th. But truth be told, we're still not sure after almost a full season what Farrell is as a manager, or what he brings to the mix. A strong jaw and a willingness to abide baserunning outs? But what more than that? We're still trying to figure that cat out.

As we look back, we keep settling on that day back in January, when Vernon Wells was traded out of town. We can still picture the restaurant where we had just walked in for a meal with Mrs. Tao, and the feverish exchange of tweets and messages as the details came to the surface. (Also, the indulgence of the missus as we lost our mind and ignored her for the entire meal. Sorries.) We suspect that the magnitude of that transaction has been lost somewhat over the past few months, to a point where we even saw tweets and heard JaysTalk calls which wondered about how good a trade it was, usually after a bad outing by Frank Francisco or a good night by Mike Napoli.

(Hopefully, Mike Wilner could back us up on that. We listened to A LOT of JaysTalk this year. It wasn't always like an exchange of discourse among gentleman and scholars at the Acropolis.)

But with almost 10 months' distance since the trade was announced, it's still worth remembering what a momentous change for the franchise that single transaction represented. It wasn't just about riding the team of a middling bat (though that helped) and a heap of cash (that was pretty nice as well). It wasn't just about opening up the middle of the diamond to a younger player with more upside, nor was it about reworking the middle of the lineup. The point is that a franchise with Vernon Wells as it's begrudging centrepiece does not make the deal for Colby Rasmus, and the Jays don't take the hyper-aggressive approach to drafting amateurs and signing international free agents this year if they are still trying to find a dance partner for the Wells Jubilee.

There's a touch of unease in personifying all that has gone right with this franchise around Wells, because we fear that he's been made to be more of a villain than he deserves. Many have filled in their own notion of how Vernon's intangible presence might have detracted from the team, but we wouldn't suggest that we know what occurs behind the closed doors of the Jays' clubhouse. Though it's hard to conceive of Wells' presence in the middle of the raucous, Delta House atmosphere that we've seen in the dugout as young stars with out-sized personalities made their way into the lineup.

Regardless, the $25 million per annum that the Jays would have had to pay out to him through the end of the 2014 season would have cast such a shadow over all other moves that they made that the team and its wunderkind general manager wouldn't have had the flexibility to take the calculated risks that they have since.

There's going to come a day when we write the book on how it all came together for the next great Toronto Blue Jays championship team. We have a notion that the Wells trade will not only provide the jumping off point for that narrative, but that it will weave its way through many of the other strands. The elasticity of the Jays' plan going forward depended on that single transaction.

The Tao's Tweet Bag - Extra Special Answers to Especially Good Questions

2011-09-22T16:14:00.004-04:00

Oh, hi. Remember me? It's your delinquent baseball blogging pal. We've been tied up with solving all the problems in the world over the past week, and a little behind in writing up some whims and notions on the Jays. Luckily, you've done the work of several yeomen in filling up the Tweet Bag this week with great questions to fuel the discussion. Let's get to it.

To start, we should get out of the way one question that was asked by many of you over the past day, including @MMMMBLT: What do you think of the new Jays logo??

We can't seem to find out Jump to Conclusions mat, as it's buried at the back of our closet with our Doc Martens and our zipper ties. So we can't jump to any conclusions about the validity of this logo, nor does the alleged logo tell us much about the look if the entire uniform ensemble. But if you want me to look at this picture and pass judgment, we'd tell you we like it a lot. It's not exactly the old logo, but it's a nice new iteration thereof. But still, we'll need to wait until we see the team working the new duds on a catwalk before we can adjudicate the execution of the new branding.

Next, @mstoreshaw (who always contributes questions and who we shamefully overlook) asks: If Lawrie profiles as corner OF long-term, crazy to look into Aramis Ramirez this winter? Likely fewer yrs/$ than Prince/Pujols.

Indeed, Aramis will certainly cost less than either of the major free agents, though he may look for an increase over this year's $16.75 million. Still, over the next three years, we can see Ramirez putting up numbers similar or vaguely equivalent to those of Fielder, while providing more defensive value.

There's still the matter of who moves where and plays what next year if the Jays were to make a move for a third baseman, and there's a larger philosophical question as to whether if you move to get the best players you can find in free agency or trades and figure out their spot on the diamond afterwards. It seems to us that the Jays are set on Lawrie at the hot corner, but a move to the outfield or even to first base in order to accommodate Ramirez isn't the craziest idea we've heard.

Let's keep talking about the corners. Two questions (from opposite perspectives) on a Jays-Reds deal in the offseason.

@joelwpenney asks: With Votto's contract rising to $17M in '13 and Y.Alonso waiting in CIN, will AA make a play? Cooper/D'Arneaud/Thames for Votto?

While @whatadewitt asks: You think a guy like Yonder Alonso fits the Jays? Seems like a high-ceiling guy without a spot to play...

To the first question, we don't think that package comes anywhere close to getting you Joey Votto. For starters, you've suggested sending back a first baseman and a left fielder to help them deal with the 1B/LF glut that they currently have. That's ain't going to play. To get a player like Votto, it's going to hurt. You know that crazily amazing rotation that the New Hampshire Fisher Cats rode to the Eastern League Championship? Start with those names, adding a couple of them into the mix, and you've got the start of a Votto deal, and none of that even begins to factor in that he'll be looking for a Pujols/Fielder/Howard deal very soon. (Plus, you've also got the start of your future holes in your rotation, but we digress.)

To the second question, yes, we think that Alonso would come with a more reasonable price tag, and could be a decent solution to the Jays' lack of production at first base. Alonso may even profile to be more of a DH in the long term, so he'd fit better with an AL team anyways. We're not sure what they'd have to give up to get him, but we'd be all for a move that brings in a player on upswing of his career. Buy low, sweet GM.

More offseason talk, before we even reach the end of the year! @CountyPride asks: Is a better bullpen AA's main priority this offseason?

We're not going to say that the bullpen won't be part of the process this Winter, because it surely will. Just as last year, the Jays went out and signed three players who had previously served as closers, we can see them again looking at low cost arms on short deals with a team option attached. We're not sure that it will necessarily be the main priority, or the most important aspect of the roster reconstruction, if by that you mean "Are they going to spend a lot of money and make big deals on players who have big names." In part, this is because we think that some of the arms that will pitch from the bullpen next year are already in the system. But with four or five slots to fill, there will certainly be new bodies added. Just don't get your hopes up for a proven closer for hire.

Speaking of which, @DrewGROF asks: Jonathon Broxton - Proven Closer for hire! Yay or nay?

Nay! A thousand times, NAY! (We suspect that Drew may have served us up a meatball, not unlike what the rotund Broxton might do to batters on a regular basis.)

Mind you, if you were to ask us if we'd toss a cheap, one-year deal at a 300 lb. pitcher with a history of injuries, but also the occasional dominant season (114 Ks versus 29 BB in 76 innings in 2009), we might take that gamble. If you slot him into an undetermined role in the pen (i.e. not necessarily as the closer), and you don't treat him as a bullpen saviour, you may well convince us. Would Broxton sign for one year under those circumstances? That might be a tough sell.

More bullpen queries! @NicholasDerosa asks: Cecil next year = rzep this year. Converted starter who had lots of chances, turned into expendable bullpen arm?

See? This is what we were saying about bullpen solutions from within. Yes, we understood the old argument that Cecil had too much of an arsenal to be relegated to bullpen or closer duty. (And yes, for a starter, the closer role is a demotion.) But given diminished velocity, diminished effectiveness of Cecil's secondary pitches and a delivery which keeps falling out of sorts, we don't think his spot in the rotation is remotely guaranteed next year. On the other hand, Cecil is tough on lefties (.190 batting average,.283 OBP,.246 slugging against in 145 plate appearances versus left-handed batters this season), which might be an asset out of the pen.

If the Jays don't have better options in their rotation, then we wouldn't be in a rush to move Squints into a bullpen role. But if Cecil isn't looking to be a sub-4.00 ERA starter, then, y'know...why the heck not?

And it all comes full circle. @alittlehghas asks Do you see the #Jays adding another piece to their starting rotation in the off-season?

While we don't know if the Jays will add someone to help improve the state of the starting rotation, our notion is that a) Only Ricky Romero and maybe Brandon Morrow have guaranteed starting jobs to begin next year and b) you can never have enough good starting pitching. If there is a player out there that can be had without emptying the system or overpaying in the free agent market, then the Jays ought to pursue that. Anyone in mind?

Apparently, maybe. @THEPatSuley asks: What do you think of The Jays going after CJ Wilson?

We haven't expended a lot of time thinking on Wilson up until recently, in part because we presume that the Yankees are going to pursue him so vigourously that the Jays won't get a shot at him unless they wildly overpay. Which is ridiculous, right?

Maybe we've just been worn down by too many conversations about "proven veterans" and all that nonsense, but the idea of a gaudy four-year deal for Wilson actually is starting to make sense to us. To keep him away from your AL East rivals, and you would have to accept some additional financial risk, but if there is a reason to sign a borderline bad contract, it might be to keep pace in the chase for good starting pitching.

Let's get a move on. Here's the rapid-fire portion of our semi-weekly exchange of ideas.

