In defence of "fun"

To be honest, I hadn't planned on a second post this weekend. But that's the thing about this blogging game: you never know when the mood will inspire. Part of what I (try to) do around these parts is react to the copious amounts of coverage around the team and provide my - opinion - when I disagree. Let's be perfectly clear on this - disagreement doesn't mean disrespect. Hell, I disagree with the Tao from time to time (cough Shawn Camp cough). Now allow me to get down to it before I earn my dismissal.....

The Sun's Bob Elliott and the Post's John Lott both penned familiar refrains in weekend columns concerning Roy Halladay and his legendary demeanor, work ethic, and preparation. More specifically, how those attributes allow Doc to mesh much better with his new team than old and how those attributes explain the difference in the recent successes of both franchises.

Lott, with help from Halladay, insinuates that it's the mental aspect of the game and unparalleled preparation of Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins, and Ryan Howard that drives the success of the Phils.

“The part that surprised me the most is the preparation of the players — talking about Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, Jimmy, those guys — the time they put in, the attitude they go out and play with, that definitely surprised me."

It would be a fool's quest to argue that intense focus and preparation don't contribute to team and individual success. Hell, it's those very traits that led Jays fans to hold Halladay in such reverence. That, and the filthy, filthy stuff.

But do you know what I think led the Phillies to a World Series title? The talent of Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, and Jimmy Rollins. During Halladay's tenure as a Jay, never was there such a collection of stars up and down the lineup to support him. Hard work and pre-game prep undoubtedly played a role, but each of those players were anointed as up and coming stars before playing a major league game. It wasn't their work in the video room that earned those advance props. It was their talent level.

Point being, you need both to win. Talent and preparation. Halladay never had a roster full of both attributes during his time in Toronto. That's the real difference.

For his part, Elliott re-lives the now infamous pre-season quotes from some of the young Jays - in this case, Shaun Marcum - about how the clubhouse was to be a looser place, now free from the cold reign of King Halladay.

"In the spring, Shaun Marcum said with Roy Halladay gone the Jays clubhouse would be looser, the Jays would “have fun,” and Marcum would “talk to young guys.”

It was a shot at the departed Halladay’s intensity. People within the Jays organization have said the clubhouse was more relaxed once Halladay left with his all-too-serious attitude. "

That interpretation of the players message bothered me in the spring, and it bothers me now. Undoubtedly pressed with dozens of questions along the theme of "Whatever will you do without Roy?", I'd like to believe that Marcum was insinuating they would find their own way, and things would naturally have a different feel without baseball's best pitcher stoically leading the way. Call me a wild-eyed optimist, but I just did not read those comments as an indirect insult to the departed staff ace.

Further, and maybe I'm unfairly merging thoughts on both articles here, the insinuation seems to be that fun, loose baseball teams will never succeed against extremely focused, intense clubs. Perhaps (and even likely) the long season will flush out the argument further, but now seems like the wrong time to make such a point towards the 40-35 Jays, hanging tough in the monstrous AL East.....while the disappointing 39-33 Phillies find themselves in 3rd place in a weaker division. And hey, someone tell that to the young '03 Marlins roster, or '04's collection of Boston's self-proclaimed idiots.

Disappointingly, Elliott ends his column with a none-too-subtle throwaway:

"Marcum takes the mound Saturday to provide fun."

A 5-1 Jays victory over the focused Phils, with Marcum throwing 6 strong innings? Yeah, I'd say that was fun.

The dumbest thing Bob Elliot has written (this week)

We must somehow be immune to the charms of longtime Toronto Sun scribbler Bob Elliot.

We'll hear people wax rhapsodic about him and his skills, and how he's sure to eventually win the Spink Award and gain entrance into the Hall of Fame, and we were left at a loss. We heard people talk about what a fantastic read his A Northern Game was, but we struggled to make it much more than halfway through, literally falling asleep almost every time that we endeavoured to dust off a chapter.

(Really, after one or two chapters, a book emphasizing just how goshdarned friggin' Canadian these Canadian baseballers are loses it's appeal for those of us who don't particularly care about the provenance of our favourite athletes.)

We'll confess that there may be a chance that he is a better reporter than writer (not a bad thing at all), although we often wonder about his comic overuse of the "Anonymous NL Scout". (This is especially the case since this unknown baseball birddog seemed to be trotted out whenever Elliot needed a blunt object with which to bludgeon the former administration.)

