Backyard Baseball

I was a bit nostalgic this afternoon watching the second half of Toronto's 6-5 loss to the visiting New York Mets.  My viewing of the first half of the game was pre-empted by some much-needed yard work, which is as much a May Long Weekend tradition as sitting on my ass watching baseball.

I finished up in the backyard, craving a cold drink and a place to put my feet up, and I remembered fondly my days as a youth, when I would spend more than a few afternoons like this one on the back patio of the house where I grew up, watching Blue Jays games with my dad.  He wasn't a hardcore baseball fan, but he was certainly television-addicted, and he was good with electronics to boot.  I don't know of another house on our block that illegally split a cable TV feed into as many locations as ours, including a permanent jack on our back deck.  A little portable colour TV set would be set up in a spot shady enough to restrict the glare and create an outdoor viewing experience that, while imperfect, was still better than being inside.  I watched a lot of great sports, including some great baseball players, on that back deck.

I don't think I could convince The Org Wife to let me begin drilling holes through our walls and feeding coaxial cable through the drywall.  But as both the mercury and Henderson Alvarez's ERA steadily rise this summer, the thought has certainly crossed my mind.

About that Alvarez stuff:  it's been covered to death elsewhere, by people who have a stronger grip on the stats involved than me, but the last two starts for Alvarez, including today's, are looking very much like a manifestation of the much-dreaded regression that was just bound to happen sooner or later.  In fact, The Alvarez Regression has seemed like such an inevitability for so long that very few people seem all that surprised -- as if nobody really believed he was as good as his results were making him out to be, even if they couldn't put their finger on why.  It's a really good thing thing this team's fan base isn't prone to overreaction or anything, and they'll continue to give Alvarez the benefit of the doubt as more of those ground balls find holes.

Besides, it's not like fans don't have better things to worry about.  Like, say, the fact that the much-ballyhooed yet laconic centerfielder acquired in a big trade at last season's deadline is a bit of an offensive black hole at the moment.  With Adam Lind now optioned (outrighted? waived? It's something like that.  Anyway, we don't have him to kick around anymore) to Las Vegas, I imagine by about the second game of the upcoming series against the Rays, the calls will be loud and lusty to give Colby Rasmus the same treatment, albeit with little consideration given to whether there's a player on the roster capable of manning center in his absence.  Oh, sure, if you have to, you can run Rajai Davis out there, and he's at least getting on base at right around his career average, and hitting with a bit more pop in limited time this season, and... wait.  Scratch all that.  I don't want to give anyone any ideas.  I don't think we have to worry about Rasmus.  Yet.  But maybe soon.  (Excuse me while I anxiously look at Anthony Gose's K rate.)

A guy we don't have to worry about is Jose Bautista, not that I'm telling you something you didn't know.  He came through on my prediction of three more home runs this week, although his OPS hasn't yet cracked the .800 mark.  But it's going in the right direction, and with a thumping Bautista in the mix, this team can boast some pretty strong offensive depth.  I'll quit while I'm ahead on the prediction front, and simply take solace in the fact that the Jays have won four of their last five games, with mixed pitching (a dominant Brandon Morrow, as opposed to more ordinary outings from Alvarez and Ricky Romero) and some contributions all over the lineup.

Life on the Road

When you scan through the lineup the Minnesota Twins are rolling out there on a day-to-day basis, you have to feel just a little bit sorry for the faithful in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.  (Also, I used to think that if there were really ten thousand lakes in Minnesota, the entire state would have to be like Waterworld.  I thought maybe they were passing off some pretty marginal bodies of water to keep that slogan, but it's more than legit according to Wikipedia.)  That's a lineup with more than its fair share of AAAA-types, and even its stars aren't quite what they've been in the not-too-distant past.  So I get why some fans are laying the criticism on pretty thick after only taking two out of four games against the Twins at Target Field -- especially after the two losses looked pretty winnable right until the end.

There's some justification to looking at a roster full of guys like Darin Mastroianni, Alexi Casilla and Erik Komatsu and wondering why a competitive AL East team like the Blue Jays could only beat them twice out of four chances.  Of course, if the Jays played these Twins fifty times in Minnesota, they'd probably take about 34 games from them, and the same criticism would probably be leveled at them after each of the 16 losses.

The fact is, it's hard to win on the road.  Treading water at a .500 pace on the road, even against so-called bad teams, is actually pretty damned good.  Right now, after 22% of the season, the Jays are 11-9 on the road.  Two games over .500 doesn't sound like much, but consider this:  last year's Wild Card winner in the American League, the Tampa Bay Rays, had 91 wins and were only 7 games over .500 for the season.  The Jays still have a better winning percentage on the road this year than they do at home.

How productive are you when you travel?  I know that when my real life job takes me on the road, my productivity, and my give-a-shit factor, tend to dip.  It's only natural.  Yeah, there's work to do, but I'm a human being.  I'm not as comfortable not sleeping in my own bed.  My routine gets all screwed up.  I eat more Tim Horton's breakfast sandwiches than any man really should, instead of having something healthy and light.  And then there's stuff to see and do.  It might not be all that exciting (I'm not sure the Minneapolis-St. Paul area offers much more than a ginormous mall), but it's still a distraction from the business at hand.  I often come home shocked I got anything done at all.

Before it started, I was pretty apprehensive about this road swing.  After it wrapped up this afternoon, I came to terms with the fact that the team actually handled it very well.  It's also fair to say we have yet to see this team at its very best, with all aspects clicking at once.  Somewhat counterintuitively, that's precisely what has me encouraged about the remainder of this season:  the Blue Jays haven't been below .500 once this season, and they aren't even showing everything they have yet, notwithstanding some ominous signs on the horizon.  I don't think a team like the Twins would want to have the Jays roll into town for four games when they do start putting it all together.

Bautista Watch (!)

The Twins did, however, get themselves a big, hot, steaming bowl full of Jose Bautista's power stroke.  Minnesota would have been a popular pick for anyone entering a pool for which stadium would allow Bautista to rediscover his MVP form from the previous two seasons.  Three homers and some loud hits and outs were nice to see.  Call it a mini-break-out, and welcome it just in time for the Rays and Yankees to pop into Skydome for two-game sets this week.  I'll call it:  Jose hits three more jacks this week, and bumps his OPS over .800 for the first time since Game Four of the season.