@JamieWine: You think Lawrie plays so hard that he'll always be an injury risk? We've had exactly this thought on more than one occasion since he was recalled. His injuries this year have been mostly flukey ones. But a player who plays at max effort levels as often as Lawrie does is a candidate for strains or tears.

@daveellis66: Correct response to being told to sit down during 9th inning rally at RC? A) Why don't you STAND UP? or B) Forearm to jugular? Depends on who was behind you (little old lady? mother with children?) and how you approached the situation (were you a jerk about it?) Generally, we'd suggest option A. Be nice.

@xsoccermomx: Why do pickles taste better then cucumbers and whats this team gotta do to get to the next level of good teams? In both instances, we'd offer the same answer: "Dill and brine."

@willbryden: What do you think the chances are that Snider gets traded this winter, or will they wait until he re-establishes his value? If they have a notion that he's not going to turn things around ever, then we suppose it's possible that they'll look for a deal. But we think the Jays will give Snider another opportunity to prove himself, because his upside is likely better than anything they could extract in return for him.

Finally, @itsgettinglate: What are your thoughts on the Zooey Deschanel vehicle New Girl? We thought we were getting to a point where the whole cutesy fey thing that Zooey had going on would wear thin. Turns out, it hasn't yet. We kinda hate the show, but we can't not watch it. She's a peach, and it's fun just to watch her be a goofball.

And that's all you wrote. (Well, not exactly, but it's all we figured you'd read.) We're always happy to hear your thoughts, feelings and aspirations. Share with us in the comments, and please, enjoy the conclusion to the season. It's a long, long winter ahead.

The Conundrum Out in Left Field

2011-09-15T10:36:00.006-04:00

Some folks spend a lot of time trying to imagine the Blue Jays bullpen next season. For us, the item of greater interest is in whose direction the members of the 2012 bullpen will be spitting their sunflower seeds.

Somewhere along the line, the Jays' left field situation got really interesting. At the beginning of the year, we would have figured that Travis Snider would have locked it down and settled into a full-time, long-term role with the team as the Eternal Rebuilding Plan came closer to fruition. But as the season played out, the situation in that corner of the outfield was muddied by the emergence of some and the rejigged roles of others.

By the time next March rolls around, some of the names and faces may well have changed or moved on. Regardless, we've enumerated the long list of candidates for the left field job based on what they've done this year and our view of the likelihood that they'll assume the role at the beginning of next season.

1. Eric Thames: By the end of the weekend, Thames will trail only José Bautista in plate appearances by outfielders this season. He's also second in OPS among Jays outfielders with an unspectacular .770 mark. He's had plenty of opportunity to nail down the position as his own, but a less-than-convincing defensive performance will mean he'll still have to fight his way onto the big league roster next season. His performance at the plate (.314 OBP) doesn't make up for his defensive liabilities, though we get the sense that his aggression (51.3% swing rate, highest of anyone not named Corey Patterson with 100 PAs) is not contrary to the team's philosophy. Apparently, you don't walk your way out of Vegas.

He has options, and if the Jays are squeezed to find room on the 25-man roster, we wouldn't be surprised to see him parked in in the PCL to rake at the start the season.

2. Travis Snider: Were it not for his history with the Jays and his role as the perpetual prospect on the cusp, we'd slide Snider further down this list. If you were to try to resolve this quandry with a cold-eyed statistical approach, there's at least a marginally better argument for Rajai Davis, who bettered Snider in OBP (.273 to .269), and slugging (.350 to .348).

By the eyeball test, Snider is a better fielder than Thames who improved that aspect of his game greatly last year. (If you must, his UZR/150 is 11.4, while Thames is a -18.8 and Davis is a -12.) If they Jays feel as though they can place Snider at the bottom of the lineup and let him work his way through a full season of playing with the big boys, then he's likely to start the season with the team. But his late season injury and his remaining option (yes, he apparently has one for 2012) gives Alex Anthopoulos a fairly legitimate rationale for starting him in the minors.

3. Rajai Davis: The Jays have Davis signed for $2.75 Million next year, with a $3 Million option ($500K buyout) for 2013. That's not a monstrous contract, and it would be easy to move if the Jays were so inclined. But Davis' long list of health issues means that he'll likely have to get at bats in Toronto before he'll be enough of a marketable asset. (Plus, the temptation to have a "prototypical" lead-off hitter might be too much for John Farrell to resist, even if he has toned down the relentless running game through the later part of the season.)

If Davis has a role with the Jays beyond May of next year, our guess is that it will most likely be as a fourth outfielder.

4. Adam Loewen: The Jays won't be able to park Loewen in the minors next year, which means he either makes the 25-man roster or they risk losing him on waivers. Loewen's versatility (he can play all three outfield slots and first base) might earn him a bench role next year, and if the battle for the starting LF job falls between him and Davis, we could see the Jays opting for his bat over Rajai's feet.

In his limited time in the Majors thus far, he hasn't looked out of place (five hits in five games), though the value of September performances are tough to quantify. Still, he's started to make a believer out of us. His Canadian passport means that he'll be the choice of the chattering class, for whatever that's worth.

5. Mark Teahen: It's entirely possible that the Jays choose to eat his $5.5 Million salary for 2012 and move on. If letting that much coin sink to the bottom of Lake Ontario is the cost of getting Colby Rasmus, then so be it. But if they somehow decide to bring him back, he'd be as likely to get plopped into left field as anywhere else. It's a long shot, but then again, he is sorta-Canadian.

6. Moises Sierra: The 22 year-old Sierra has had a decent year at New Hampshire (.342 OBP/.436 SLG/ .778 OPS, 18 HR and 16 SB in 133 games), posting numbers that were marginally better than those of Anthony Gose (who's still just 21.) Will likely merit a promotion to Las Vegas, where the typical PCL inflation will have tongues wagging by June over a possible callup. Unlikely to start the season with the Jays (barring a slew of trades and injuries), but will be on the far outer edge of the conversation.

7. Anthony Gose/Jake Marisnick: Included here because, you know, why not? Both will be in their 21 year-old seasons next year, presumably with Gose in Vegas and Marisnick in New Hampshire. Neither is likely to see Toronto before September at the absolute earliest. But you know you'll be asking about them all year long.

8. Edwin Encarnacion: Allegedly, this is happening. We have yet to see him play the outfield, though we've seen some brief video of him tracking fly balls from a machine. (He looked like he's able to catch soft fly balls shot directly towards him, though for that matter, we'd probably be able to pull that off.) Farrell has said that he'll get some innings out there at the end of games before the season is out, though sometimes we think he makes those sorts of comments to entertain the beat writers.

The Wisdom of Solomon?

Our interest was piqued by a tweet last night from the New Hampshire Union Leader's Kevin Gray, who is covering the beat as the Fisher Cats play for the Eastern League Championship:

Fisher Cats owner Art Solomon told the players before the game: "The way you played (in Game 1) was embarrassing."

This followed a game which the Fisher Cats lost 10-9 in the ninth inning to start the series. (Did we mention that this was the League Championship that they're playing for? We'll probably mention this again.) We were left gobsmacked at the notion that the Jerry Jones of some third-level market could take it upon himself to scold the Jays' prospects as though they were his players. Gray assured us via Twitter that Solomon feeds the boys steaks and looks after them whilst in New Hampshire, but we can't get past the fact that he has no authority to lecture the Jays prospects.

If there were speeches that needed to be given, there's a manager in Sal Fasano who can do the talking.

If Solomon wants to tear a strip off the ushers, or tear into the marketing department, or yell at a popcorn vendor, then have at it. Those are his employees. The future Jays? He should probably keep away and enjoy the fact that these players who have embarrassed him so have managed to get four additional home gates for him. A little less scolding and a little more gratitude might be in order.

Epic Tweet Bag! So Many Questions, Not Enough Answers!

2011-09-09T09:47:00.005-04:00

We asked for your questions, and you provided them in abundance. (Even with our caveat that we wouldn't answer anything to do with the growing obsessions for Joey Votto, Prince Fielder and Albert Pujols.) So without any further dithering about, it's your Tweet Bag column!

@mkpiatkowski asks: Do you think Lind can be fixed? And if so, how? And what about Aaron Hill being able to hit in the desert?

To the first part, we continue to wonder if there isn't something that's gone from nagging to chronic in Lind's back as the season has progressed. He missed a month, came back and raked for two weeks, then basically fell off a cliff for the remainder of the season. (He also appears to be swinging with his arms as opposed to his whole body, which is why we have our suspicions.) As for why he'd continue to play through it, we figure that he (and the Jays) though that it was a manageable injury...But we're getting way ahead of ourselves. But if it is injury-related, hopefully some rest will help to put him straight.

As for Hill? It's amazing what staring into the abyss will do to a player's motivation. Also, he's playing against lesser teams right now. Let's not assume too much.

Onward ho! @CrazzzyQball asks: Do you think Farrell will replace either the pitching coach or the hitting coach in the off season?

