The Manager will use his magic powers to help you hit dingers

This is how The Manager has built his reputation.

A barely-above-replacement level scrub goes out for extra batting practice in the midst of a slump which has only served to drag down an already lousy year. And then The Manager steps forth, with his knowledge of the grip-it-and-rip-it philosophy, and touches the player with his wisdom and insight.

And then, after but one session with The Manager, the player goes out and hammers the ball around the yard like he was Hank. Unbelievable.

We could go into a whole repudiation of the myth and the legend, and suggest that maybe anyone could have provided a healthy refresher for John Buck to help him pull his head out of his ass. And we could also point out how a couple of the swings that resulted in those dingers weren't exactly what you would call "pretty" or "textbook".

But really, who's to argue with those results? When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

A tribute to Windows Restaurant
We're not even sure that anyone would or could call it Windows anymore, given that it has sat as empty as Steve Simmons' head for much of the past three years. But seeing John Buck's third homer of the night rattle off the panes - now covered in advertising - reminded us of what a thrill it used to be when a Fred McGriff or Carlos Delgado moonshot would touch the glass, deep in centre field.

While we've advocated pulling the glass and creating some sort of douchebag party patio out there, seeing that homer bounce of it last night might have just convinced us that they ought to keep the structure out there. For oldtimey's sake.

Dropping links like Adam Lind crushes hanging breaking balls

We'll confess to being a bit spent by the two-game mindfuck that was the series against the Clevelanders, so to give ourselves a little respite today, we'll punt you off to the many other fascinating Blue Jays tidbits around the internet.

(Speaking of which: Did you know that you can get free breakfast and "internets" from Super 8? We may have heard that somewhere.)

Scott Richmond got his face in a frame
The Blue Jay Hunter tips their cap to the American League's New Employee of the Month, Scott Richmond.

Doc turns his stare from stun to grin
Hum and Chuck offers up a funny video of Roy Halladay being interviewed by Gerry Dee, the caucasian half of the Score's goofball reporter tandem. It's a riot to see the look on Doc's face as he suffers Dee gladly. Funny stuff, even without the allegations of litigious racism.

The Blue Jays' attendance woes, Part 28
In the comments yesterday, we promised a post on the Jays' early season attendance numbers, though we're not sure that we could do much better than this gem from Neate at Out of Left Field.

If you can't get 'em to the park, at least have 'em watching on the tube
The Star's Chris Zelkovich reports that the Jays' TV audiences on Sportsnet are up about six percent over last season. (Which begs the question: Even with half of the 'Net's "regions" airing games other than the Jays'?)

What do you do with a problem like Snidey?
It's a couple of days old now, but Drew/LtB at Ghostrunner on First made a very reasonable suggestion that the time might have come to send Travis Snider to Las Vegas for some fine tuning. This, of course, was before Snider discovered the impact that high socks could have on his performance. Problem solved!

Josh Barfield misremembers the good old days of the SkyDome
Jesse's kid regales the Cleveland Plain Dealer with tales of goofing around the SkyDome when it first opened and playing in the new facility with the Mosebys and Upshaws. There's just one problem: Willie Upshaw never played as a Blue Jay at the SkyDome. In fact, he never played at the SkyDome at all. In 1988, he made way for Cecil Fielder and Fred McGriff by moving on to Cleveland before retiring at the end of the season. The SkyDome didn't open until June of the next season.

Moreover, Jesse Barfield was traded from the Blue Jays on April 30, 1989 for Captain FingerBlister, Al Leiter, a month before the SkyDome opened. So clearly, we can expect to see an announcement coming from the Cleveland front office that Josh has been placed on the DL because of injuries sustained when his big liar pants were on fire.

The minutiae of MLB rules...explained at last!
We're digging Bart Given's Inside the Majors blog lately, especially when he digs into the particulars of the waiver or DL systems. We're just hopeful that Given doesn't go all soft on us after he moves to the West Coast.

There's something that happens to people when they get to the other side of the Rockies...we can't explain it, but we've lost too many friends to a life of performance art, yoga and Canucks apologism not to worry for Bart. (But congrats to Jody on the new gig.)