Let's Write the Whole Year Off

There's no question that the promotions and game operations side of the organization brought their "A game" yesterday for the Blue Jays' home opener. There was so much new video content with such a fierce tone that it seemed as though the team were ready to skip past the regular season and take on all comers in the playoffs starting last night.

But the other side of building that much anticipation all at once is that when you don't come through immediately, it can have the opposite effect on the fans.

After last night's disappointing 4-2 loss to the Red Sox, our Twitter feed was unsurprisingly blown up with those expressing their "major concern" over the feasibility of Sergio Santos, immediately writing him off as just another example of the poor excuses for closers that the Jays have had since Tom Henke left town. Others spoke ominously of how this one game may well have cost the Jays their shot at the playoffs, and that we shouldn't forget how last year's Red Sox and Atlanta Braves missed the post-season by just one game.

And what about all that talk about a new era of Jays fans and a new feeling of optimism? The Jays built the expectations, and suddenly, just four measly games into the season, the queue to exit the bandwagon is backed up. Which is patently ridiculous.

There are 158 games left in the season. Even if the Blue Jays do manage to defy expectations and take a big step towards the next level, there will be 60 to 70 more losses to come, and some of them will be even more disappointing and uglier than last night's.

The Blame Game: There's no question that Sergio Santos had a terrible outing last night, and that he began overthrowing his pitches to try to blow the Red Sox out of the batters box. Which is probably not the best approach to dealing with that lineup. It was also his second straight blown save, so there's some understandable uneasiness with his performance.

In our preview piece about Santos, we wondered whether if Jays fans were ready for a pitcher who is still somewhat raw, and has some control issues. The piece was written after watching him send two pitches past Jeff Mathis to the backstop in a spring training game, which is no small feat. Santos is a power arm, and one that is not yet refined, so there will be walks and there will be pitches in the dirt and beyond. But there will also be plenty of strikeouts and baffled batters along the way. The question is whether if the positives will outweigh the negatives over the long run of a season, as they have in the past for Santos.

Santos might have had a little more room for error had the Jays' offense put up any sort of showing last night. When Scott Atchinson holds you to a single hit over three relief innings, you really haven't done yourself any favours. Among those feeble Jays bats, no one looked worse than José Bautista, who went 0-for-4, leaving four runners on base and hitting into a double play. We doubt, though, that anyone is looking at yesterday's game and pondering a move down the lineup for the team's most valuable player.

Accentuating the Positive: Henderson Alvarez had a tremendous outing, giving up just four hits and one walk in six innings against the solid Red Sox lineup...We won't pester you with our Colby Rasmus love. But offensively and defensively, he was the highlight of last night's game. Take that as you will...Both Kelly Johnson and Edwin Encarnacion continue to have good at bats. Johnson is making pitchers work as hard as anyone in the lineup, and EE is squaring it up and hitting the ball hard on a regular basis...Darren Oliver's two-strikeout inning of work was quick and effective, and Coco Cordero also had a nice inning in the eighth.

Today's a New Day: Kyle Drabek gets his first start of the season against Daniel Bard. It's a whole new ballgame!

30 Jays in 30 Days - José Bautista is a Transcendent Superstar

Who: José Bautista, No. 19. Right fielder, occasional third baseman. Bats right, throws right. 6’0”, 195 LBS. 31 years old.

Provenance: Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Drafted in the 20th round of the 2000 amateur draft by the Pittsburgh Pirates. Acquired by the Blue Jays on August 21, 2008 in exchange for catcher Robinson Diaz.

Tao-Approved Nickname: One Man Gang.

Contract Status: Beginning second year of a five-year, $65 million deal signed last spring. Jays hold an additional option year for 2016.

Career Stats: 885 games played for Baltimore, Tampa Bay, Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Toronto. .362 OBP, .481 SLG, .843 OPS. 156 homers, 438 RBI, 455 runs scored in 3376 plate appearances. Two All-Star appearances. Two Silver Sluggers. Two Hank Aaron Awards.

2011 Stats: .447 OBP, .608 SLG 1.056 OPS with 43 homers in 149 games.

Before and After: Posted an OPS+ of 91 from 2004-2009. From 2010 on, posted an OPS+ of 173.

Looking Back: A year ago, we were left wondering how José Bautista would ever follow up his 54-homer coming out party. Also, we were wondering why the Jays were planning to honour Jason Frasor because of the big number 54 on the field on Opening Day. Because we’re a bit dim sometimes, and have yet to retire our aluminum pots and pans.

What Bautista did to top it was add almost 70 points of on base percentage, and lead the league in walks, slugging, OPS and OPS+. Oh, and homers too. Again. No biggie.

For all of that achievement, Bautista became an afterthought in the Most Valuable Player discussion towards the end of last season. Baseball’s chattering class twisted itself into painful contortions in order to find arguments against his candidacy. That punditry, in an all-out effort to hold true to the sacred conventional wisdom that governs baseball’s awards season, dismissed Bautista out of hand, noting that his production “tailed off” or that he went “into the tank” after the All-Star Game. We wouldn’t classify an OPS of .893 with 12 homers in 64 games in that manner, but hey…live and let live, right?

We wouldn’t even be so impertinent as to point out that when his team needed him to fill in at third base for several weeks to rebalance the team’s defensive strengths and weaknesses, he made the shift without much fuss and vastly improved their infield defense for the month while they waited to the apparition of another star. (But more on that guy tomorrow.)

Bautista can take some comfort in a record number of All-Star votes, as he garnered almost 7.5 million ballots from fans around the world. In the space of two seasons, Bautista has evolved from a handy and perhaps underappreciated utility man into a truly transcendent star. He’s become the biggest sports star in Toronto, and one of the most recognized faces in baseball.

Looking Forward: It’s hard not to revert back to last year’s question: What next? It’s perfectly reasonable to expect some sort of regression with Bautista’s output. Given just how high he set the bar with last year’s all-around excellence, it’s hard to envision that there’s another level above that for Bautista to achieve.