A couple of things: First, we don't think that John Farrell makes that call himself. But second, we think that there will be turnover in the staff over the winter. Nothing overly dramatic, but we think it is entirely within the realm of possibility that one of the Jays' coaches gets snatched away by another team, which will mean that the roles of the remaining members of the staff get tweaked, and maybe Luis Rivera gets to sit in the dugout.

More along these lines from @DSF81: How much should we read into the Mottola "call up"?

Chad Mottola has (according to the players who've come through Las Vegas) done a stellar job in helping to identify subtle tweaks to their mechanics that have helped them to thrive this year. So maybe he deserved a call-up, just as David Cooper or Adam Loewen did. But should his presence in Toronto mean that he should size up Dwayne Murphy's locker space? Not necessarily.

If there is something to read into this move, we'd point to the depth that the Jays are creating in their coaching ranks. The Jays already have more coaches than they can fit into uniform on any given night, and if they find individuals who are able to help, why not keep them in the system? Why not have the single largest coaching staff in the league? And why not offer a bit of enticement for minor league instructors to stay within the fold?

We're guessing that whether if his future is in Toronto or Las Vegas next year, Mottola is feeling the love. And when you feel the love, your interest in sticking it out rises, and your interest in seeking the next best opportunity might not be as strong.

Next up, fantasy baseball guru @whatadewitt asks: WAR is wins above replacement, by definition, wouldn't this indicate the league's most valuable player?

Oh...if only it were that simple. On the one hand, a stat like WAR isn't going to speak to the narrative that some writers like to use in order to fill out their ballots. It might contribute, but it's amazing how the traditional markers (played for a contender, RBIs, stolen bases) still matter for a lot of people in the discussion.

On the other hand, there's a growing issue that we have with that specific metric, specifically around how it integrates defense into the equation. Increasingly, we're becoming uncomfortable with Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) as a precise measurement for a player's defensive output in a given season. Players seem to jump up and down dramatically from year to year, though we understand that more data (several seasons worth, apparently) can help to make this metric more meaningful. Having said that, it seems wrong to give it as much weight as it seems to have in the current configuration of Fangraphs' calculation of WAR, especially when discussing a single season performance.

There's an illusion of precision that WAR presents, because this player is 0.5 wins better than that player, and so on. But as ESPN's Keith Law notes, that's tantamount to a rounding error. We're not suggesting throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and we still feel pretty good about the calculation of offensive WAR, to which we often refer. In the interim, we're working hard on our new metric: The Cut of his Jib Above That Other Dude (COJATOD), which should be ready any year now, and will be absolutely bullet-proof.

Nextly, @JeremyTMartin asks: Does Loewen have a place with Jays in 2012? If so, how do Jays juggle him with Snider & Thames?

As nice as the story is with Loewen reshaping himself and coming back as a position player, we don't think there's going to be room for him on the roster. The Jays not only have Snider and Thames to consider, but also Rajai Davis for their outfield spots next year. Certainly, some of those bodies might move in trades over the offseason, but there's still a few too many players ahead of him to figure on a spot for 2012. Our guess is that the Jays allow Loewen to test the market, and someone sees enough in him to offer him a minor league deal with a better chance of cracking the 25-man roster.

Our next contestant,@SmellyMoss has this: Two questions from the UK: Opening Day rotation using available pitchers/current roster, second base next season: KJ or AH?

How could we not answer a question from another continent?

There were a few rotation questions that came through this week, which we understand given all the extra arms kicking around the team this week. We could spoil the fun by saying that it's almost impossible to know. But we're not that much of a spoil-sport, so here's what we can figure: Ricky Romero (for sure), Brett Cecil (pretty sure), Brandon Morrow (uneasily unsure), Henderson Alvarez (optimistically unsure), and...well...from here, it's a crapshoot. We'll have a better sense after Sunday's outing from Dustin McGowan, but we'd lean towards him as the leading candidate to at least break camp with the team.

This all supposes no player movement, which is why @devenp asks: What are the odds the Jays go after CJ Wilson or Harden in the offseason? Also possible trade targets?

We'd figure Harden would be a better bet than Wilson, if only because we're reasonably certain that the Yankees will just keeping stacking thousands of $100 dollar bills in front of his house until he says yes. We'd probably prefer to give Harden a whirl in the bullpen, but we suspect that he might prefer a rotation spot. If no one else is offering that assurance, the Jays might have a shot. (And that has nothing to do with his being Canadian.)

As for trade targets, it's far too early to even guess. There's a lot of baseball to play yet, and many moves to be made between now and the winter meetings. Ask us in four months.

Also, relatedly, @gcm1979 asks: Which current prospect not yet with the team will have the biggest impact in 2012?

Experience seems to indicate that the players who unexpectedly sneak into the mix tend to be pitchers, because you need a lot of them to get through 162 games. The playoff rotation of the New Hampshire Fisher Cats is as good a place as any to start your search, as four very good hurlers have landed there by season's end: Chad Jenkins (23), Deck McGuire (22), Nestor Molina (22) and Drew Hutchison (20) have all advanced through one or more minor league levels, and all have looked good (at least according to the numbers) in doing so. Jenkins would seem to have reached the age where he's ready to ascend, although he misses the fewest bats amongst that group (6.6 strikeouts per nine innings, and a 2.74 K/BB rate).

The other three put up drool-inducing numbers through this season.

-McGuire (at high-A Dunedin and AA New Hampshire): 8.9 Ks/9, 3.14 K/BB
-Molina (Dunedin/NH): 10.2 Ks/9, 9.25 K/BB
-Hutchison (Low A Lansing, Dunedin and NH): 12.6 Ks/9, 10.5 K/BB

Based on his experience at the higher levels, we'd guess that Molina is the most likely of that group to slip through and make an impact next season, though don't completely forget about Hutchison. A debut at 21 isn't beyond the realm of possibility.

Let's wrap this quickly. You've all got things to do this weekend, right?

@B00mer05: In what capacity, if any, do you see Johnny Mac coming back to the jays next season? At most, 25th man to start the season. Regular pinch-runner. Backup SS/2B/3B. Possibly transitioning into a coaching role.

@NicholasDerosa: Do you think MLB should allow trading of draft picks? No, absolutely not. Did you see what the Pirates did down the stretch? Dumb teams would trade their picks to smart teams, who would stockpile them and...wait...this might work out well for the Jays!

@gord_u: Scott Parker: Great Spur, or Greatest Spur? *Shakes fist* Why you. (This is a soccer thing. Gord is making me cry.)

@darelleats: OK! I have decided that the Jays need Brett Gardner. Am I nuts? How do we make this happen? You are nuts. Why would the Yankees let a good player like that go? Back to the video games for you, son!

Finally, on a happy note, this from @500LevelFan: If you could drink a beer with 1 current Jay, 1 former Jay, and 1 other mlb player, who would they be? We'd grab José Bautista, Carlos Delgado, and Miguel Cabrera and a case of Presidente, and just listen to them talk about hitting jacks all night long. (Of course, we wouldn't understand enough Spanish to know what they'd be saying, so we might need to rethink this.)

As always, thanks for all of your questions, and we'll do one more of these before the end of the season. Have a great weekend!

Five Other Guys Who Could Play First

2011-09-08T11:17:00.008-04:00

Somewhere along the line, the idea that the Jays could take a run at Prince Fielder (or to a lesser extent Albert Pujols) or could try to pry Joey Votto loose has evolved in the minds of Jays fans from a flight of fancy to an absolute necessity. We fear that even musing about those players has amped up Jays fans to a point where they can't help but be disappointed when none of those players come to Toronto in the offseason.

(And though we think that Alex Anthopoulos is a magical creature who makes the impossible occur with some regularity, we feel pretty comfortable saying that none of those guys will be Blue Jays anytime soon.)

But because we hate to see people disappointed, we offer up the following list of players who we think could be had at a minimal cost, and who could provide the Jays with a decent solution for a year or two at first base/DH, should they decide that Adam Lind is not the best option.

(For a point of reference going forward, Lind's numbers are: .297 OBP, .442 SLG, .739 OPS, and an offensive WAR of 0.4 according to Baseball Reference.)

Carlos Lee: Lee has a year left on his mega-deal with the Astros, worth $19 million. That's a lot of dough, but Houston might be just as happy to let it go for cheap, while the Jays wouldn't be locking themselves into anything onerous in the long term. Lee has posted a not-terrible .330 OBP to go with a .444 SLG this year, and has played 62 games at first with positive UZR numbers (for whatever they might be worth).

Todd Helton: The Rockies' first baseman is in the twilight of his career, having just turned 38. Still, he's managed to post an .859 OPS (.387 OBP/.472 SLG) this year, which slots him just ahead of Mark Teixeira in that "dumber" metric. He has three years left on his long term deal with Colorado, but at $4.9, $5.0 and $1.31 million through 2014, that's a very manageable number. With Ian Stewart looking to get another shot at a full-time big league job, the Rockies might be inclined to let their franchise's most beloved player go.

Carlos Pena: After signing a one-year, $10 million deal with the Cubs last off-season, Pena has battled back from slow start and is now putting up numbers that you'd pretty much expect from him (.355 OBP, .461 SLG, .816 OPS). Pena is represented by Scott Boras, so no one should expect a sweetheart of a deal to be forthcoming. But for a guy whose offensive WAR is at par with that of Ryan Howard (2.3), it wouldn't be a terrible idea to see if a reasonable one- or two-year deal isn't a possibility.