Monday morning, running on fumes

Running a motor vehicle indoors is not such a super idea for those who aren't suicidal
The motorcross jamboree held on Saturday night under the Rogers Centre dome forced an evacuation of the hotel rooms and restaurants overlooking the stadium. Isn't this yet another argument for turning the former SkyDome into a baseball-only venue?

So long to all of our spring mancrushes
Jason Lane and Brad Emaus - the Mantle and Maris of Dunedin in 2009 - both got their walking papers and will make their way to the Jays' minor league camp for reassignment. Also taking the walk of shame is Dirk Hayhurst, whose sterling 13-to-0 strikeout-to-walk ratio in eight Spring innings was not enough to make up for the massive number of earned runs - one - that he gave up in those appearances.

Let's talk about Alex Rios to the Giants again, shall we?
Bleacher Report ponders who got the better of last spring's non-trade of Alex Rios to the Giants, although they weigh out the relative benefits of the swap with Matt Cain as the pitcher coming back to the Jays instead of Tim Lincecum. And while we have a certain roto-league weakness for Cain, we think we can speak for the majority of the Jays' fanbase when we say "thank god that trade never happened."

And while we smugly dump on starting pitchers we don't have...
Let us ponder the fact that Ricky Romero has become the front-runner for the fourth spot in the rotation, and that Dustin McGowan's return to good health may be delayed long enough that he'll have grey in his lambchops by the time he pitches again. Crap.

It's a blogger roundtable!
Mopup Duty has a Blue Jays Bloggers Roundtable of Death, featuring the best and brightest of the northern baseball blogosphere. There are some interesting thoughts in there, and the quality of the commenting is much improved by the fact that we didn't interject our weak-ass third-person piety into the mix. At least not this time.

The Ack will return once he is done parting the waters
For those of you who missed the inimitable weekend stylings of the Ack, know that he will be back just as soon as he turns back the Red River flood waters. No, seriously: he really spent the weekend helping to sandbag and secure the safety of his neighbours, and for that, he deserves our praise and adulation.

It's funny, though, that when the Ack takes a weekend off, people get up in arms, but we could blow off an entire week and no one would care. Suffice to say, we're not walking down any stairwells in front of the Ack any time soon...we saw Showgirls, and we're not about to make the same mistake as Cristal Connors.

When you keep adding 2 + 2, the possibilities are infinite

Pete Toms' lengthy article posted yesterday on the Biz of Baseball is a thoroughly researched, 3600-word piece that deserves a certain degree of respect. It pulls together a lot of strands and ultimately weaves together the story of how the Blue Jays' tenure in Toronto may be short-lived. The piece is so well written and researched - and we hold Mr. Toms in high enough regard - that we feel like we need to do something more than just call "bullshit".

But that is pretty much what we're about to do.

In a nutshell, you can find our argument in the title of this post. What the article does is stack up like Jenga blocks an oppressive amount of facts on top of some vague speculation and media opinion, and leaves us with the notion that the Blue Jays are about to go tumbling down south of the border, as did the Expos and the affiliated minor league teams in Canada.

To us, it just seems like there's been some essential information overlooked in the article. For a little more detail, we offer the following specific arguments.

A Canadian media company and a Global media company are not the same beast
One of the first arguments made is that Rogers is the last of the media companies to own its own franchise, while the Disneys, NewsCorps, Tribunes and Time Warners of the world have bailed out.

At a glance, we can see the connection, but in truth, Rogers' business model very different. While those media companies are content producers (filmed entertainment, online, TV, newspapers), Rogers' biggest bucks come from content distribution (broadcast distribution, mobile networks) and consumer products (mobile devices and everything else at the Rogers Video stores).

For multinationals like NewsCorp and Disney, the Dodgers and Angels created a lot of extraneous and decidedly local content, which barely registers as a priority for them.

The clear example of this dichotomy would be Ted Turner's Braves, who were a vital piece of his emerging media empire from the 1970's through the 1990's. Braves games were a cornerstone of TBS's evolution into the Superstation, but once Turner was sucked into the Time Warner family, the Braves became an undesirable, Atlanta-centric relic of the pre-merger days.

For the Tribune, keeping the Cubs and Wrigley and WGN all wrapped together in a neat package might have made sense if it weren't swamped in a ridiculous amount of debt and tossing any asset it can overboard in a futile attempt to stay afloat.

