Briefs: Various and sundry thoughts from a long weekend

Hope you all had a great long weekend, eating spaghetti squash and ham and turkey and watching baseball where Sportsnet deigned to put the playoff games on the air.

Watching douchebags fail makes life worth living
We felt for our buddy the Red Sox fan, who came over to watch the Red Sox-Angels game in the TaoCave on Sportsnet West (the only feed on which the "four-channel offering" could be bothered to run what should be a national sports media property).

Yeah, sure, he roots for a team full of pompous douches and rat-faced little twerps (shine that MVP plaque this offseason, Mr. 72 RsBI Pedroia), but you still have to empathize at least a little bit when you watch his arsewipe closer huff and puff and blow the game for the Masshole Nation.

Nah. On second thought, you don't. Because watching Jonathan Papelbon cough up a three run lead is one of the happier moments we've seen this year.

(And a free tip for Mr. Irish Jig for next season: Mix in an offspeed pitch once in a while.)

Anthopoulos does stuff
If you were wondering whether if Alex Anthopoulos is just keeping the GM seat warm until the mythical creature known as the Next President of the Jays is found, the news that he's brought in his pal Dana Brown from his days with les Expos should at least give a sense that he thinks he's got the job long term.

We'll leave it to those who dig into the whole prospect and development side of baseball to figure out if this is a good thing. The Nats don't seem to have an overwhelming abundance of talent, and the Expos had some pretty fallow years in the draft before moving south (Josh Karp and his $2 Million-plus signing bonus, anyone?)

Simmons slurpage
Speaking of the new GM, the Sun's Steve Simmons could barely contain his glee while writing his love letter to the new regime.

"It all sounds so promising and so anti-Ricciardi that you want to believe every word and you want to run alongside him, just hoping to capture that youthful exuberance," Simmons wrote.

Not that we're wishing ill on Anthopoulos, because the fate of the team that we spend entirely too much time worrying about rests in his hands and in his decisions. But we're getting an impression that the lad is going to get cut a lot of slack over the next few years because he is just so darned nice and Canadian. (Never mind that J.P. was pilloried for years for firing top scouts and minor league staff upon his arrival, while Alex is getting a pass on doing the same.)

A Bad Week for Umpires
It's probably a good thing that the first round of the playoffs has concluded, and that the pack of umpires will be culled by half. While it is understandable that umpires are going miss a few calls and the spotlight of the playoffs will make those mistakes more evident, this year's postseason seems to have had more than its share of botched calls.

The most fun for us, though, was suddenly seeing hundreds of people late on a Friday night landing on an 18 month-old post about Phil Cuzzi, and our general antipathy towards him. Fun stuff.

Happy Reading
Just picked up Stephen Brunt's new book, Gretzky's Tears: Hockey Canada, and the Day Everything Changed, and though we're only three chapters in, we can wholeheartedly recommend it. It's on sale. Go buy it. You owe it to yourself. Brunt is a national treasure, and buying his book will only convince Knopf to keep engaging him to write more of them. Which is a good thing.

The book is so good that about five pages in, we hit ourselves over the head with it, because his eloquent, engaging, and evocative prose is so far beyond anything that we'll be able to write. (And he doesn't even indulge in corny alliteration like we just did there.)

10

Ten games, and no losses in September. Seriously, this is getting ridiculous. Isn't is strange to think that at some point years from now, we'll look at great winning streaks in the history if the franchise and see the past few weeks as one of the most wickedly awesome stretches ever.

No, really. And we don't even care at this point how much of a long shot the postseason is. We're going down with the ship.

We know that the chances are remote, but the irrational fan in us is doing somersaults when we see the Jays' chances at the Wild Card increase over the past week from 1% to 2.8% according to Coolstandings. (UPDATE: Actually, it went from 1% to 2.8% in one day.)

You see? They're saying that we still have a chance!