It could be that the next level has less to do with personal achievements, and more to do with the success of the team. Last season’s personal development for Bautista was built on refining his game, becoming more selective at the plate and taking as many walks as the opposition was prepared to offer. If he can maintain his patience and if the lineup around him is more productive, it could lead to improvement in the most important stat of all: Team wins.

Speaking of the team, Bautista has said in the past that he believes he serves it best when he is playing right field. We wonder about this a fair bit lately, as we become more convinced that he’ll finish up his contract in Toronto playing first base. That’s not to slam his defense -- though his rocket arm helps to conceal some of his positional weaknesses – but it is more a matter of how many outfielders will begin to crowd the picture for the Jays within the next 18 months.

Bautista comes off as a proud and driven player, so could he see such a move as something that is better for the team and not a personal demotion?

2012 Expectations: We expect that Bautista will continue to produce at a level with the best players in the game. An OPS over .900 would seem reasonable, and anything above .950 would be great.

What might be interesting is how Bautista is perceived in the season’s endgame, especially if the Jays are in the mix for one of the two Wild Card positions in August or September. If he has even 90% of last season’s success while the Jays are in the postseason discussion, could he break through and achieve the individual honour of an MVP season?

Old Voting Habits Die Hard

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.

High Five! Tiny Morsels for Your Friday

If brevity be the soul of wit, then blog on, bloggerman!

1) Jo-Jo Reyes is your number two starter: Okay, that's a stretch, but amongst the regular starters, his ERA+ ranks only behind Ricky Romero. (And Carlos Villaneuva, whose awesomeness probably deserves its own bullet point.) Our point here is not to hype Jo-Jo into something that he's not (which was our pre-season mistake), but merely to underscore that a guy who was about to be run out of town two weeks ago ("useless", "waste of a roster spot") is now a guy who the team will depend upon to give them quality innings for the next few months. Beacuse...

2) Kyle Drabek is wild man! WILD!: Drabek has walked more batters than he's struck out (45 to 43). Yikes. And if you want to double down on your worries, listen to Keith Law on the June 2nd edition of the Baseball Today podcast, wherein he wonders if this sort of lack of command indicates some form of injury. (Our two cents is that we think Drabek might have been able to get Double-A hitters to swing at hard stuff out of the zone more so than big leaguers. That's what passes for positivism around here.) Also, KLaw quite rightly questions John Farrell's handling of Drabek in that inning by not letting him extricate himself from the mess he'd made, given that it's part of the learning process.

Does Drabek's recent struggles mean he should go back to the minors and put in some time against Triple-A pitchers? It might work out well, considering...

3) Brett Cecil's wife thinks Brett Cecil is ready for promotion: We tend not to monitor the Twitter accounts of Jays' wives and girly-girls, because we're already creepy enough. But we couldn't help but notice the retweets of Jennifer Cecil's timeline from last night, as her fella tossed a complete game, six-hitter as the Las Vegas 51's won 4-1. The one run was on a homer which Mrs. Cecil assures us would have been a double in Toronto, and she noted that he was touching 94 MPH and regularly hitting 91. Take that as you will. Perhaps if Cecil were to be recalled, he could share a cab with...

4) Gordie Dougie!: For all of the pissing and moaning we've done in pushing back on the many fans who were calling for his immediate integration into the MLB roster, we'll confess to being as excited as any of you now that the recall is imminent. The power-speed-contact-discipline numbers that we've seen from Lawrie in the past month are enough to make even us, Your Scolding Auntie, trip over our knickers in anticipation. And won't he look splendid lining up next to...

5) AL All-Star Shortstop Yunel Escobar!: Actually, June-Yell is going to be in tough when it comes to making an appearance in this year's game, given the extraordinary seasons of other AL shortstops. Even with the pretty nice start that Escobar has put up, he's still in a three-way tie for fourth amongst AL SS's in fWAR. (Though Erick Aybar's and Elvis Andrus' 1.7 fWARs are fuelled mostly by stolen bases, and we suppose that you could start to pick apart what value should be placed on SBs if you were so inclined. We'll say that we LIKE the fact that Yunel has only one stolen base this year. So there. SMALL BALL SUCKS!)

All this to say (wtf happened to all the brevity we promised), if you want Yunel to make the All-Star roster ahead of The Shell of Derek Jeter, Alexei Ramirez or Asdrubal Cabrerra, you might have to buckle down and find the time to get your 25 votes in for our boy in the middle infield.

And don't go to sleep on José Bautista either! You remember how that hot girl on American Idol got voted off because no one thought she needed their votes, and then the creepy country kid with the head tilting won? Don't let that happen to the One Man Gang!

Have a great weekend!

The One Man Gang's Acting Chops

You know, we shouldn't encourage José Bautista to continue promoting the "Joey Bats" nickname, especially when he already has a perfectly awesome nickname: One Man Gang!

Still, we had to admit that we chuckled when he said "whacked". He could definitely play the heavy in a revival of the Littlest Hobo.

What's the timeline?

When you're supposed to be blogging about the Toronto Blue Jays and you have what serious writers (ie: folks who are, uh, good with words, and, uh, get paid to do it) refer to as writers' block, there's always one easy fallback option.

So how fuckin' good is that Jose Bautista? Am I right? Nails or what?

OK, but seriously, this post is about Bautista and his greatness. The premise is this:

How long do we think his current level of greatness will last until he becomes "just another slugger"? 2 more seasons? Maybe 3? And does it then not stand to reason that Alex Anthopoulos would target the next few seasons as the time during which the Jays must finally climb that mountain?

Of course, it's not so easy as snapping your fingers and announcing "We're competing now, boys!", but one would have to assume this timeframe was already within the scope of The Plan (right?). But let's say things were to go south with certain pieces of the future plan (no inferences allowed)..... does the Era of Bautista then dictate a quick and dirty (ie: expensive) plan-B as opposed to waiting for the next internal option?

You know what brings this to mind? The Jose Reyes nonsense brings this to mind. Not that I was buying into any serious interest the Jays might have in the player (miss that), but the concept of this team actually taking a run at big shiny pieces along those lines.