Logan Morrison: Morrison's probably better suited to play first base than the outfield. (We have lots of questions about UZR, but LoMo's -15.9 UZR/150 number for his career at least indicates that it's not all bouquets and fruit baskets out there.) His offensive year hasn't been as superb as one might have hoped (.328/.451/.779), but those are still better numbers than Lind's. Also, given the all the ruckus around him, his demotion and his outspoken defense of former batting guru (John Mallee, who was fired by Florida but subsequently hired by the Blue Jays to serve as a roaming instructor), it could be that he didn't have his full focus on the game. He's just 24, and we think he'd benefit from the proverbial change of scenery.

Adam Dunn: Is Adam Dunn really this bad? Does he really not like baseball? Is he really a guy who posts a .576 OPS? Whose uninspiring OBP (.295) is actually higher than his SLG (.285)? Given that over the three previous seasons, Dunn posted a cummulative .380 OBP/.526 SLG/.906 OPS, we be willing to bet on some sort of comeback, especially if he were given the chance to play the field again. Is that bet worth the $44 million remaining on Dunn's contract over the next three seasons? That's probably up for debate, but he'll certainly cost the Jays less than any of the other names being bandied about.

Was there anyone we missed? Any other 1B/DH types who the Jays should consider for next year and beyond? Drop us a line in the comments, and we'd love to hear your take.

Notes from the Notebook: Scattered Thoughts from the Long Weekend

2011-09-06T07:29:00.001-04:00

After a long weekend of reflection and scribbling the most profoundly obscure, yet thoroughly sagacious baseball insights into our Moleskin notebook, we scanned the pages, ran them through optical character recognition software, and six hours later, we gave up. (Our teachers were right: We really do have atrocious handwriting.)

Instead of those momentous thoughts, we offer the vague whims that came to us just now. Enjoy.

The Ongoing Epic History of Brett Lawrie
We live in an age where baseball is increasingly appreciated through the analysis of various and sundry points of data. (Which is totally fine. We get that thing. We don't judge. Some of our best friends are stat heads.)

But in the midst of all that poring over columns of numbers and arguing as to the validity of the your numbers over ours and fretting over which version of the stat you're about to quote is the one that is de rigeur this week...well, there's something refreshing about sitting back and viscerally appreciating the sight of Brett Lawrie playing baseball.

It's not just that Lawrie plays with intensity (which he does), or seems to legitimately love what he's doing. It's not the dirt on his jersey or the blood on his pants, or his somewhat local provenance. The thing that's so awe inspiring about Lawrie is the simple fact that he plays the game well. Extraordinarily well.

There are things that he does on the diamond or at the plate which are just so impressive to watch that it legitimately reminds you of why you like the game in the first place. For instance: Seeing the 21 year-old let pitches that break just out of the zone float by without a flinch leaves us astonished. These are pitches that entice swings out of successful veterans with a decade of experience under their belt, but because someone in the Jays front office told Lawrie at some point to be more selective, he just figured it out and did it. This is to say nothing of his defence, which seemed shakey when he first arrived in Toronto. But a bit of presumably well-received instruction, and now we're reaching for superlatives and to remember who has ever patrolled the hot corner for the Blue Jays as skillfully as he has.

It takes effort to turn down the noise of the chatter about value and free agents and September callups and men in white and next year's rotation and compensatory picks and, well...all of it. We're grateful that Brett Lawrie has shown up to occasionally wow us with the game he's crafted for himself. It makes us feel 21 again.

Red Sox Pitching Torture
Between Josh Beckett's interminable dull-eyed stare into the catcher's groin and the infuriatingly protracted time that Jonathan Papelbon takes to throw the ball, we're amazed that anyone can even pretend to enjoy watching the Red Sox.

Sure, we get that there's an abiding affection for the team that's held by New Englanders or some of you kids out in the Maritimes. But you can't tell us that you enjoy watching the games. It's just such an onerous demand on your patience to sit and watch Papelbon take 24 minutes to throw 27 pitches. Who has that sort of time all summer long?

A four-hour game that ends with a single run being scored just baffles us, and should frankly be more of a concern to the MLB's brain trust. There are rules in place to guard against these sorts of excesses, and the league shouldn't be waiting until sometime after a Red Sox/Yankees ALCS where every game lasts well beyond 1 a.m. to do something about it. It's contrary to the best interests of the game.

As we joked on Twitter: Whichever player decides to charge the mound in the middle of one of Papelbon's endless ponderings will instantly become national hero.

(Apparently, we weren't alone in our antipathy, as NESN Red Sox analyst Dennis Eckersley called the display "sickening to watch" according to a tweet from ESPN Boston's Gordon Edes.)

Lind Provides Bitter Relief
The end of that endless 10th inning came on three wild and ugly swings from Adam Lind. The strikeout only served to further our opinion that he should slide down (way down) the Jays lineup soon for the good of the team. The Jays may not be "playing for something" at this point, but that doesn't mean that they should continue to undermine their offence by waiting for the ghost of a chance that Lind's 2009 form will return.

After returning from a back injury in June, Lind put up two solid weeks of walloping the Royals, Orioles and Reds. But from his OPS apex of 1.019 at the start of play on June 18th, his performance has plummeted, with his OPS sitting at .745 through September 3rd. In the intervening time, Lind has put up a .199 batting average to go with a .241 on base and .322 slugging. He's struck out 57 times in those 287 plate appearances, while drawing just 14 walks.

Perhaps most shocking of all is that Lind hit just six doubles in that time, which is one fewer than the number of times he's hit into a double play. Over the full course of the season, he's hit 24 homers, but that number only serves to obscure just what a feeble offensive season this has been for Lind, given that he's managed barely half as many doubles (13). (In case you're wondering, Lyle Overbay has 18 doubles through his horrible season with Pittsburgh and Arizona.)

It could be that the back troubles that landed Lind on the DL in the first place have nagged at him all year long, and perhaps when he is healthy and rested at the beginning of next Spring, he'll rebound nicely. If there is some injury that is impeding him from playing the game to his fullest, the Jays might be willing to show some patience and see him through part of the remaining three years on his contract. What they should not do is continue to subvert the achievements of the others in the lineup but waiting for those tarnished skills to suddenly reappear this season. It isn't happening.

Three Happy Thoughts!
So that your pallet isn't offended with the acidity of any of the observations above, we leave you with three happier notions to brighten your day:

1) Henderson Alvarez faced the most fearsome offensive lineup in baseball and walked away unscathed. Moreover, the hard sink and movement on his pitches left some pretty impressive hitters looking like statues cast to convey befuddled apprehension.

2) Five of the Blue Jays' minor league affiliates made the postseason this year. Vince Lombardi said that "winning is a habit". It's nice to think that some future Jays are developing that habit early on in their careers.

3) Dustin McGowan is back, and he brought his lambchops with him. It's nice to see him, and we look forward to seeing him pitch again.

The Extraordinary Circumstances of Brian Tallet

2011-08-31T09:52:00.006-04:00

The sight of Brian Tallet last night was more than a little surreal. It was a bit like running into an ex, where you're left just a bit slack-jawed, thinking "oh, heeeeyyy...it's...you."

We'd never figured we'd see him much of Tallet again. Certainly not in a Jays uniform. Even after the trade that brought him back to the fold, we thought it was a long shot that he'd get back into the playing shape. We figured he'd head off into the sunset, and work on whatever side projects he and his fellow members of Broken Social Scene have planned for the Winter.

(That's him, second from the left...right?)

But there he was, his lanky frame once again draped in the familiar number 56 uniform, taking the ball in a most unfamiliar situation - looking for his first career save in six tries. We likely don't need to enlighten you as to what ensued, but in case you're reading this twelve years from now in some internet archive, Tallet basically threw the ball anywhere but in the strike zone, giving up two walks, two hits and two runs while getting just one out.

It would be easy to bury Tallet - and people on Twitter and elsewhere were calling for him to be DFAed before his cleats even left the playing surface - but we'd be somewhat charitable towards him given the extraordinary circumstances. Tallet hadn't pitched a big league game in almost two months after dealing with serious kidney issues, but Jays interim manager Don Wakamatsu had few other options than to run him out after having his pen run ragged in the series against the Rays.

When Casey Janssen couldn't go back out after a clean ninth, Wakamatsu basically had a choice between lefty Rommie Lewis and Tallet to go out and face a lineup full of right-handed bats heading into extra innings. Given that it was Tallet's first game back, holding Lewis for any subsequent extra innings was probably the right choice, unpalatable though it may have seemed.

We're not saying that Tallet's is an arm that we want to many more times this season. But we'll cut him some slack before calling for his immediate release. It wasn't the ideal situation for anyone involved.

UPDATE, 3:52 PM: And now, he's gone again. If we hadn't watched last night's game, we'd barely believe that he was here at all. We probably would have told you that you were mistaken, and it was just someone who looked like him.