Of awe-inspiring comebacks and yawn-inducing callups

Comeback kids
For most of this season, a 5-1 deficit in the early innings of a Jays game meant either walking away and getting on with your day/evening, or sticking it out and watching the Jays roll over and play dead.

But in recent weeks, this team has shown the ability to continue to chip away at the lead and swipe it away in the late innings, as exemplified by last night's 7-5 win over the Twins. Maybe it's the warm dry air that's helping some warning track shots turn into home runs, or maybe Cito really does have some sort of mystical effect on this team.

Whatever the case, and no matter how strange this might seem, the team that we the faithful are watching now looks to us like the sort of team that can actually play in a pennant race. They're nine games over .500 since Cito's arrival, so just extrapolate that over a full season. (We know it doesn't really work that way...get off of our cloud.)

There are plenty of people who have been campaigning to blow this whole team to smithereens, from the front office to the field. Watching them hang tough over the past month against the teams ahead of them in the AL standings , we wonder if a tweak or two to the roster wouldn't be enough to put them over the top.

Callups? You call those callups?
Maybe we're paying a little penance for the Jays' having called up The Great Big Giant Pasty White Hope^TM Travis Snider last week, but the callups added to the expanded September rosters yesterday were a little underwhelming and a lot familiar. We were hoping for the future of the franchise to get the call, and instead, we get a bunch of familiar faces. Shaun Marcum, Brian Wolfe, Scott Richmond? Welcome back, fellas. Curtis Thigpen? It's been a while. Brevin Mencherson? Did you guys even leave?

A minor note
Goodbye Syracuse (and good riddance for that matter). Hello Buffalo?

Was that meaningful for you?

Because fuckit dude, we've got wood after that win.

Yeah, we know that the playoffs are still a long shot, but that's what makes this next stretch of the season fun: Every game is going to at least feel like it matters. And did you see the reaction of the players after tonight's game? Hell, the Jays fans were outcheering the Yankees fans at the Dome tonight!

Now let's move to the Roll Call...
A.J. Burnett: Wicked awesome. Has he pitched a game as a Blue Jay better than tonight's?
Adam Lind: More awesome than awesome. We can believe how often we're referring to him.
Lyle Overbay: A gritty awesome gamer with the glove. That was an amazing game saver in the ninth.
Johnny Damon: No longer an option in centerfield. But thanks to Joe Girardi for putting him out there tonight.
J.P. Arencibia: Drove in his 100th RBI of the season tonight. At least someone in the Jays system is going to reach that milestone.

Playoffs? Don't talk about playoffs. Are you kidding me? Playoffs?

Don't mention playoffs to the Jays' AA NH Fisher Cats, who fell to the Red Sox' Portland Sea Dogs 7-4 in a one-game play-in. (Hat tip to Neate for following up on our post from yesterday.)

Of course, the loss put the Fisher Cats at 70-73 for the season, so by all rights, they probably didn't belong in the postseason.

Unless they were in the National League Central.

Long balls end Fisher Cats' season (Manchester Union Leader)

Time to make some hay

Here’s a novelty for you: Meaningful games.

After what feels like a month of playing National League teams, the Jays have emerged, suddenly finding themselves in second place in the AL East (11 back of Boston, and a half game up on the Yanks). Moreover, the Jays are back in the Wild Card mix, sitting six games back of Cleveland in fifth place.

(It may be a bit of an overstatement to consider the Jays back in these races, but we’re fans. We’re willing to suspend our disbelief, if only to make our summer that much more satisfying.)

What this past weekend’s upswing means is that the next four series leading into the All-Star Break will be of considerable import for Toronto’s playoff hopes, as they'll play the four teams above them in the Wild Card standings.

The Jays take on Minnesota (38-35, 1.5 games up), Seattle (39-33, and three games up), Oakland (39-35, two games up) and the Tribe in the next two weeks, and with only two series per year against these opponents, the Jays will have to make up ground on these teams now, or rely on others to do their work for them.

It isn't quite "do or die", but it would be a hell of a time to go on a winning streak.