And I can't decide if I love or hate the idea.

Because as fantastic as it would be if AA's Jays suddenly became players for the Reyes and Fielders and (gasp!) Pujols of the baseball world.... I seem to kinda remember the outcome the last time the Jays were amongst the biggest players in the free agent world. It didn't end so well and resulted in a public craving for an internal rebuild and "doing things the right way".

And here we are.

Great players are great players, whether they're homegrown or bought & paid for on the open market. So what am I thinking? I guess I'm thinking a Big Splashy Move is always fun, but this team is more than one piece away from a championship calibre club.... until proven otherwise.

Luckily, we're likely on the verge of finding out whether a few of those pieces are ready to assert themselves as future cornerstones in the days, maybe weeks at most, ahead.

And if they are?

Big Splashy Moves!

A One-Sentence Post on...Being the Man

This is why you open the vaults for a player like José Bautista: To be excellent when the situation calls for it; to lead through performance and not through soundbites and professions of willingness to assume a leadership mantle by default; and to lift a floundering team out of the doldrums when they need it most.

Take Away Thoughts from the First Weekend

Before we start picking through the minutiae, indulge for this moment: Good gravy it was lovely to see baseball this weekend. Sure, we can spend six months musing on hypotheticals and theory, but there's nothing quite like real games that matter.

(And make no mistake: There are 159 games left, but the margin for error for an American League East team is so small that the "meaningful" games start early on in the season.)

With that said, here are a few thoughts on the weekend.

The Crowds, For Better, For Worse: Mostly, we should be saluting the strong crowds throughout the weekend. Bringing in more than 110,000 spectators for the first three games shows that there is a renewed interest in the team amongst some of the more casual fans. So bully for us.

Now, about the bad shit: When you pack the house on a Friday-Night-Opening-Night, you're certain to attract a some number of hooligans and ne'er-do-wells, as has happened before. Friday night's game was not nearly the complete shit show that the 2008 opener devolved into, with just one (apparently highly-entertaining) girl fight breaking out. Still, the Jays' in-game promotion department should probably settle on the fact that they can't just hand potential projectiles to the Opening Day crowd.

No one was in any particular danger - which only facilitates the thought process for the idiot goons who get their kicks out of throwing shit on the field - but the delays are a pain in the ass, and senseless.

Final thought on the crowds: Blue Jays crowds tend not to be terribly raucous, and that's okay, frankly. Yes, the echoes of silence in the closed Dome can create some uneasiness. But that's just who we are. And if it bothers you enough, then let yourself become the SuperFan that you wish for. (But try to be more interesting than the guys who scream: "You suck!" all game long.)

It's really just a shame that with the extraordinary upside that this team has, the crowds have chosen to reserve their most vocal moments for booing one of their own players. Which brings us to...

Good Edwin, Bad Edwin: Make three errors in two games, and suddenly every thinks you're a terrible player.

(Okay, maybe not so suddenly.)

Yes, we're a bit of an apologist for Edwin Encarnacion, so take this for what you will: We actually liked his game this weekend, especially his newfound speed out of the box. EE twice reached on errors this weekend, but they were errors that he helped to create by getting out of the box and down the line quickly.

As for the errors: The short hop on Friday was a tough play with which he tried to do too much, while the liner on Sunday was another difficult (though makeable) play. But let's not run him out of town like Larry Murphy based on three bad moments. (And by the way: Booing him out of town isn't going to speed the process of getting Brett Lawrie to Toronto. So shut that shit down right here and now.)

Pitching Dopeness, Pitching Wackness: Friday's start by Ricky Romero and Staurday's outing from Kyle Drabek were remarkably fine-tuned performances for the beginning of the season. Both changed speeds and locations well, and kept the Stars-and-Scrubs lineup of the Twins in check for the first two days.

And if it were still the fourth inning on Sunday, we could have roped Bret Cecil into that same group. Except that Cecil began letting the ball sail up in the zone, his tragic flaw.

It seems to us as though there's something askew with Cecil's foot plant, or it could be that when he gets into this trouble, he is too upright and never quite gets his body driving on a downward plane towards home. (Pappy Walton and Pat Hentgen would probably punch us in the face for talking about stuff that we don't really know. But we'll stand by this.)

(And by the way: More interesting, graphically astute analysis of the weekend starts by Drabek and Cecil can be found over at Ghostrunner on First.)

Surprising Mancrushes: Watching two games of Mike McCoy in centre for an ailing Rajai Davis, we were actually pretty impressed with his ability to field the position. (We sat in the centrefield seats on Saturday, and spent a lot of time observing the outfielders' positioning. And while Kyle Drabek's mastery meant that it wasn't a busy day, we appreciated some of the heads up play that we saw.) McCoy may not get more than 100 ABs this year, but as a guy who can cover off the middle of the diamond defensively, there's some value to him as organizational depth.

The Leader Leads through Leading Leadership: It's hard to criticize José Bautista, especially given the quick start to his season. Still, we watched him this weekend, and he seems to have taken his role as a leader on the team very, very seriously. It seemed as though he never stopped talking to teammates (this chatterbox nature might be why Alex Anthopoulos has bonded with him).

Given that there was plenty of complaining about the lack of active leadership in the clubhouse over the past decade, we're willing to go along with JoBau's chatty routine. As long as everyone is happy to listen, then this is great, we suppose. But it is a fine line between talking TO your teammates and talking AT your teammates.

(Why am I complaining about this?)

Other Stuff, Quickly, with Ellipses: The Saturday and Sunday lineups were not necessarily what we'd have used, but at least Farrell is willing to mix it up a bit...Not that we expected much from Juan Rivera, but even at that, he has been pretty lifeless so far...Loved the path to the ground balls that Snider took on Sunday to throw out one runner and hold the other. Saved two runs, and he looks swift tracking down balls as well...We can make the argument as to why Lind was right to jump on the first pitch (presumed to be a fastball strike, except that it was a breaking ball low) from Joe Nathan with the bases painstakingly loaded in the ninth, but it would probably sound like contrariness for sport.

Up Next: The Athletics. And The Summer of Jo-Jo begins in earnest.