Whatever the reason that we don't seem to get Elliot's work, we generally don't see him come up with anything particularly awful either, so maybe his worst crime is that he is bland. Hard to believe, we know, considering the electrically vibrant personality that he puts forth on his appearances on Prime Time Sports.

But in Sunday's Sun, Elliot offered up an absolute howler on the significance of Roy Halladay's departure. And if you'll permit us our moment with the Fire Joe Morgan meme, we'd like to share this bit of work with you.

Plenty of calls, e-mails and texts received in busy week.

Nice to know you're keeping busy. What with the biggest trade of the decade for the Jays going down this week. Hopefully, all that contact with your fellow humans didn't cost you too many naps.

One friend's message was short: "Andrea Bocelli is gone. So am I."

Andrea Bocelli is dead? And you're friend is going to commit suicide out of grief?

My friend is not a ball fan.

Nor is he a music fan. But go on...

He appreciates excellence. Over the years he has paid to hear Colin Powell speak, although he disagrees with his politics; watched Mikhail Baryshnikov while disliking ballet, heard Bocelli sing, although he does not like opera and watched Roy Halladay pitch.

Okay, I see where you're going with this. You're trying to say that your friend appreciates only the finest things in life, and Roy Halladay is one of those fine things. And this is supposed to mean something profound to me, although all I can think when I read this is "Andrea Bocelli was not so much a singer as a hoary hollering novelty act, and he really sucked, and now he's dead. So maybe I should show some respect."

(Wait! Hold the phone! A quick Google search tells me that Bocelli is alive. So Elliot's friend is clearly full of shit. If only he'd realized it before he went and hung himself in the shower.)

He would only go to the Rogers Centre to see Halladay face the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox.

Okay, let's stop the charade right here. Elliot is trying to use this expression of disinterest in the Blue Jays as bad omen, and an example of how people are going to abandon this team because of the loss of one key player.

Except that the truth is that Elliot's friend is not some sort of connoisseur, but rather, he is a dilettante, a tourist and an interloper who is only interested in his own self-aggrandizement through his broad demonstrations of his aestheticism. And if that fey bastard doesn't want to come watch the Jays next year, then that's just fine by me.

Reading the tea leaves in the bottom of an empty cup

The big free agent signing is no signing at all
The first thing that went through our head when we heard of the Matt Clement signing yesterday was "Jaime Navarro". The Jays signed him in December of 2000, and after a couple of Spring Training outings, he never threw a pitch in anger for the Jays. We're assuming the same fate for Clement.

The triumphant return of Cody Heather Hatheer Haerther
The Jays are apparently smitten with Cody Haerther, seeing as how they plucked him from the Cardinals for the second straight year in the Rule 5 draft. Which is a little puzzling, seeing as how he posted a .658 OPS in 100 games at Triple-A Memphis last season. If nothing else, this pick up provides the Jays' PR team with a do-over after mangling his name in successive press releases last season.

Harbingers of doom, courtesy of Bob Elliot
Sun Media's veteran baseball scribe raises the spectre of the Jays being put up for sale in the wake of Ted Rogers' passing. Our thoughts: no one at Rogers is going to make a decision this quickly on the team, because they've put to much time and effort into integrating their media properties and marketing initiatives into the Jays.

Some of the signs that Elliot points to have less to do with the team preparing to be sold than they have to do with the team battening down the hatches for the financial decline that is sure to have a significant impact on them for the 2009 and 2010 seasons. Sadly, for us Jays fans, there are forces in the world working against the team's ultimate success that are bigger than the Yankees and Red Sox.

Why are we reading the National Post?
It took us a while to come around to it, but we have to admit that the NatPost's Jeremy Sandler did a pretty good job with his reportage from Vegas. We've been dismissive of some of his writing in the past, but we found his work to be frequent, informative, fair-minded and entertaining throughout the Winter confab. We still miss the Globe's Jeff Blair (come back Blairsy!), but in his absence, Sandler probably did the best work on the Jays' beat over the past week. Huzzah!

Statler and Waldorf have got nothing on the PTS crew

Listening to Bob McCown, Jim Kelley and Bob Elliot talk about the Blue Jays is much like the Muppet Show segments with the crotchety critics, only devoid of the humour, reason and reasonable resemblance to actual human beings.

Also, the PTS baseball segments are generally stretched out over five minutes, which is a seemingly endless amount of time to allow Jim Kelley to try to make an argument about anything.