The clear distinction with Rogers is that they are a national company with national media holdings, including a national network of Sportsnets that need compelling local (i.e. Canadian) content.

Moreover, Rogers is a company that has a far more direct connection with consumers than most media conglomerates. While the Blue Jays aren't exactly the beating heart at the center of the Center of the Universe, it seems to us that Rogers might not be eager to pull up stakes and offload the team in a rush and risk alienating those same customers to whom they market cell phones or DVRs.

"There is greater consensus amongst the Toronto sports media that the Blue Jays will soon be on the market."
Much of that media speculation came in the days (and hours) after Ted Rogers passed away, and to be frank, nobody knew what they were talking about at that point.

Moreover, you had a lot of people within Rogers who were freaked out by the instability of losing Ted, and some of them anonymously vented those insecurities. We wouldn't exactly take that to the bank.

Media companies don't need content...unless they need content
Amongst the speculation, Toms points to a Jeremy Sandler article that features an anonymous quote stating:

"It is natural for media companies to get out of ownership of sports teams and stick to their core competencies," said the official who asked not to be named. "They're selling them because they can compete for content now."

But this is stated one paragraph after Sandler notes that Sportsnet carried 100 games and the Fan 590 carried all 162, so there is a certain rational dissonance there.

At the risk of repeating ourselves, Rogers is a Canadian media company which is compelled by federal regulations to air a certain amount of Canadian-produced content. Would Rogers really want to cut loose a property that nets them more than 360 hours of Canadian content for their television enterprises and more than 650 hours of CanCon for not only the Fan 590, but for a whole slew of stations along their network of News talk stations?

Sure, they could let the team go and then reacquire the rights from the new owners, but doesn't that seem a bit more troublesome and less secure than the situation that they have now?

The Beest - Interim CEO or Calculating Overlord?
This is where the article starts to go off the rails a bit. Toms ties together the firing of Bart Given with the hirings of scouts (not a stretch), but then ascribes to them some element of Paul Beeston's ambition to be the permanent overseer of the Blue Jays.

What proof does he have? Snappy Jeff Blair's huge big picture view of the shifting sands of Toronto's sports landscape, which features Beeston as the central unifying figure that brings all the pro sports franchises together into one TorontoSportsCollosus. It's like something out of Tolkien.

But here's an obvious question that bears asking: If Paul Beeston wanted to reach out and grab the precious ring that is the Jays' presidency, wouldn't he have grabbed it already? Wouldn't Rogers have given it to him months ago if he really truly wanted it? Couldn't he have had it and named his price?

And if all of those questions are answered in the affirmative, then why the charade of all of these interim shenanigans?

Isn't it at least plausible that Beeston is doing what he says he's doing, and seeking out someone to take the Jays' top job?

The MLSE Merger
We can totally see it happening. Maybe. But it would be a sad day.

The Stadium Issue
Sure, the Rogers Centre isn't one of the new-fangled old-fashioned parks with fewer seats and pseudo-retro styling. But Rogers got it for a song and has plowed a significant amount of money into upgrading it.

The stadium experience has vastly improved over the past few years, and there won't be any significant push from anyone other than cranky baseball purists to replace it with a new publicly funded stadium for at least another 10 years.

Besides - Have you seen the size of the Rogers store that they have there now? You think they're gonna rip that thing out of the building any time soon?

And by the way: no other city in North America is going to build a park for the Blue Jays to move there any time soon.

A Final Thought
Part of what motivates this latest round speculation is the inertia of the Jays offseason. There are thoughts that yanking back on the reins is a sign that all sorts of changes are in the offing.

But when we look at the team's prospects over the next few years, we're left asking ourselves why the Jays would plow a bunch of money and/or years into a free agent this year when it is as plain as the moustache on Dave Stieb's face that their fortunes look good in the years beyond 2009.

Why mortgage your future payroll and lineup flexibility on an overpriced free agent when you have a number of highly-regarded and inexpensive players on target for 2010. And they'll join a team that will feature a (fingers crossed) fully manned and healthy pitching staff.

It sucks as a Blue Jays fan to think in those terms, but that seems to us to be the most sensible explanation and the most prudent path for the team to take.

(Our apologies for the length of this thing...but congratulations for those of you who made it the whole way through!)