Thoughts on moving pictures

It's a hell of a concept, these motion pictures. Watching a game of baseball on the TV, and suddenly, you're filled with whims and notions and some things that might even approach the territory where they could be called "ideas". Amazing.

As such, a few of those things that popped up following this weekend's game.

Brett Lawrie is Brad Fullmer: Okay, we'll say not really, if only to head of the heaps of scorn that we'd get in the comments for such a remark.

Nevertheless, Lawrie's big, broad upper-body, his batting stance (deep crouch, hands high and bat active), and even his angular features bring to mind the Jays' former DH. And while some would write off Fullmer's performance because of the brevity of his career and his time in Toronto, his 2000 season (32 HRs, 104 RBI, .898 OPS) was amongst the best ever single seasons in the team's history. So don't be giving him no guff.

The chief difference between the two is the glove (though it's probably worth noting that Fullmer might have had the chance to be a passable fielder if he weren't blocked by Carlos Delgado.) Lawrie has looked very much up to the task thus far at third, with good hands and a very strong and accurate arm. We could even envision him being discussed as a Gold Glove candidate at some point down the road. (For whatever that's worth.)

And before we ignite another Lawrie controversy: We still think he should start the season in Las Vegas. The Jays have other outfield options, so there is not the great necessity of moving JoBau to right and bringing Lawrie up immediately to play third. Let Lawrie go get his reps in at AAA, and see a lot more balls at third, and if sometime later this season the Jays feel incapable of keeping him down, then call him up.

Talking OPS: It's probably a sign of how slow the older media are to change when the notion of OPS on a broadcast becomes a novelty. But yesterday, Sportsnet posted the AL leaders in OPS last year to underscore José Bautista's 2010 excellence. And while Pat Tabler was extolling its virtue as a stat that better elucidates a player's worth (which it does! Yay Tabby!), he started tiptoeing dangerously close to some strange "walks clog bases" notions in his discussion.

Baby steps, to be sure. Though we noticed that the stat line in the Sportsnet broadcast later in the game included 2010 OPS numbers, which is a splendid addition to the production mix.

JoBau Bombs: Yes, the Rays very astutely tossed a bunch of random cannon fodder (best selling authors included) out against their divisional rivals, so it's hard to gauge that much from the shit-kicking that the offense laid on those marginal arms. But the swing that José Bautista put on Cory Wade's pitch was a thing of beauty.

And while Wade isn't exactly the Rolaids Relief Award frontrunner (and did you know they still hand that award out?), JoBau's ability to identify the pitch and time his step into it makes us feel much better about the prospects of another productive season.

2010 was no fluke. Go tell that.

Pitch session: We were impressed with each of the initial three pitchers, as Brandon Morrow looked as though he is ramping up, Marc Rzepczynski looked like a major league pitcher, and Carlos Villaneuva looked good enough to get relief innings (though wild enough not to get high leverage innings.)

As for Casey Janssen: He looks like such an unbridled ball of anxiety every time he's on the mound. We still love the look of his delivery, and his performance last year probably merits him a spot in this year's bullpen. But with the heap of humanity available to pitch in relief this year for the Jays, that spot is for Casey is no given.

Infuriatingly Yunel: We're in for a long season with young Mr. Escobar. Early in the game, he rushed a throw and hurled a ball into the camera bay even though he had more than enough time. On the other hand, he hit the ball hard yesterday, and drove in runs. Even still: That swing of his looks like an off-balance lurch towards the pitch, which makes us worry about how repeatable those successes might be.

And even with all the negatives, we're vaguely optimistic about Yunel's 2011. Which is why we'll inevitably end up pulling our hair out by season's end. Should be fun.

Tumblin' dice: Assessing risk and the JoBau deal

Signing any player to a contract is a risk, and with more money and more years, you only magnify that risk.

Add to that the lack of clear evidence based on past performance, and the backlash amongst some of us against the José Bautista deal hopefully seems less like smarmy snark directed from the back of the class. We can't speak for Dustin or Drew or Stoeten or others who've raised concerns about the deal or questioned the urgency of signing this now (and they can speak for themselves just fine, we're sure), but there is something about the balance of risk that Alex Anthopoulos has taken in this deal that left us uneasy.

(And not to bore you with the plight of the blogger, but it's weird how we spend years getting accused of being on Rogers' payroll - I wish! - and how we're apologists for everything they do, and the moment we look with hesitation on a deal, people write us off as cynics. Cripes.)

Now that the deal is done, we're left trying to piece together the rationale. And with a full night's sleep and some time spent thinking in a manner that we assume AA might think, we're coming to a point where it's starting to come to us.

While we still more or less agree with Parkes' recent point that the Jays needn't have made a move early on Bautista, we're rethinking the equation and coming to this point: The Jays were set on this guy, and not just potential value.

What we mean is that the notion of acquiring value back for Bautista later this year in the form of returns from a trade or draft picks was less appealing to the Jays' brain trust than working through to achieve the best value that they could in order to retain the player they had.

It's not exactly "we want Bautista, whatever the cost". But certainly, they were set on this particular asset. It wasn't his level of production that they wanted...it was him.

(And maybe it would be too cynical to tell a bunch of baseball fanatics that we really shouldn't start naming the animals on the farm or getting attached to them, because those attachments are half the reason we're here writing, and you're here reading.)

Once you set it in your mind that the Jays wanted the man himself, then the timing starts to make sense. Whatever his performance in the first few months, the Jays were going to start to lose leverage in their ability to retain him. If it's June 2nd and Bautista has 10 homers, would the Jays have been able to grind him down to a three-year deal? And if he has a three-homer day on June 3rd, and hits five more within two weeks, and suddenly he's back on a 40-homer pace, does the price go back up? Could they get one type of prospect on June 2nd, and a whole other level on July 1st?

And would they have wanted to play that game all year?

It's pretty clear at this point that the Jays would not have retained Bautista had they not moved before this season. We love what he produced last season, and we're really quite happy to have him back in the fold. We share your enthusiasm. (For criminy's sake, we compared him to Lolita and us to Humbert Humbert last Spring.)