We feel terrible for Tallet.

Leaving Las Vegas? Not Likely

2011-08-30T00:15:00.007-04:00

By chance last night, we noticed that Kyle Drabek would get the call to start the Las Vegas 51's game versus the Sacramento River Cats. Given the perpetual fixation on the future among Jays fans these days, we dialed up the game to see what the young pitcher had to offer should he merit a September call-up.

It took about 15 minutes to realize that Kyle Drabek probably isn't getting that call.

Drabek had an okay first inning, giving up a homer to Oakland farmhand Chris Carter. It seemed at some times as though he wasn't getting calls at the top of the zone, but we can't remember a pitcher who has excelled by living up there for any amount of time.

By the second frame, though, Drabek's delivery began to unravel, as he looked to be exerting a lot of extra effort throwing across his body. A soft single was followed by a walk, then a botched 3-6-1 double play in which Adeiny Hechavarria threw high and Drabek hit the ground after reaching to make the catch.

From there on, it was a scene from which you wanted to avert your eyes. Another soft single, then three consecutive walks with Drabek's delivery becoming increasingly erratic and almost random from pitch to pitch. He uncorked a wild pitch. His limbs flew about on each delivery like a shaken sock monkey.

The third inning started with a tough play to Hechavarria, who rushed a throw on what would be ruled a single. Once again, Drabek looked frazzled, loading the bases so that they could be cleared by Quadruple-A infielder Wes Timmins (who?) with one swing of the bat. Escaping the inning was modest achievement.

Drabek's final line: 3.0 IP, 8 hits, 9 runs (all earned), 4 BBs, 4 Ks, with a wild pitch and two homers. Frankly, Drabek was outpitched by teammate Jason Lane, a 1B/DH, who came in to toss two shutout innings with just one hit.

None of this is to write off Drabek. As we noted on our Twitter feed throughout the outing, he may be at the end of his physical rope at this point in the season. (Though that doesn't explain the track record of bad outings throughout his Triple-A assignment.)

In the end, we were left wondering if Drabek is just too gassed to maintain a consistent delivery, or if he's never developed that skill. Moreover, we'd be shocked if the Jays were to call on his services next week after the rosters expand, unless it were to get him more face time with the pitching coaches in Toronto.

Too Much Glove Love for Adeiny?
As mentioned above, Hechavarria did not overwhelm us in the way that he has others with his defense. (And believe us when we tell you that we were open to be wowed.) The allegedly slick-fielding Cuban made three bad throws and dropped an easy grounder, scuttling what should have been an easy double play.

Granted, this is our first opportunity to watch him on something other than YouTube clips, so you can apply a shiny, yellow "Small Sample Size" warning sticker on this observation. And we'd also note that his reactions off the bat look pretty great, which makes us think that he'll get to plenty of balls. We just hope he works on setting his feet a bit better on throws over his full season in Triple-A next year.

One last observation on Hechavarria: He plays bigger than his body. He may look small and wiry, but he's by no means a scrappy, slap-hitter. Imagine having Otis Nixon taking cuts like Edgar Martinez, and you might have something close to Adeiny.

Twisting Roads Through the Minors
We liked the cut of his jib, and we knew Manny Mayorson's name rang a bell for us, so we looked him up mid-game. Turns out, he's been with the Jays's system for most of the past 11 years, making his professional debut as a 17 year-old in 2000 with the now-defunct Medicine Hat Blue Jays. Among Mayorson's teammates that year was an 18 year-old Dustin McGowan, who scuffled to a 6.48 ERA and 2.04 WHIP.

Along the way, Mayorson made stops in Auburn, Charleston, Dunedin and New Hampshire in the Jays system, before spending a year and change in the Marlins' system. He returned to the Jays in 2009, and has played the past two seasons in Vegas. With the ability to play around the infield and OBPs of .362 and .370 over the past two Triple-A seasons, we wouldn't mind seeing Mayorson get a shot at cracking the big leagues to play the Mike McCoy role next year. (Maybe that's overly sentimental. Still.)

Also taking an odd path through the Jays system is backup catcher Luis Hurtado, who entered the game to give Ryan Budde a break. The 22 year-old Venezuelan has now caught for Low-A Vancouver and Lansing, High-A Dunedin as well as the Triple-A 51's, but has played a grand total of 12 games across all four levels. Where it gets weird though is that Hurtado played a total of just five games last year (at Low-A Auburn), and just 13 games across three levels the preceding year. Is Hurtado an emergency option who is brought out only when all other receivers are indisposed? There must be a story to this.

A Quick Thought on the Big Club
To bookend the post, we'd underscore Ricky Romero's grace under pressure tonight. Though he fell behind 2-0 after two batters, we loved how Romero continued to pitch aggressively and throw strikes while maintaining his composure.

Though his last few outings have not been as stellar as much of the past month, we've been impressed by Romero's ability to hang in through some tough innings and continue to pitch calmly and with purpose. While his emotions seem to get taken out on his cap and glove or on the dugout upholstery in between innings, his delivery remains solid and steady, even when he doesn't seem to have his best stuff.

The whole discussion of who is an "Ace" is a little tiresome, but we're definitely getting accustomed to having Romero's turn come up when the Blue Jays need a win. (Now if only he could do this against the Red Sox...)

Friday Tweet Bag - Your Tweeted Questions Answered with Aplomb

2011-08-26T10:38:00.003-04:00

There's a heaping sackful of tweeted questions sent along by our devoted followers (and some people who just spammed us with tomfoolery), so let's get to answering them straightaway. We wouldn't want to induce boredom and dazed admiration of distant construction equipment in anyone...again.

Leading off, @SteveASchneider asks: If you had to overpay for one free agent, is it Prince, C.J. Wilson, or Jose Reyes? (Assuming Pujols is not an option.)

The key here is the word "overpay". We'd love to bring Wilson or Prince or Reyes into the fold, but the market for these scarce premium players means that teams will have to blow their minds out with longer terms and more money. Given everything that's going right with the way that the Jays are deliberately building from the foundation of the organization towards long-term and sustained success, we wouldn't want the broken down version of any of those players weighing down the team's flexibility seven or eight years down the road.

Having sucked all the fun out of your question, we'll say that as the days grow colder and the wind begins to offer reminders of the long, cold offseason ahead, we hear it whisper a name..."Prince"...

Onward, before the poetry gets too adolescent in here. The always dependable @sporkless asks: Worried about Lind for next year. Is he good enough to play daily for a contending team, or maybe a platoon player?

Four weeks ago, we might not even have cast a second thought towards Prince Fielder, because the notion of paying him $20 million (or more) seven or eight years down the road seems like lunacy. But the more that one watches Adam Lind struggle, the more that we realize that the hot month that he had earlier this season is the aberration, and that he's likely not the long-term option at first. In his last 253 games with the Blue Jays over the past two seasons, Lind has an fWAR of -0.1, and an OPS of .728. (For the sake of reference: Lyle Overbay's numbers over the same two seasons are +0.5 and .715.)

It pains us to say this as someone who roots for him to succeed, but Adam Lind is not good enough to play daily for an AL East team with notions of contending. (Though we're reasonably sure that he'd rake for the D-Backs, if they still have a need next season.)

Smores! @coolhead2010 asks: Would you change up the hitting coach in the offseason, if you were in John Farrell's chair? The pitching coach?

If you were to dig back through our blog, you'd probably find a few "fire the hitting coach!" posts. "The hitters are too timid! They're not patient enough! They're failing at a rate of 70%...toss the bum that makes them strike out!"

These days, we're not even so sure of the extent to which the hitting coach or pitching coach really help. Maybe a lot, or maybe not much at all. But given that admitted lack of insight, we'd feel uncomfortable campaigning to hurl someone out the door. We'd certainly like to see the Jays work the count more often, because we have a notion sometimes that the hitters basically walk to the plate looking for a fastball they can pull. Is that strategy coming from Dwayne Murphy? Or is that the team that's been assembled? And why is it that the Jays' lineup is like a Snackables pack for left-handed junkballers?

Chad Mottola, the hitting coach of the Jays' Triple-A affiliate in Las Vegas, has earned rave reviews from the farmhands for his work on their swing mechanics. (He's apparently transformed Adeiny Hechevarria from Dave Concepcion to Alex Rodriguez overnight.) If there was a perceived need for change, the Jays have a decent candidate in the wings. But will it matter?

He is the eggman! @izzjr2010 asks: if the jays offer serious money to pujols or fielder do you think they would turn it down bec of T.O. Not being a great market?

Okay, we could start by accosting you for the lack of an avatar on Twitter...because,really? It's that hard to find a photo of yourself, or something funny or clever to represent you?

But on the other hand, we could just as well give you the gears over the substance of your question, because this constant poormouthing of Toronto drives us nuts. The city is essentially the third biggest media market in baseball, has TV ratings that are the envy of most other teams, and a base of corporate support in the community that provides the franchise with strong fundamentals, regardless of the vagaries of attendance or the team's fortunes.

(And, as Maury Brown from The Biz of Baseball reported yesterday, the Jays' attendance is up so far 11.5% over last season, with Yankees and Red Sox series remaining.)

