The Chairman of the Bored

It shouldn't surprise us that Drew at Ghostrunner on First struck a nerve with us this week when he declared his boredom at the fake news coming out of the fake games at Spring Training. We are, after all, part of the Same Guy Baseball Blogging Borg Collective, and try as we might to underscore the differences between our worldviews, we generally wind up in the same place.

And that place, right about now, is bored out of our skull.

That likely makes us sound like the worst ingrate ever, given the long winter and the exciting changes to the on-field and off-field make up of our favorite team. Still, as we listen in to games or check out the stories and tweets coming out of Dunedin, our eyes glaze over like Ban Roll-On dispensers as we wait jam our knives and forks into the real meat of the season.

(A parenthetical note here in lieu of a footnote¹: We were so determined to drive away the March blahs yesterday that we spent an hour trying to track down a flight to Tampa so that we could go to the actual Spring Training facility this weekend and smell the sweet odor of the Toronto Nine and hear the crack of the bat and fill our empty soul with real baseball activity. Alas, last minute decisions seem not to be the most effective manner of getting yourself a plane ticket at a reasonable price.)

There's probably two points here: Firstly, we've clearly become too engrossed with all of this Blue Jays tomfoolery. (No fucking kidding.) While podcasters and beat writers and the like took the winter off to write about fantasy football or curling or hockey or the Olympics-One-Glorious-Year-Later-Oh-My-God-Look-At-Melissa-Hollingsworth's-Powerful-Limbs, we spent our fall and winter up to now ears-deep into each story, non-story, whim/notion/idea/what-have-you leading into the coming season. Which is a bit like eating crème brulé three meals per day for three months. Eventually, you need something different.

Secondly, we fear that such a level of engrossment has led us to become exactly the thing that we loathed the most: Jaded. And cynical. And self-important. We've talked to a few bloggers over the years, and while most of us are embarassed to say this outside of that circle, this shit starts to feel like work at a certain point.

We shouldn't feel that way, of course. We started this blog for the love of the game and we've learned so much about the game over the past four seasons, in large part thanks to those of you who've shared your thoughts and a multitude of links through the comments and Twitter. But that knowledge can be stultifying at times, as one begins to be incapable of feeling something as a baseball fan.

This will all pass, certainly. The smell of Rogers Centre turf and the sound of many of us joined together for the season opener will almost certainly reawaken the visceral joy that the game provides us. We'll probably even snap out of this funk by the time Sunday rolls around, and the Jays are actually playing the Pirates right there on the TV. Just bear with us if we seem a little detached from the daily stories of this guy's tweak and that guy's chances and the other one's options.

April 1st can't get here quickly enough.

Hey! Music!

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1. Because footnotes apparently drive some folks batshit crazy. Heyo!

You'll have to forgive our lack of protestations

This whole story of the rising season ticket costs seems a tad overwrought and orchestrated to create a story out of very little.

We know it has to suck if your seats have been "rezoned" into a higher price bracket. But somehow, folks have developed this notion that the Blue Jays, because they finished seven games under .500, should suddenly run the team like a factory-seconds carpeting store that's going out of business. They believe this because they say that it would be the noble thing to do after the team sucked so bad last year.

We just can't buy into this. (Maybe in part because there doesn't really seem to be anything of real substance to the stories that we've read.)

Which is not to say that we don't think that there are some overpriced seats in the Dome, because there are. And increasing the price of those cheap seats down the line will probably not help to fill the lower bowl.

Maybe you want to portray the Rogers folks as a bunch of greedheads who don't care about the fans, and who are extracting their pound of flesh from all of the die-hards. And if so, that's your thing, and have at it.

But we would remind you that the current ownership oversaw a monumental slashing of prices for all of the seats in the 500 level (you know, the tickets that you buy before you sneak down) just a few years back. We paid $30 to sit in 500-level seats in our first visit to the Dome more than a decade ago, and those seats last season retailed for more than 200% less than what we paid.

It could be that we just accept these sorts of things. That prices go up, we always seem to have less money, and someone, somewhere (centre field?) gets richer.

If you want to piss and moan about this, then have at it. We're certain that this is going to be an unstoppable refrain on JaysTalk all season long.

As for your faithful blogger: I'll reserve my ire for the decisions that are made (or not made) about the on-field product.

Friday Rock Out - Biz Markie

I dunno. It was just in my head.