But know that this is signing is a risk. They say that fortune favours the bold, and this sort of deal may be as bold a move as Alex Anthopoulos has made since he's arrived. By giving significant money to Bautista for several years, he's begun to sketch out for us what the team will look like four or five years down the road. While some other deals looked as though they had an eye towards the future, none did as much to solidify the roster's composition for the 2014/2015 seasons.

One way or another, José Bautista is going to be central to the conversation five years from now.

Too long. Too much. So what?

Earlier in the week, we quipped in tweets (ouch) that we'd lose our minds if the Jays were to offer José Bautista something to sign that committed them to pay him for longer than four years.

Before we start fretting over the salary flexibility in the 2015 season, we'll wait until later this afternoon to see how much of the rumoured five-year, $65 million contract is guaranteed. And to see whether Alex Anthopoulos has worked some magic that gives him far more control over this situation.

Ultimately, we're happy to know that Bautista is coming back, and that he'll be the face of the franchise for the next few years. (Yes, he will.) And we're doubly happy about the notion that his preferred position is suddenly third as opposed to right field. We're also filling our head with mammoth shots into the upper tank just to bring the sunshine back into our cold heart.

Still, we can't help but think of the elation throughout Blue Jay Land a few weeks ago when they off-loaded a big money deal that wasn't paying sufficient dividends.

More later, as more is known...

Update - From the presser
Deal is as reported: Five years and $65 million. Breaks down as $8 million, then $14 million over next four years. Frankly, I probably would have liked to flip that.

Uggla's deal was a barometer.

The deal is based on what they think of Bautista as a person.

Sweet jiminy jillickers...we love The New Manager. John Farrell has a "why am I here" look. Then takes a question and sounds like a frickin' awesome sage cowboy genius business executive.

And then, the press conference is over, with Jay Stenhouse's clever mention that single game tickets go on sale tomorrow. BUY BUY BUY!

A final blogged reaction for today
I don't hate this signing. I worry about the last three years on the deal, but that's just my nature. I'm a worrier. In the short term, I'm really happy to have a guy who may well be a premium offensive talent with some positional flexibility on the roster. The bilingualism is an asset as well on a team that has begun to bring more young Latin talent into the fold. Having your clubhouse leader be a guy who can address the entire clubhouse is a good thing.

We'll try not to poop all over this, even if we don't like the fifth season. The money seems as though it might be fair, and not so much of an albatross that the Jays will be unable to eat it if JoBau regresses.

The JoBau Extension Predicament

We'd spent most of the Winter hoping and wishing and praying for the announcement of some sort of deal between the Jays and José Bautista that would buy out his arbitration and keep the newly-fashioned King of Swing in Toronto for the next few years.

But then, over a couple (or six) beers with The Score's Getting Blanked baseball-blogger-in-chief Dustin Parkes a week or so back, we came around to his way of thinking: That this wasn't urgent, that the Jays could wait this out, and that they were in a better bargaining position than people thought.

By taking the 2011 season to get a better sense of what JoBau has to offer over the next few years, the Jays would have avoided a situation in which Bautista turns into a pumpkin, and they end up on the hook for a biggish deal to a guy who is a 25/85/.815 guy for the next few years. (And while we have a lot of faith in the adjustments that Bautista made last season, we have some worry that the rest of the league will have spent the offseason figuring out how to pitch him and where the holes may be in his swing.)

The downside of waiting is that Bautista may follow up his otherworldly 2010 with another insane year of 50-plus bombs, find himself in the position to get real paid, and take off, leaving Toronto in the worst case with either draft picks or whatever they could get for him at the trade deadline.

The upside is if Bautista gets hurt or flames out, you're not left with several years left on a significant deal that cuts into your payroll flexibility just as the team is ready to emerge into a legitimate contender. (And need we remind you of the deal that the Jays unloaded in recent weeks, and how that may have impacted on their payroll?)

There are lots of reasons for us to be enthused by the delay that was granted on the arbitration hearing, and the potential a long term deal. Tangibly, Bautista had one of the most offensive seasons in the history of the franchise, and while his track record of that level of excellence is sparse, it's at least feasible to conceive of him putting up WARs above 4.0 for the next three years.

Intangibly speaking, there is Bautista's role as bridging figure between the Anglophones and the Hispanophones within the locker room, and his ability to be a "leader" without having to campaign for the role amongst the press corps, reiterating his willingness to take on that role long after he should have assumed it anyways.

(Yes, we're looking at you Aaron Hill. You can leave your copy of Vernon's "best shape of my life" talking notes in the locker room as well, because we don't need to hear those recycled by you either.)

If the Jays and Bautista come to an agreement for four years or less at an annual salary of $14 million or less, we could live with it, and not fret for how it might derail what has been a pretty sharp and astute track taken by Alex Anthopoulos towards building a long-term contender. Moreover, it would be fun to consider four productive years with JoBau in the middle of the Jays' success.

Just so long as he plays third base along the way.

Hot corner hot stove - What JoBau's 3B reticence has wrought

So somewhere along the line, José Bautista got it into his head that he would prefer to play in right field. (Don't ask us to come up with the quote. It's been out there so long that we just assume that it's true.)

We get why JoBau might want to take this approach. Ladies love baserunner kills, but throw a guy out from across the diamond, and you elicit barely a yawn. Also, there are far fewer screaming-take-your-dome-clean-off-your-shoulders line drives that come hurtling themselves hungrily at your flesh when you're in the outfield.

Unfortunately, this particular stance isn't necessarily the one that makes the most sense for the Blue Jays. There are plenty of warm bodies that you can stick out in the outfield on any given day, but only so many guys who can hold their own at third. If Bautista would accede happily to life on the infield, sharing jokes and smiles and hip bumps with Yunel, then we could wrap up this discussion and go get ourselves some aging slugging non-fielder (other than Juan Rivera) and toss them in right or left or wherever.

But seeing as how the Jays aren't likely to do anything to upset or turn off Bautista until after they sign off on their longer-term matrimony, it leaves us without an enviable option at third for now.¹

Nature abhors a vacuum, though, so we've spent the past weekend observing the efforts of some to fill the third base void. Here's the options that we've seen, for better or worse.