People need to stop thinking that players don't want to play here. It's a false assumption. The truth is that when the Jays have wanted a top free agent and were willing to pay the market price for them (B.J. Ryan, A.J. Burnett, Frank Thomas), they got them. There's nothing wrong with the market, and frankly, there's a lot that's going right.

Briefly, more tweets from the tweeters!

@Brochenski asks: who has cooler sideburns, Cecil or Thames?

Thames, and it's not close. Cecil's facial hair and ridiculous fauxhawks have gotten way out of hand.

@EthanDR asks: WIll Kelly Johnson be wooed to re-sign with Jays by Bautista/Lawrie dance moves?

I'll be square with you, son. Kelly Johnson doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who gets wooed by dance moves. Unless J.P. Arencibia and Colby Rasmus were to engage in some celebratory boot-scoot-boogeying. Kickin' up mud!

@RustyArmy asks: I was trying 2 decide which position player 2 buy a jersey 4 last night when Lawrie hit a homer...was that a sign?

The universe speaks to you so clearly, and you need me to translate for you? Of course it was! Also, since we're acting as your go-between, the universe is telling you to get a number 13 jersey with "Gordie Dougie" on the back.

@Indie102 asks: what is a greater need for next years jays: starting pitching or bats?

Pitching. It's always pitching. You can stumble your way into a halfway decent lineup, but the mechanics of the game dictate that you have to have someone go out and throw 100 pitches and keep you in the game night in and night out. Also, pitchers come and go and flame out quickly, so you always need more stockpiled.

@dave_church asks: Crystall ball time: 5 years from now, who's most likely to still be with the Jays? Snider, Escobar, Lawrie, or Rasmus?

We've said it before. We're not a soothsayer. Or an empath, or a vampire or a faerie or were-panther. (Clearly, we're watching too much True Blood. Groan.) But the answer is Lawrie, because he's the youngest, and likely has the highest ceiling of the four.

@Tammy_Beth asks: How good is Kenen Bailli and why can't I find an answer to that question anywhere?

We honestly had no idea what you meant until we looked it up. We're not about to make a judgment based on four games in the Florida State League, but he's 26 years old, so we're not about to put a ton of stock into his future.

And that's about all the time we have for this week. Hopefully, you're still awake. Our apologies to those whose questions we didn't get around to answering, but please keep sending those cards and letters, and we'll get around to them sooner or later.

You Won't Have to Wait for Kelly Johnson

2011-08-23T15:59:00.005-04:00

We mentioned to a friend the other night that a trade must be coming. It's just been way too quiet. And here it is.

That Aaron Hill would be shipped off after another in a series of underwhelming seasons is not a great surprise. We now have nearly two years worth of evidence that he's simply not the player that he once was, and at the age of 29, he was unlikely to recover those former glories.

Oddly, we'd been sketching out a post that observed some stats through 127 games, and had included this:

Aaron Hill Is Second Best at Second
It was completely within the realm of the possible that Aaron Hill would continue to struggle this year after a sub-par 2010. What we never would have imagined is a year that was worse. Hill's OBP is around the same as last year's (.271 in '10, .270 in '11 so far), but he's dropped 81 points of slugging. His fWAR sits at -0.5, which essentially puts him into a category where any minor-league callup would be an upgrade.

Speaking of which, Hill (429 plate appearances) trails John McDonald (182 PAs) this season in OBP, SLG, isolated power, and wOBA, and WAR. And if you need more context, you can roll in the 2010 numbers, and Hill still trails Johnny Mac in all of those categories.

With both Hill and McDonald gone, we turn our attention towards Kelly Johnson, whose own disappointing year (.209/.287/.412/.699) still sees him with a wOBA (.310) better than the two players for whom he was traded. Johnson posted an .865 OPS last year with 26 homers, and has posted positive UZR/150 numbers at second over the past two seasons. In terms of what gets pencilled into the lineup each day from here through the end of the season, the Jays came out ahead.

Johnson's name had long been the focus of alleged interest by the Jays, with a notion that he would possibly be at the top of their offseason shopping list when the time came to replace the incumbent Hill. Jumping the gun on this likely means that the Jays will be able to get a better look at Johnson in the proper context in the short term, with a view towards a deal heading into next season.

Add to this the fact that all three players are free agents, but that Johnson is the most likely to net a compensatory draft pick if he leaves, and you see how this deal works now and in the future.

There's more to write about this deal, and we'll double back tomorrow to consider the two veterans who now leave the organization (at least temporarily.) In interim, here's the thought that's been running through our mind so far: There's likely to be as many tears shed over John McDonald's departure as there are over Hill's, and we're not sure that we can entirely disagree with the thought.

If we were offered one or the other back for some unknown reason, we'd likely choose McDonald, and not because of any abiding affection for his gritty scrappiness. It would be because we think he might be the better player.

Loving Luis Perez and Other Weekend Reflections

2011-08-22T12:31:00.005-04:00

Okay, hands up all those of you who had figured in March of this year that Luis Perez would pitch 50 innings with the Jays this year. No one? Okay...How many figured he might get a cup of coffee?

Well then. Who among you knew who the hell Luis Perez was coming into this season? (And if you're getting all like Horshack, straining to raise your arm until you throw out your shoulder, shouting "Ow ow ow...Mr. Kot-Tao! I knew who he was", then just stop. You didn't. You saw him on the 40-man roster and thought: "Who dat?")

Perez' start yesterday, impressive though it may have been, was far too small a snapshot for us to draw any real conclusions. But in a year in which the Jays have required 11 pitchers to take the ball at the start of the game, Perez has been a pleasantly surprising asset. He's shown himself to be a respectable arm who can throw hard and down in the zone and eat bullpen innings, and to get through 162 games, you need someone dependable to do just that.

One more question: Who figured that on August 22, Luis Perez would be rocking the same 0.3 WAR as Jason Frasor, Frank Francisco, and Shawn Camp? And that he would have produced more value than Jon Rauch, Octavio Dotel and Kyle Drabek combined?

Oh, of course you did, smarty pants.

Frankly, on Franky Frank
When Frank Francisco couldn't answer the call yesterday afternoon, we saw mostly joyous exaltations of Casey Janssen and jovial ribbing of the Jays sorta-not-really closer. And yet, it bears mentioning that Francisco's output since his terrible outing in Cleveland on July 7th has been pretty exemplary. Just one run allowed in 13.1 IPs with 11 strikeouts and one walk. Hitters posted a .204 OBP against him, and he hasn't allowed an inherited runner to score.

So before you make your comments about how it won't be a big loss to replace Franky with whatever random organizational arm we can scrounge up, think about how that tomato can is going to replace those numbers as opposed to a couple of disaster outings in the distant annals of the season.

Kyle Davies Is a Blue Jay
A number of you flipped this news to us on the weekend, and the weird thing is that when we'd heard that the Royals were giving him the heave-ho, we had this sneaking suspicion that the Jays would pick him up. We won't embarass ourself with some sort of rationalization of how he's an arm that might have something left and worth a flyer, because he's really been terrible since his not-awful 2008 season.

Then we reach for out standard "...but still...you never know...", only to be reminded of how Jo-Jo Reyes' opponents have OPSed .910 against him since his rebirth as an Oriole.

And yet...He's an arm. You never know.

House of Grim
Is there any more depressing sight than watching your team struggle against the A's in Oakland? Watching as much of the games as we could (usually on some errand-induced delay), it was just a depressing vibe to see the Jays whiff and pop up into the expansive foul territory of the deserted Alameda County Mausoleum.

For whatever history that team has in that market, they've got to get out of that stadium and out of that town. The San José A's has a ring to it.

Whither Aaron Hill?

2011-08-20T00:01:00.002-04:00

I hate that there's even a conversation about potential second basemen for the Toronto Blue Jays in 2012 and beyond.

It guts me, it really does.

A homegrown player signed to a team-friendly (ie: option laden) contract, it was but a few season ago that Hill authored "Silver Slugger" to his resume, adding to his growing reputation as an excellent defender. It was also but a few seasons ago that Hill was seen as a leader of the team, wistfully encouraging the youngsters in camp to take advantage of the opportunity given to them and start dreaming of a career as a Blue Jay.

And now what.

I'm not sure if Hill looks more lost at the dish or in the dugout, but in both cases... he's not the same guy. Gone is the line drive stroke that propelled 62 balls over fences in the seasons 2009-10. Never an OBP machine, Hill's line now resembles a mediocre batting average. Defensively, well.... if defense were all that mattered at the position, we'd probably be seeing a lot more of Johnny Mac.

The Jays need Hill to be more than Johnny Mac. With all due respect to the Prime Minister of Defence himself, of course.

Perhaps as noticeable as his struggles at the dish is Hill's presence in the dugout. Clearly I'm reading far, far too much into this kind of thing (but if I didn't.... I would never have anything to blog about)... but it's hard not to notice that with all the excitement around these New Jays, Hill fades into the background. He`s not dancing any jigs with Jose, nor does he share a secret handshake with Edwin.

