MLB SEASON PREVIEW: CANADIANS WISH THE BLUE JAYS WEREN'T SO NICE

by Neate Sager, Out Of Left Field

The Toronto Blue Jays likely won't get to have an Opening Day until Wednesday with the way the rain is coming down in New York City, which means no weaseling out of writing the team preview.

It's assumed Epic Carnival's audience is dying to read about a perennial 83-win team that is based in a foreign country and plays in the charmless Rogers Centre, which only has a modicum of atmosphere. That's not the typical Canadian righteous, please-pay-attention-to-us indignation toward Americans talking. That's not even the beer talking.

It's just the best way to explain the bliss of being True Powder Blue. From mid-March to late September, you get to zone out on the greatest game of all, have beers (always the plural) while rocking a powder-blue throwback jersey and are insulated from the Canadian hockey mafia who are bent on sucking all the fun and life out of following the second-greatest game of all. It's more than enough to see John McDonald do his jump-throw from deep in the hole at shortstop.

Then there's the not-so-silently laughing at the stooges who waste their beautiful minds on whether the Jays can pull off a playoff spot in the cutthroat AL East.

It's reached the point that The Onion last Thursday mocked a local baseball writer for "writ(ing) his yearly mid-March article asserting that the Jays have a chance to contend in the AL East." Still, he wrote the same article four days later.

A few weeks of hard study and having the good B.S. detector that's sorely lacking from most of the chatterati is that the Jays' corporate strategy, playing in the AL East, is that averageness is next to godliness. They have a nice ballclub, but nice only gets you so far in baseball. See, it's exactly like life that way. There's no smile-when-you-kill quality to this team.

Finishing third in the AL East eight of the past 10 years (one second, one fifth) has inculcated a myth that the Jays need to be perfect to ever make the playoffs again. That's manifested itself in GM J.P. Ricciardi being bent on making sure there are no weak spots that they Jays don't have any strong spots, save for their starting pitching with Roy Halladay and A.J. Burnett. The Baseball Prospectus 2008 was nails over the winter, saying the Jays have "painted themselves into a corner," since they don't have the means or the opportunity, or the interested ownership, to go out and get the player who can put them over the top.

This probably sunk at some point over the winter during the 19th or so conversation over who should start at shortstop, David Eckstein, who can sort of hit but can't field, or John McDonald, AKA McGlovin, who can't hit but can field. Tons of bandwidth was spent debating two players who aren't going to a win a team a pennant.

It's a lineup of no stars (Alex Rios is a maybe) and no plugs, which means the Jays probably win about 88 games, which is fine. All Canadians want is to have our Canadianness acknowledged once in a while. Hey, did you know the movie Juno took its title from the name of Canada's version of the Grammys? But I digress.

The '92 team had two Hall of Fame position players, a centrefielder who had a visegrip on the Gold Glove, a first baseman who later won a batting title and a rightfielder who had led the league in RBI, but it also had Manuel Lee for a shortstop. The next year, the Jays had a vacancy at short and were able to bring in Tony Fernandez, who helped put them over the top.

That's not gonna happen with the way Rogers Communications, which has made uninterested ownership an art form (they need content; it need not be good content, just read the so-called blogs at sportsnet.ca) runs the team. They're only interested in having the payroll at a level where it looks like they're trying to do everything they can while their hands are tied by a poor baseball market. The Jays also appear to be skimping on signing amateur talent at a time when the Yankees, Red Sox and Tigers are throwing money at teenagers like they were the dot-commers from a decade ago.

It is what it is, but for the bastard sons of Ernie Whitt, the generation who cut their teeth on the 1985-93 teams and didn't jump off the bandwagon during the down years, nothing can be finer than the arrival of the home opener on Friday against the Red Sox. We've made it ours.

Let the Boomers who used the 1994-95 strike as an excuse not to follow baseball cling to hockey and try to pound it down everyone's throat, almost as a defence mechanism as the face of Canada becomes less and less white and Protestant. Let the younger generation who's into MMA (Mental Midget Assault) pony up for pay-per-views of something that is to sport what Girls Gone Wild is to sensuality. Let all the casuals of all ages who assume anything American has to be better hanker for the NFL to come to Toronto.

We have the Jays. It is unconditional. Like I said in the Deadspin preview, baseball doesn't need the Jays playing October baseball for its bottom line, so the bottom line is, Jays fans don't need October baseball. There's no playing along with the playoff talk.

Perhaps Burnett and Halladay will be a more lethal combo than Jack Daniels and I.W. Harper. Maybe enough of the hitters perform way over their heads and the Jays excise their tendency to take 2-of-3 off the Yankees or Red Sox and turn right around and get swept by the Kansas City Royals.

The Jays have a good, representative team. Hopefully they stay in the race deep in September. Hopefully they realize Aaron Hill could give them a decent 2-hole hitter for the first time since the days of Robbie Alomar. There's a lot to keep an eye on, like whether 40-year-old DH Frank Thomas gets the 376 plate appearances he needs to validate his 2009 contract. The Jays will have some drama, for sure.

At the end of the day, what matters is how they play the game and the Jays play it pretty well for the most part. Let everyone else worry about the playoffs.

Anyhow, if the Jays do contend by some combination of fluke, happenstance and guys playing so far over their heads it gives them nosebleeds, Bugs and Cranks, the Drunk Jays Fans ("smarter than you, and more drunk") and The Tao of Stieb ("One day, we'll be perfect") are your go-to blogs. I actually forgot to mention E. Spencer Kyte on the first write-through, but that happens when you have 33 million people spread over such a big country; I watched all three seasons of Arrested Development without knowing Will Arnett and Michael Cera were hosers.

The Drunks even had more than 100 comments for the liveblog of today's rainout.

(Seriously, who's the future brain surgeon who thought you could begin a season on March 31 in New York City, especially when Toronto plays in a retractable-roof stadium?)

Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.