Greatish Jays: The Shaker

As we're about to leave on a much-needed, much-deserved and far-too-short vacation tomorrow, it struck us that we'd better leave things on a much more happy and positive vibe. Somehow, leaving the angry, accusatory post with our absurdly confrontational, Bissinger-esque comments seemed unwise. Uncouth, even.

And so, we've reached backwards into our memory hole and picked up some of our happiest memories about the Toronto Blue Jays. And somehow, so many of them seem to involve the inimitable Lloyd Moseby, better known to you and I as The Shaker.

Moseby's numbers with the Jays don't always astound, in part because of his early years in which he was pressed into the lineup to gain much-needed experience at the Major League level. (Imagine this: Lloyd Moseby had 361 big league games under his belt before he turned 23. What a concept!) In his prime years (1983-1987), Moseby was a 117 OPS+, .811 OPS, 101 homer, 174 stolen base guy who played premium defense, and did it all with a smile and fun swagger.

Three other things we love about The Shaker in retrospect:

1) The hair/cap/helmet confluence: Moseby somehow managed to pull a cap over his sweet afro day in and day out, and would wear his batting helmet over top of his cap. (Not unusual in those days, but Moseby's combo was especially cool to see.)

2) The Power cleats: No one else that we know of wore what was then Bata's athletic shoe brand. But given Power's Canadian connection (Bata's headquarters were still in Canada at that time), we used to see Moseby's Power posters in sporting goods shops all the time.

3) The Shoestring Catch? Somehow, in our mind, we had built this into a seminal moment for the Blue Jays: Moseby comes on and makes an outstanding shoestring catch in the 1985 ALCS, only to get robbed of the call, causing the whole series' complexion to change. Except that the play actually happened in Game 2, in a game the Jays would go on to win in extra innings. The fact that we still hold onto that moment is probably a tribute to two things: The frustrating and spirit-crushing years after the 1985 ALCS but before the World Series wins, and the strict early bedtime to which I was compelled to adhere.

Obviously, there were better players in the Jays' history. But we're not sure that there is a player who we think of more fondly than Lloyd Moseby. There have been several centrefielders who you might prefer to play for your All-Time Jays roster, but if we were to sit in the stands to see such a team play, we'd be happiest to see the Shaker leading off and marshalling the middle of the outfield.

Greatish Jays: Mark Eichhorn

Somewhere in between the players who have their names plastered across honoured on the facing of the Rogers Centre and those who receive our own ignominious honour, there are those in Blue Jays history who have stepped up and left their mark, even if their moment in the sun was all too brief.

On that level, there are few Blue Jays who left more of an impression on us than Mark Eichhorn.

(And kudos Sven, who in the comments of our Kent Tekulve post a couple of weeks back correctly divined that we were a rabid Eichhorn fan.)

Eichhorn's career with the Jays started with a whimper, when he went 0-3 with a 5.45 ERA in seven starts with the team in 1982. After a few more years of scuffling around the Jays' farm system, Eichhorn rejigged his throwing motion from the standard overhand into the glorious pseudo-submarine, sling-it-hop-and-fall-off-the-mound delivery.

It really was a thing of beauty.

And while the delivery may have owed something to some of the submariners of the past (Tekulve and Dan Quisenberry, for instance), Eichhorn's motion was far less jerky and far more graceful than those. For a low-angle sidearm slinger, it looked pretty smooth, and it allowed Eichhorn to throw a slider that fell as suddenly and dramatically as the value of our mutual funds.

Aside from mere aesthetics, Eichhorn's 1986 rookie season with the Jays stands out as one of the most remarkable performances from any Toronto pitcher: 69 games, 157 innings, a 14-6 record with 10 saves, 166 strikeouts versus 45 walks, a 1.72 ERA and a .955 WHIP. And even though we think that the BBWAA is a bit of a joke, it's still worth mentioning that Eichhorn finished sixth in the Cy young voting (although we're assuming those were hometown votes), and third in the rookie of the year voting.

There's also this story about that 1986 season that makes us think that Eichhorn was pretty freakin' rad: Apparently, the Jays offered Eichhorn the possibility of starting one of the last few games of the season so that he could rack up enough innings to qualify for the ERA title, but the pitcher turned the idea down because he didn't want anyone to think he was sneaking in the backdoor to get it. That's nails.

(And as it turned out, he ended up throwing 4.1 innings on the last day of the year, pitching in both ends of a double-header against the Brewers. Double nails.)

Eichhorn pitched for two more seasons in that first stint with the Jays, with diminishing returns as runners began taking advantage of his deliberate motion to the plate. His 1988 season was punctuated by an ongoing attempt to speed up his delivery and improve his pick off move. Jimy Williams, as he is wont to do with everything beautiful and true in baseball, tried to make Eichhorn conform to his rigid and dull approach to the game.

It damn near killed us to watch it. It was like having two seasons of Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust, and then seeing him crushed down into Never Let Me Down.

Eichhorn was banished to Atlanta (where he kinda sucked) and spent some time with the California Angels of California, where he regained his form (posting a 1.98 ERA and .931 WHIP in 1991.)

In 1992, the Jays summoned him back to his home and rightful place, just in time for their back-to-back World Series runs. Over those two postseasons, Eichhorn tossed 4.1 innings of runless ball, and while he wasn't the bullpen lynchpin that he had previously been, he was still an effective relief arm, holding the lead and feeding the ball to Duane Ward on many nights.

Though he finished his career elsewhere (stints with Baltimore and back to Cali), we still can't picture him in any uniform other than the Jays'.

All of this adds up to Mark Eichhorn being a truly Greatish Jay. And besides all of this history and statistical nonsense: Isn't it wicked fun to say "Eichhorn"?