That's hard for me to take, quite frankly. I wish I could be the kind of dude who looks at the numbers and says "Pffft. Aaron Hill? Send him out!" But I can't. Maybe it's the loyalist in me, I don't know. Hill has invested a lot in this organization; would you dare tell me he didn't leave guaranteed money on the table when he signed that extension? And that extension was signed in the days before all this excitement; the future direction was undefined, but all Aaron Hill knew was that he wanted to be a part of it.

So you'll excuse me if I'm not so quick to toss the incumbent second baseman out with the bathwater. I want him to succeed. As a Blue Jay.

Something tells me, though, he only has a few months left to make his case.

Old Voting Habits Die Hard

2011-08-19T12:21:00.007-04:00

If you consider yourself a vaguely progressive baseball fan - and in spite of our alleged lack of knowledge about the sport and our tenuous grasp of OPS, we'd say we are - then there's a fair bit of satisfaction to be taken from the development of the discussion around the game. It's not to say that the entirety of the baseball world has shifted to a new view of the game, and there are some sticklers who will make the case for intangibles that only they seem able to quantify.

But generally, the old saws have less relevance. The best example of this likely being Felix Hernandez' 2010 Cy Young Award, which he won easily in the BBWAA vote, in spite of months of whingeing and worrying by the Nerditocracy over the reaction to his low pitcher-win totals. When we saw how overwhelming the support of Felix was in the writers' vote, we figured that it augured well for the future of the end-of-season award discussion.

(Actually, there's a contradictory argument that we could make in the case of the Cy Young, which is that the valiant battle of a great pitcher on a bad team has started to be an aspect of the narrative for the winner. Before Felix, Zach Greinke won for the dead last and awful 2009 Kansas City Royals, and Cliff Lee won for the .500-in-the-AL-Central Indians. The last AL Cy winner whose team made the playoffs was C.C. Sabathia in 2007, while the NL went four straight years of awarding non-playoff pitchers before that tall ginger dude with the Phillies won last year. But never mind this for now. Pretend we didn't go here.)

If voters seem to have figured out how to pick the best pitcher in recent years, the path to choosing the Most Valuable Player remains muddied in the axiomatic knowledge of old.

(A quick note on that term, because we use it often: When we say someone is using axiomatic knowledge, we mean that they are basically relying on wisdom which has been carried forth for years, but has not really been examined. So when our financial advisor is saying "It's a good time to buy low", it's because that's the homespun wisdom that was passed to him and to his predecessors for years. And yet, the "buy-low opportunities" are the same. Like the ones that come right before the worldwide debt implosion. But we digress yet again.)

The first and most basic question that writers and pundits seem to ask when talking about the MVP is: "Is his team in contention." They do this because of the notion that if the player were truly valuable or the most deserving of recognition, his team would be in contention. Being good enough to take your team on your shoulders and lug them into the post-season is the single most important determining factor in the selection of the MVP.

It's also rubbish. But what's concerning is how the notion seems to have maintained some currency among people who you would otherwise imagine to be a progressive baseball fan.

A great example of this is the recent "blog entry" (hate that term) by ESPN's Eric Karabell, the host of the Baseball Today podcast. While Eric is a numbers guy by trade (his initial expertise was in fantasy baseball), he quickly falls into this trope when listing out the top 10 choices for the AL and NL MVP races.

In discussing the NL race, this is why Karabell says he knocks back Troy Tulowitzki to third on his ballot:

"Sure, it’s not Troy Tulowitzki’s fault that the Colorado Rockies likely will miss the playoffs, but I can’t vote for him when there are so many other deserving candidates. "

Wait...what exactly? You're saying that he's had a great season, and his numbers bear out his value to his team, and yet others are more deserving because they happen to be playing on a team that is better situated to make the playoffs? With all of the metrics that we have at our disposal - and Karabell snorkels through these numbers daily - you're still saying that the most significant demonstration of individual value is the success of the player's team?

This is particularly loopy when it comes time to look at the AL MVP race. Karabell (and we don't mean to pick on him...he's only the exemplar of the thought process) lists José Bautista fifth on his fictional ballot because:

"...his team is certainly not looking like it will play meaningful October games."

So who jumps ahead of Bautista because of this apparently striking deficiency in his game? Three Red Sox and a Yankee. Players who play in stacked lineups with bats behind them and ahead of them, and who could probably get run over by a truck and still have their team in the race.

But is this not an individual award, and should it not be judged just as the Cy Young has? Why should their middling teams disqualify Bautista or Tulowitzki? Why is an individual award so hung up on the state of the team? Is it Tulo's fault that Jorge De La Rosa got hurt? Or that his team cashed out on the season in July? Is it Bautista's fault that he spent months with Corey Patterson hitting ahead of him and Juan Rivera's remains putrefying behind him?

This is absurd, but the axiom might have been understandable five years ago when we didn't have the immediate access to metrics that attempt to solve the very question of player value. But the bad days are over, and the bright light of reason has allegedly shone through in the form of these metrics, such as Fangraphs' Wins Above Replacement. And WAR clearly shows José Bautista at the top of the heap.

Not that WAR (or its predecessor, VORP) are necessarily the final point of analysis. You can probably dig in and find aspects of a player's performance that you'd prefer to emphasize. Still, the entire purpose of that sort of metric is to establish the relative value of players, and to look at it explicitly (as Karabell says he does) and then to make the decision to counterbalance that rational knowledge with some old, chaw-stained notion about what a real MVP should be is the height of incongruous and tortured logic.

There's a lot of writing about baseball. Sometimes, it's okay to let the numbers take precedence over the story you've become accustomed to telling.

Blue Jays Twitter Power Rankings - Second Half Edition!

2011-08-18T11:04:00.007-04:00

It's been a while since we sorted the social media output of the fellas on the Jays' active roster, so we figured it was about time to reassess and re-rank the lot of them. Who's had a late season surge, and who's lapsed into late season doldrums? And more importantly: Who doesn't love Power Rankings? Noooo-body!

(Wow. Lastman's Bad Boy reference just fell out of nowhere there. I need coffee.)

1. J.P. Arencibia (@jparencibia9) - Followers: 40,017; Last Rank: 1
All hail the Jays' King of the Thumbs! Hangs onto the top spot through a combination of persistence (1,571 total tweets), and newsworthiness (his tweets provided go to quotes in the midst of the sign stealing story.) Creator of new and amusing hashtags (#bestslumpbuster,#awaybutfeltlikehome, #clown.) Provides frequent Family Feud and CMT Mornings updates. Authoritative source on all that is #pro.

2. Brandon Morrow (@2Morrow23) - Followers: 23,339; Last Rank: 2
Made valiant run at the top spot with post-start tweet jamboree last night. Apologized to player he beaned in the game. Seems quietly funny. ("Jersey Shore time with @LilyMorrow21...the fist pumping should help me get loose for tomorrow!") Squints-tribute ringleader. Only Blue Jay currently following yours truly.

3. Ricky Romero (@RickyRo24) - Followers: 42,243; Last Rank: 4
Earnest tweeter. If there were an emoticon for towel-waving-rah-rah-let's-go-boys! (and there should be), he'd use it often. Frequent straight man to Arencibia's monkeyshines. Far too generous with shout-outs and RTs.

4. Mark Teahen (@ESPY_TEAHEN) - Followers: 15,480; Last Rank: Unranked
New Jay now leads the team in career tweets with 1,810. Active and funny. ("Baseball from a ballgame is a souvenir forever but so are the shame & embarrassment that come with sprinting tackling & diving 2 retrieve it.") Answers a fair number of tweeted questions, and asks for local advice from followers. Set up account for his dog, but stole it back for himself. Vaguely Canadian.

5. José Bautista (@JoeyBats19) - Followers: 113,265; Last Rank: 5
Bilingual tweeter. Has taken up the food-obsessed #FEASTMODE slack from the demoted Lunchbox. Good source for Jays travel news. Ringleader. Cajoled other Jays into the Twitterverse. Unremittingly positive. Él no necesita un hombre con una camisa blanca.

6. Brett Lawrie (@blawrie13) - Followers: 31,994; Last Rank: 7
Wooo! Lots of emphatic exclamation! As pumped on his mobile device as he is in the dugout. Lots of strong high-fives for teammates. Presumably spikes his phone after particularly awesome tweet. Awful grammar and spelling.

7. Jesse Litsch (@JesseLitsch) - Followers: 19,627; Last Rank: 8
Strong Twitter showing, though emo fits threatening to quit downgrade him at least one slot. Generally, leans towards the inspirational. Still has the problem with the run-on sentences sometimes never place for commas or a second sentence too much to say alright lets do this!

8. José Molina (@Joeycatch8) - Followers: 7,566; Last Rank: Unranked
Probably much better than we realize, but is primarily in Spanish. Google Translate doesn't seem to do it justice. Loves his brother. A Twitter account to watch in the coming months.

9. Edwin Encarnacion (@Encadwin) - Followers: 7,168; Last Rank: Unranked
Just getting started. Account is as quiet and reserved as the man himself.

Deactivated List - Brett Cecil: Sadly, Squints isn't sharing his thoughts anymore. Something about a virus.