(We think Kelley's point tonight was that J.P. overspent Rogers' money on A.J. Burnett, and therefore should have overspent with the personnel that he has accumulated in order to acquire Jason Bay. Which is quite possibly the stupidest thing we've ever heard spoken on Sportsnet, the Fan 590, or on any sports talk radio program anywhere.)

Come on, guys. We fucking well get that you hate J.P., and that anything he does is wrong in your eyes, and of course you are right because the proof lies in the fact that they haven't won the World Series under his watch.

This whole act is so tiresome. We're almost rooting for J.P. to get fired at this point if only so that the thin-skinned Toronto media can get over their fucking imaginary wounds and move on.

Hopefully, Tony LaCava won't offend anyone's precious sensibilities.

Steve Simmons is a smug cheapshot artist

Actually, to call the Sun Media hack an artist of any sort is to give him way more credit than he deserves. But we couldn't help but get enraged by his lazy swipe at A.J. Burnett's Friday night performance against the Rays.

In his Sunday column, Simmons spat out the following bile: "This is why A.J. Burnett makes people scream: He is pitching brilliantly. He has a one-run lead against a Tampa team that has lost seven straight. And he gives up a home run to a nobody ninth-place hitter to lose the game."

Well, Steve-O, here's the thing about "nobody ninth-place hitters": they still let them step up to the plate with a bat in hand, and they still let them swing away at pitches. Sometimes, those swings connect just right, and the results aren't always favorable to the defense, regardless of who the pitcher is.

And it might even be worth noting that Ben Zobrist, the nobody in question, has twice as many homers this season (4) as Aaron Hill did before he went down...in approximately one-third as many at bats.

Moreover, isn't is pretty weak to single out that one pitch to the "nobody" when A.J. had otherwise pitched well enough to win, but was once again betrayed by the sputtering Jays offense?

To pick up on a meme that the Drunks like to trot out: If Roy Halladay had tossed out that same pitching line as A.J., he's be regarded as a gutsy gamer who was failed by his team. But because it's A.J., he's a punk .500 pitcher with no heart. What bullshit.

And not to engage in the same cheapshot artistry that Simmons seems to prefer, but we wonder what is the appeal of the horsefaced, smug, crayon-eater's scribblings and rantings. The only significant contribution that Simmons makes to the Canadian media landscape is to remind us in his appearances on TSN that male pattern baldness and hair gel are a really tragically bad combination.

More from the Sun
When the whole lot of coaches from the 1990's joined Cito on the Jays' staff, someone joked about Mel Queen joining the team. Turns out (as Bob Elliot writes today) that it wasn't such a stretch after all.

What's this about the tickets you say?

We're really going to stop picking at this scab any day now, but we thought we'd mention that both Mike Wilner and Bob Elliot weigh in this morning on this Masshole-centric ticket-selling scheme that the Blue Jays have cooked up.

Wilner: "The term 'galactically stupid' comes to mind." (Looks like somebody watched A Few Good Men recently. We never pegged Wilner for a Tom Cruise fan.)

Elliot: "I'm no ticket broker, but shouldn't Jays fans be treated No. 1 in their own backyard?"

Let's hope that a few mainstream media mentions will get the ball rolling on this story, because we'd like to see that mangy scoundrel Paul Godfrey dragged out in public and forced to eat a bit of dog poop over this.

Sweeeeeeeep!

Freakin' Sweet!

Jesse Litsch was round, pink and efficient tonight (6.2 innings, 2 hits, 1 run, 4BBs and 1 K), while Russ Adams crushed a grand slam in the eighth off Jonathan Pablumbomb in a 6-1 win over the suddenly flailing Red Sox.

Russ Adams! All is forgiven!

Wednesdays with J.P. Highlights: A couple of interesting notes from the Mighty Wilner's tete-à-tete with J.P. Ricciardi tonight:

1. J.P., in answering a question about Bob Elliot's hatchet job in the Sun today, noted that Elliot hasn't spoken to him in five years.
   
2. J.P. confirmed - with an awesome snort - that he would not trade Vernon Wells for Tike Redman. (Drunk Jays Fans have the story here on that particular bit of fan insight.)
   
3. J.P., given the choice between the Who and Led Zepplin, chose correctly.

Which SS do you love? We really wanted the Jays to pick up Julio Lugo heading into this year, but after seeing him give up on that ground ball bobbled by Ray Olmedo, we'll stick with Johnny Mac.