The unstoppable Arencibia

Considering how high and how low people have gone on J.P. Arencibia, it's hard to believe that it will only be three years this June since he was drafted into the Blue Jays organization. Catchers of the Future are always a tricky thing, and a great deal of them only emerge as legitimate Major Leaguers after abandoning the Tools of Ignorance and stepping out from behind the plate. (Like this guy.)

Still, there is some reason for optimism as Arencibia plays well through the Fake Game portion of the season. After hitting his third dinger of the Spring yesterday, we're wondering (almost certainly entirely prematurely) if Arencibia isn't playing his way into the conversation of which catcher joins the team when they head north.

Look, we know this is stupid. But this is the stupid, overly optimistic time of year. You wouldn't crap all over someone for being especially merry or jolly through the last weeks of December, would you? At that time of year, people see holly and winterberries and tinsel and lose their minds. We see Arencibia wearing number 9 (an especially auspicious number, if you ask us), and we start to have visions of his emergence as a stellar backstop. Or at least as an option.

We appreciate that one of the catch-and-throw guys will in all likelihood be the guy who gets the call at the end of this month. And we also realize that a couple of good at bats in March don't offset the step backwards that Arencibia took last year in Las Vegas. But we're hopeful that with a clean bill of health, Arencibia might emerge at some point this season as a viable backstop in the short term, and a middle of the order bat in the longer term.