In the Minors - Travis Snider (@Lunchboxhero45): Will jump back towards the top of the list when he returns in September. Still enjoying meats.

On the Rise - Many Jays minor leaguers are frequent tweeters, and worth a follow, if only to realize how long their bus rides are. They include: Deck McGuire (@deckmcguire), Chad Jenkins (@Jenknutz), Justin Jackson (@JaxChillinONE), Daniel Norris (@DanielNorris18), Mike McDade (@MacDizzleMan), and Drew Hutchinson (@1DrewHutch), just to name a few.

Tuesday TweetBag - You Tweet The Questions, We Blog The Answers

2011-08-16T08:45:00.009-04:00

It's been way too long since we trolled for your questions, and to be honest, we kinda miss you all. Unfortunately, brewing up a TweetBag for a Friday afternoon in the Summer generally leads to the post landing with an echoing thud of indifference, as the rest of you are already blasting your way up the highway and out of town at that point. (Or maybe you've just snuck out to a patio for extended "strategic consultations"...)

Oh well, whatever, never mind...On with this edition!

@BitterRaptorFan gets straight to the point: Is there a silver lining to Beede not signing or should we have ourselves a good cry?

Here's the positive coming out of last night's draft signing deadline: The Jays signed 11 of their top 13 picks, in a year in which they were as aggressive as any in their approach to the draft. That's not half bad. And where they missed was with Beede, a guy who the Jays knew from the outset would be a tough sign. But because it was a protected pick, they get it back for the 2012 draft, so they can reload and take another shot.

Maybe the Jays come to regret not taking him, but considering that they appeared to be $1 million apart in their numbers, the Jays should feel no shame. Beede seemingly had a sense that the Jays were going to blow their brains out to make sure they kept him, and that $3.5 million seemed like a bit much. The Jays were right to walk away.

Onward ho! @Mapleleafs1988 (was that a particularly good vintage for the Leafs?) asks: With the meteoric rise of Travis D'arnaud, is J.P. Arencibia's long term future with another team?

No doubt, d'Arnaud has had a nice year at Double-A New Hampshire (.326/.393/.558, with 31 doubles and 17 homers), and he'll be poised to move up next year. But as the Jays did with Arencibia, we assume that d'Arnaud will get a full year at Triple-A to fine tune his catching and game calling skills, and to have fun jacking balls hither and yon across the American Southwest in the PCL. That basically gives the Jays another full year to figure out what they have in JPA, what the catching market looks like, and where there are strengths and weaknesses with the rest of their roster. Come back and ask us a year from now, and we'll have a better answer.

And another thing! @rprus (and several others) asks: Is a Jay's AA farm team in Ottawa realistic and do you think it would be sustainable?

This is question springs up because of a piece from the Ottawa Citizen's Ken Gray, who notes that there are discussions about bringing a Double-A team to Ottawa for 2013 or 2014. We've generally poo-pooed such talk as merely that: Talk. But there are enough details here to warrant consideration of the possibility that maybe - just maybe - an affiliated team may return to the Capital City.

Would it work? If it is affiliated with the Jays, we think it would, as a whole new appreciation for prospects has developed amongst the average baseball fan over the past five years. We could see drawing in Jays fans from across Ontario to help supplement the Ottawa-faithful (who likely can't support a team by themselves.)

There are a few issues that would need to be resolved, including a fair bit of work to bring the former JetForm Park/Lynx Stadium back into game shape after it has been allowed to go to seed in recent years. The batters eye is tattered and torn, and the weeds have overtaken the area behind the outfield fence. Plus, the scoreboard will likely need to be replaced...and sports fans in Ottawa know how agonizing the wait for a scoreboard can be. In addition, parking issues at the Stadium will need to be resolved, given the large chunk of the lot that was sold off to developers. If there is a percentage of your fans who will be coming from away to see the future Jays, they'll need a place to park.

But we're getting WAY ahead of ourselves here. There's many a slip between a cup and a lip.

And there's more gold in them there TweetBag hills! @Roll_Fizzlebeef asks: ...how important do you think Thome's 600 dingers are to ending the stigma on power hitters in relation to steroids? #JIMJAM

It's funny, because there is a large swath of players - who never tested positive for nothin' - whose achievements get lumped in with a bunch of "cheaters" (there's that word again), and who may have a hard time getting into the Hall. On the other hand, we can't help but wonder if there will be a pendulum swing in the other direction, where a number of sullied players - McGwire, Palmeiro, Bonds, Clemens - get in because a new generation of writers takes a less sanctimonious view of their workout regimes.

As for Thome: Our first instinct was to assume that his years as a DH would hurt his chances of getting in on the first ballot, but another look at his other career numbers (.403 OBP, .558 SLG over 21 seasons, and 31st all-time in Win Probability Added) along with his high Weighted Good Guy Likeability Smiling Factor leads us to believe that he'll get his call in the first year.

Will that open the door for home run hitters emerging from the steroid era? Maybe. Frank Thomas comes to mind as the guy who might benefit by drafting in behind Thome's slipstream. Unfortunately, former Jays Fred McGriff (493 HRs) and Carlos Delgado (473) are probably too far behind in that crucial career home run tally to benefit from this presumed openness to 90's/00's power hitters.

One more, because this one is fun! @larhey86 ask: why doesn't the rogers center provide fans with replays (close plays, a strike zone) its drives me crazy. No wonder fans stay hm

We get where you're coming from, because we've had that moment of seeing a close play on the field, and instinctively looking to the big screen in centrefield only to be met with a static image of the next batter. It's maddening. Of course, if you ask the fans of the 29 other teams, they'll offer up a similar frustration. We're not sure if it is codified somewhere, but there seems to be a general agreement between the teams and the league that they'll not run close plays on the scoreboard, and certainly won't show balls and strikes. Maybe, as has been suggested, this is done to spare the umpires from further scorn. As if there could be any more.

But we'd offer two thoughts on this to temper your disappointment: Firstly, we're not sure that getting the replays would actually contribute greatly to the fan experience at the park. While some might be able to look at a close call and with a genuine level of critical detachment, a larger percentage of fans will see what they want to see, which is whatever favours the home side. We're not sure that airing the replay does much more than inflame the crowd.

Secondly, we can see a time coming soon where passionate and technologically savvy fans such as yourself arrive at the game armed with their tablet of choice, and an MLB app that will allow them to track Pitch F/X data (and Hit F/X data?), as well as give them access to replays at their fingertips. WiFi at the ballpark might help to speed this along, though 30,000 fans with smartphones and tablets might quickly overload the system.

Speaking of overloaded, that's about all we can handle for this edition of the TweetBag, though we'll be back soon to answer more of your tweeted questions. Be sure to comment below to let us know if our statistical acumen passed muster.

Attention Sportsnet Viewers!

2011-08-15T13:37:00.002-04:00

Hey kids! Have you found your way here through the links on Sportsnet.ca's informative and incisive Q&A with handsome Blue Jays blogger, The Tao of Stieb? Well, if so, welcome. Have a look around, and feel free to share your comments in the appropriate receptacles.

If you've come to the Tao blog through bookmarks or RSS feeds (do people still do RSS?), then please visit the link above, and get to know your interweb posting pal that much better. And please come back often, as you'll find more sublime content (both mine, and that of regular contributors like Michael Grange and Shi Davidi) on Sportsnet's MLB page on a regular basis.

Now more than ever

2011-08-14T22:23:00.009-04:00

So is this the kind of ballclub you can get behind or what?

Oh sure, there are still maddening stretches of inexplicably flat baseball these Blue Jays tend to fall into, but I'm willing to chalk that up to growing pains. For now. Because this is a talented roster that has nowhere to trend but up.

Right?

To these eyes, there is far more chance for even greater upside in this lineup than there is downside. And that's exciting. For the first time in a long time, these Jays have a roster stacked with talented youth who's best is yet to come (Lawrie, Arencibia, Rasmus, Thames? Sure, Thames), unquestioned superstars (Bautista, Escobar? Sure, Escobar)... and only a few question marks.

It's a roster perfectly built to growing together, and that is no coincidence. The goal of Alex Anthopoulos has always been to put together a team built for the long-term, with a stacked farm system ready to plug holes through promotion or for use in trades. That aspect is definitely in place.

So is the roster close? Now more than ever, I think that it is. Other than time and experience, perhaps the one thing the club really needed was a rallying cry......

Well then.

Look friends, it would be easy & convenient to rant on about the American media not wanting to attribute the successes of a player (Bautista) on the league's only Canadian-based team to hard work and talent. But this isn't about jingoistic baseball rhetoric. It's about the league and those covering it taking notice of an upstart team getting ready to challenge the big dogs of the AL East.

It sure seems, since the story "broke" concerning The Man in White (this whole thing is stupid!), that the Toronto line-up has, in response, got their collective backs up and are responding to the negative attention with a massive F-U.... and that's a good thing.

You think our best player is PED'd up? F-U. You think we're stealing signs? F-U. You think we celebrate inappropriately? F-U. Jerkball, baby. Jerkball.

Much like the Rays, the Jays are now on the scene. It's only a matter of time before the barking gets even louder, and once again.... that's a good thing.