Kevin Kouzmanoff: KK is probably off the table now that Chone Figgins has precluded any further discussion on getting traded to Oakland. And to think that we'd just started to come around on him, in spite of the fact that he hasn't posted an OPS above .732 in the past three seasons. (He's got home/road splits that look promising, and his defense seems to carry much of the weight of his 2.7/2.7/2.9 fWAR over the past three years.) A long shot to think that AA can get him, though the A's seem determined to replace him.

Eric Chavez: On a minor league deal? Why not? For some of the cushion change in Bob McCown's green room, you sign a guy who was an elite player at one point (admittedly, five years ago) and who might have something in the tank and something to prove. If he's healthy, he could be a low-risk/high-reward pick up. If not...well, what's the down side?

Aaron Hill: You create one hole by filling another, though there may be an argument that you'd be moving Hill in a year anyways to make room for Adeiny Hechavarria. (Unless it's Yunel that moves to third, in which case, you slide the tiles in your slide puzzle the other way around.)

John McDonald: In limited playing time, Johnny Mac managed a .727 OPS last season. Which, we'd point out, is better than Kouzmanoff's OPS in 2010 and 2009. Oddly, though, the PMoD has put up a negative UZR/150 at third over his career (-7.9). But if you're sliding Hill over, you get McDonald's career 18.9 UZR/150 at second over Hill's 4.8.

Edwin Encarnacion: He's still on the roster. He still has a higher career OPS than Aaron Hill. And his UZR/150 last season at 3B was -2.3, which is a vast improvement over seasons past. Playing EE in the field means that the Jays would have more flexibility with their DH spot. We could go on attempting to make the case for Edwin, though we're reasonably sure that all you'll read from this point on would look like "E5 E5 E5 E5E5 E5E5 E5E5 E5E5 E5E5 E5E5 E5E5 E5E5 E5E5 E5E5 E5E5 E5E5 E5".

---

1. You have no idea how many different ways we tried to work a marriage analogy into this paragraph. "Put a ring on it" was tossed around. We conjugated the verb "to betroth" for 20 minutes, until we realized that it only connotes getting engaged and not buying the whole cow. "Down the aisle" was used. Rote "no sex after marriage" jokes were tried on for size. We gave up. This is the best we could do.

Far away, so close

So there's about three million bucks difference between the Jays and José Bautista, which seems like a significant gap betwixt what the team thinks he's worth and what he thinks he's worth. Except for the fact that we suspect that neither party actually believes that's what Bautista is worth, nor would be willing to chisel those numbers into granite.

Given the process within which they find themselves, the Jays were smart not to allow themselves to go overly high in their offer to Bautista, lest he snatch it up and set his course firmly towards a mostly barren free agent class follow the 2011 season. Their offer might seem low or untenable, but they couldn't paint themselves into a corner where they had no leverage while negotiating a medium or longer term deal.

For that matter, Bautista's responding figure seems low as well, and likely below what he'll eventually ask for when a multi-year agreement is presented. (And much more palatable to an arbitrator, for that matter.) Given the Jason Werth horseshittery and Dan Uggla's deal, we're figuring that JoBau's desires will be in the five-year, $65 million range, and that the Jays' offer would be closer to three and $33 million.

(We're pulling numbers out of the air here, so don't take this as anything more than jibber jabber.)

The point here, we suppose, is not to get overly set on the actual figures that have been floated thus far. They are negotiation points, but not true statements of worth or assessments of player value. And following the logic of what we said yesterday about the meaning behind the small divide with Jason Frasor indicating a larger divide between the parties, we actually think that the largish gap between Bautista and the Jays is an indication that both sides are willing to push this process to the very end, and continue working towards a longer deal rather than a one-and-done.

Which, if you think kindly on JoBau, is good news indeed.

A new approach to negotiating?

For years, the Jays took their streak of not busting their players' balls in arbitration hearings as a symbol of their enlightened virtue. And being that we're all a bunch of overly polite Canadians, we probably liked it that way. Those are our guys, so why do we want to be something less than accommodating to them?

(And pause now to link to Jeremy Sandler's NatPost piece from late last night which kicked off this whole line of thinking. Lest you think we have an idea of our own.)

With the deadline for avoiding hearings creeping up fast, and the Jays still holding the line on an MLB-high nine players, it seems to us that the front office has a different view on how to approach the process, and how nice is too nice. (Now, cue all of the signings avoiding the arb process dropping on one day. Boom!)

If the Jays front office does indeed continue to be slightly unconventional in their approach (and the Miguel Olivo deal certainly qualifies as that), then maybe there's something to taking a new path to purchasing the players' services.

Certainly, on the top end, the Jays are faced with an unprecedented issue with José Bautista's contract for next year. His otherworldly 2010 campaign may well force the Jays into a hearing, because really, how the hell do you square away the rest of his career with that one season?

The really interesting question is whether if the team will go to arbitration with some of the more marginal cases, and if so, what do they see as the advantage to such an approach? Niceness aside, is there really any advantage to the team staying away from the arbitration hearing? And what's to be gained by the team by going this route?

The past approach to arbitration seemed to have been one of ensuring that the players were appeased and that a few hundred thousand bucks here or there would suffice to ballast the boat. But a $100K here and $200K there, and pretty soon, you're talking real money. The sort of money that the Jays may be more interested in spending on the multitude of draft picks coming this June rather than their seventh bullpen arm and fourth outfielder.

Moreover, this front office seems to be the sort who wouldn't avoid the arbitrator's room if they thought that they could win. Given the amount of time and resources that have been dedicated to the knowledge and reconnaissance aspects of running the Jays over the past 16 months, we would at least imagine that they would know which cases they could go in and win, and from which awards they might need to walk away.

We're not wanting to present this like we know what the team (or the very polite and kindly Alex Anthopoulos) is thinking, but we wouldn't be opposed to the team taking an approach to this process that is something other than what the orthodoxy would suggest they adhere to, if only to see what the result looks like.

That's a nice pitchers park you built, Minny...

...It's a shame for you that the Jays had to go gangsterin' all over it last night and inflate its park factor in the space of a few innings.

