Cables and mea culpas from Down Under

So, I guess we couldn't have been much more wrong about Cliff Lee's mindset, huh?

Rather than showing Roy Halladay and his bride who's who and what's what, we're presuming that Lee will soon make his way to Doc and Brandy's to fry up a mess o' fish that his new rotation pal has just caught.

Which just goes to show you that the rest of the world isn't nearly as petty and mean spirited as yours truly. And bully for that.

Other stuff from the other side of the world - Oprah!
We're here in Sydney as Oprah has brought her roadshow to town. And while we haven't managed to meet up with "O" yet, we did bump into her gal pal Gayle King in the markets at The Rocks, not far from the Opera House. And had we been more brave, we would have struck up a conversation with her and the burly man walking with her. Instead, we just snapped photos of her for future conversation starters.

(Incidentally, Gayle literally bumped into me, and I've gotta say that she's a bit of a bruiser. Like, we've gotta hope that after all the BeestMode workouts that the Jays are engaged in this offseason, they come back with big burly arms like hers.)

Searching for baseball news in Australia
There's precious little information to be found about our beloved game down here, so the Jays could trade Travis Snider to the Yankees for a pine tar rag, and we wouldn't hear about it until we get back. Which drives us a little crazy.

Also, we have yet to see Graeme Lloyd or Luke Prokopec down here. If we do, we plan on buying Lloyd a tasty beverage, and punching Prokopec in his Aussie balls. (Ok, probably not. But that's okay, because the chances of actually seeing them are pretty remote.)

A consoling word for you all before we slip back off the grid
As we were leaving the country, the news of Carl Crawford's signing hit and we heard Jays fans start to throw up their hands in frustration. Certainly, that signing combined with the Adrian Gonzalez deal and whatever is sure to come from the Yankees is enough to make you fret over the seeming impossibility of ever getting over and succeeding with such insurmountable behemoths there to tamp out every little ember that begins to glow from our side.

If we could offer one word of solace, it's this: We think that Alex and the new administration are demonstrating a commendable patience in the face of these developments, and that this team is being built with a process that will allow them to consistently have a full pipeline and a strong Major League team. And while it's never going to be as easy as winning any of the other divisions, it will be infinitely sweeter when the time comes and this team makes it to the next level.

(Is it just us, or did we just write the marketing line for a pro-abstinence group right there? Yikes.)

One thing that we'll have to recognize, though, as the Jays proceed through 2011 and beyond in trying to compete with the Yanks and Sox (and possibly still the Rays) is that we have to recalibrate our sense of what constitutes a meaningful game. We've been locked into this old notion of "games whilst in contention against other contenders in September" as what we consider full of meaning. But given the dogfight that we're going to see in the next few seasons, we think that meaningful games in the AL East are going to start much earlier in the season, and we have a fair bit of confidence that the Jays will be playing those games this June, July and August against those opponents.

And how fun is that going to be.

(Mind you, this might all just be the heat stroke talking.)