If you're like us, you might have found yourself thinking halfway through the Jays' thorough thrashing of the Twins that there's no way that the Twins could ever hang in the AL East. And moreover, that you're sick of all this horseshit about how the Twins play the game "the right way." And that right way, so far as we could tell from last year's ALDS, involves running the bases with the wild abandon of chickens escaping from their coop; throwing the ball hither and yon around the park, but to no one in particular; and generally slapping at the ball and hoping for the best.

And all we can say to those stuffed shirt Twins boosters (in the MSM, in particular) is have fun coming up with your excuses for your early exit again this year.

Max Power!
José Bautista's latest bombs haven't shown up on the always entertaining Hit Tracker website, so we don't have the height and distance and angle and speed of last night's homers. (But if you wanna look, check here. BOOM!) We're not sure which we found more impressive: The grand slam moonshot or Bautista's first opposite field dinger for his 54th of the season.

Either way, it will be an immensely satisfying exhibition to dream about as we head into the long off season to come. And it gives us hope that the show will not stop any time soon. Because we're always happiest when our Dinger Monkey dances on command. More dingers, Dinger Monkey!

(And none of this even starts in on Travis Snider's emergence over the past few weeks. Which has been pretty fun to watch. Dingers of C.C. still count, even if they happen to land in September.)

Friday Rock Out - The Hold Steady's "Chips Ahoy!"
Hey man, we don't wanna bag on Minnesota too much, because we feel a bit of a kinship to them. (Okay, that might be a bit disingenuous. But go with it. We're trying to be nice. And we have a weak spot for Jason Kubel, too...so there's that.)

Anyways, here are some of Minnesota's favourite sons...and since we couldn't find a Replacements song where the embedding was disabled, this isn't a bad second choice.

Enjoy the last weekend of the baseball regular season, kids.

You meet the nicest people on the internet

We won't bore you too much by talking about yesterday's Jays Nerds FanFest Non-Kegger Nachosplotation Graphics Interchange Format ShenanigansPalooza 2010. (Full rundowns have been posted over at Blue Jay Hunter and Sports and the City, which contains claims that we can neither confirm nor deny.)

But suffice to say that there is a lesson to be learned from such a meeting of the minds (aside from the need for sunscreen in September...Yowza!): The people who are clever, fun and engaging on the internet are doubly so in person.

(Except for Jordan Bastian. Who is a creep. Or so we've heard.)

Things noticed in passing as we yakked our way through the game
As has been noted elsewhere, yesterday's nail biter between the OriLOLes and our heroes kinda faded into the background as we kvetched and horsed around in section 211. But there were a few things that registered. Such as:

Leading off: Travis Snider is taking this leadoff thing way too literally. He's out there running the bases like he's Vince Coleman, getting his feet on the turf, stealing bags and getting tossed out like a goof on a fly ball to centrefield. For shame. We love us the Rosy Cheeked Phenom, but we hope that someone finds a nice place in the middle of the lineup for him so that he can slow it all down and focus on hitting jacks.

Hating your AL East rivals is fun! Buck Showalter would like to send a message to the Jays. And it is this: We're gonna throw shit at your guys, because we are a shitty team with nothing to play for but moral victories. "Guard yo' grill son! Here comes a reliever to plunk your best offensive player for the second time! On our last meeting of the year! Yoinks!"

Maybe hating the O's is like hating a two-legged puppy, but we want to see Baltimore suffer for the foreseeable future. And we hope Matt Wieters turns into the bust of the decade, and that all of their young pitching has unplanned meetings with Drs. Andrews and Jobe.

Three thoughts on 50

Thought #1

We needed this. For this team's fan base, which before the season seemed to begrudge their own allegiance, this outstanding, season-long ride with an unexpected hero has been enough to shine a little light into the darkness, and create a bit of optimism for the coming year.

And don't discount optimism: Sports franchises are multi-million dollar enterprises that somehow need to create, harness and catalyze those sanguine feelings into something more palpable. And if this team is to be a continued an long-term success in Toronto, they need to get the turnstiles turning again.

Thought #2

We seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time trying to remind ourselves what a big deal José Bautista's season has been. Maybe we've all become willfully more numb to giant power numbers, and maybe we're just inundated with constant questioning around any impressive offensive stat. But it seems as though you really have to try to block out the noise and think about this differently.

It's not easy to block out the noise of the McGwire-Sosa-Bonds years (nor the high moral dudgeon that continues to be aired over those days). This makes it especially difficult to focus back to what we think is probably "normal" power outputs, and where JoBau belongs in that continuum. (And believe us when we tell you that we could argue in our own head for days on end about "normal" and what it means, if anything).

To try to fake our way to some sort of comprehension, we've been using Cecil Fielder's 1990 season as a touchstone as of late. We remember that year clearly, as Big Daddy returned from Japan and put up power numbers sick enough that they would make your stomach churn when he stepped into the batters box against you. And when he did slam homer after homer through the late part of that season, there was a certain level of elation of seeing someone put on such a display.

We'd like to think that we'll look back on JoBau's 2010 campaign in a similar fashion.

Thought #3

We've been thinking a lot about comps, as we consider where the Jays go from here in terms of signing Bautista. (And also because if we here Brady Anderson's name invoked one more time, we're going to drown a bag of koala cubs.)

There are two names that seem to stand out in terms of players who had this sort of season at this age and point in their career: Greg Vaughn and George Foster. (And please understand that we're not calling those performances completely analogous, so please don't pick this comparison apart through the marginalia before we even get started.)

We'll go into more detail on Vaughn and Foster soon, but here's the basic message that we get from looking at the years that succeeded their 50 homer seasons: That they didn't fall off the face of the earth, but that they had about three more productive seasons (even if they were less so) in them.

So if you want to start the discussions with JoBau at three years and figure out the price from there, we'd be happy to buy into that strategy.

Friday (Bleep Bloop) Rock Out: The Postal Service - Such Great Heights

This seems appropriate, even if we have to get over the idea of Ben Gibbard stealing away with our Zooey. Nevertheless...we're all grown ups here, right?

Enjoy your Friday, and the last weekend homestand of the season.