by Neate Sager, Out Of Left Field
Roy Halladay, you might be on B Squad, but you're the B Squad leader.
On Monday, Halladay likened playing for the perennially also-ran Toronto Blue Jays to being "like a little bit of Groundhog Day ...You want to talk about why we're succeeding, what we've done to help us get to the point of where we're at, and we just haven't done that ... It's hard to keep talking about the same thing."
To a diehard Jays fan, that's the equivalent of, in the last two hours, having lost your job, your apartment, your car and your girlfriend. And then depression set in. There's only one way to respond -- with an open letter pieced together from Bill Murray movies. It's the best way to get inside this guy's pelt and crawl around for a few days.
Dear Doc,
So it's true. A commenter on Drunk Jays Fans a while back claimed you'd been overheard wondering over dinner in a Toronto eatery if you were doomed to play your entire career in Toronto and never make the playoffs. It must make your lips numb just to think about it.
If this was coming from someone who isn't the god of ground-ball outs, people would be saying, right about now, his bladder feels like an overstuffed vacuum cleaner bag and his butt is kinda like an about-to-explode bratwurst.
This is a letdown. In the grand scheme of Blue Jays baseball, a high-dollar hurler betraying any trace of human emotion is really more of an A.J. Burnett thing. You're the Doc. You can chew your way through a concrete wall -- or the New York Yankees lineup, as you did with a two-hit shutout last Friday at Rogers Centre, the world's only 50,000-seat video-rental outlet -- and spit out the other side covered with lime and chalk and look good in doing it.
As a bonus, you usually finish the job in less than two-and-a-half hours.
This can be forgiven. You forgot that your cross to bear is putting up Cy Young-worthy stats while throwing for a team owned by Rogers Communications. Rogers' baseball philosophy: A hundred-dollar shine on a three-dollar pair of shoes. That kind of explains why the Jays have given 205 at-bats this season to Kevin Wench.
You saying you're unhappy and "one thing I really want to accomplish in the rest of my time, is win a World Series," could mean Toronto is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions, real wrath of God type stuff -- human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
Up until now, the impression was that you were cool with being the best Roy Halladay you could be. That was enough for us, even if it never was with Mats Sundin during the NHL season. You taking the mound every fifth day was one reason not to look at the long winter and see a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope -- but enough about the Toronto Maple Leafs.
What else is there for a baseball geek in Canada, aside from fulminating at the brilliant bits of misinformation that periodically spew forth from GM J.P. Ricciardi? Since you pitch for a team that hasn't been anywhere near the playoffs since both of us were in the eleventh grade, the satisfaction of a job well-done is supposed to be enough to keep you happy.
Who knew? You're always so concerned about your reputation. Einstein did his best stuff when he was working as a patent clerk!
You're not alone in having a weak moment in Jays-land. In the spring, there's always the wild thoughts, imagining a real Cinderella story, came out of nowhere, to lead the pack in the cutthroat AL East. By the team summer heats up, it's usually obvious that even if you guys play so far above your heads that your noses bleed for a week to ten days; even if God in heaven above comes down and points his hand at our side of the field; even if every man woman and child held hands together and prayed for us to win, it just wouldn't matter because all the really good-looking girls would still cheer for the Red Sox and the Yankees because they've got all the money and for the Tampa Bay Rays because they have more brains, and those teams will go to the playoffs!
It just doesn't matter we win or we lose. It just doesn't matter!
You're needed in Toronto to take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, the Red Sox and Yankees can buy anything -- and the Rays have a much better drafting record than the Jays have under Ricciardi -- but they can't buy backbone. Don't let them forget it.
The pathway to salvation is as narrow and as difficult to walk as a razor's edge -- which more or less sums up your team averaging only 3.8 runs in your starts this season.
That is your burden. If you could pitch in a hair shirt, you would. Having to have a World Series ring to be validated is some screwhead fetish. You're pitching for the doomed, otherwise known as diehard Jays fans. They're lost, they're helpless, they're somebody else's meal, they're like pigs in the wilderness.
They --we -- need a leader every fifth day. An army without leaders is like a foot without a big toe. And you're always gonna be here to be that big toe for us.
Of course, you'd like a little something, you know, for the effort, you know. Oh, uh, there won't be any October glory, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.
So you got that goin' for you, which is nice.
(There are 17 quotes from Bill Murray movies buried in this post. How many can you find before resorting to checking IMDb?)
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
SINCE ROY HALLADAY IS SUCH A BILL MURRAY FAN ...
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
TOP 10 DISAPPOINTMENTS FROM JOBA CHAMBERLAIN'S FIRST START
by DMtShooter, Five Tool Tool
10. More walks than fist pumps
9. Fewer innings than fist pumps
8. More thrown gloves than fist pumps
7. More absurd Hank Steinbrenner quotes ("Tonight was a creation of the media") than fist pumps
6. More kicking of dirt than kicking of ass
5. Didn't make Suzyn Waldman go into an orgasmic rant about who was in George Steinbrenner's box
4. Failed to justify that pre-first pitch standing ovation
3. Kei Igawa's first start was arguably more successful (he went 5, the Yankees won)
2. Um, the Yankees lost to some no-name Roy Halladay guy
1. Failed to turn water into wine, walk on water, throw a no-hitter, strike out 20 or any of the other perfectly reasonable Yankee Fan hopes
Monday, April 21, 2008
TOP 12 REASONS THE BLUE JAYS RELEASED FRANK THOMAS
by DMtShooter, Five Tool Tool
12. When he grazed on the Astroturf, it was genuinely disturbing
11. His TV ad made the team's management wet themselves
10. Leading the team in homers and RBIs last year made a slow April unacceptable
9. General manager JP Riccardi wants to be known as not just an unemployed stathead nerd, but a genius unemployed stathead nerd
8. Team was desperate to start the Matt Stairs / Rod Barajas Era at DH
7. Clubhouse reaction to recent benching made Big Hurt more of a statement of fact than a nickname
6. Thomas was just over 300 plate appearances away this season from making the Blue Jays pay him a terrible, terrible price... that, um, Riccardi negotiated
5. Toronto wants to make sure his Hall of Fame plaque is all messed up at the end
4. The release helps Thomas sign with another AL team and torture the Jays
3. A team with a $97mm per year payroll, that's paying AJ Burnett, BJ Ryan and Scott Rolen over $35mm for 2008, is very, very judicious with how they spend their money
2. Thomas, on second thought, just doesn't seem very Canadian after all
1. Just didn't have enough bobbleheads to go around for his upcoming day
Sunday, April 20, 2008
BIG HURT HOMELESS
by Sooze, Babes Love Baseball
What do you do with a perpetually hurt, ornery, old dog? You put him down.
That's exactly what the Toronto Blue Jays did with the angry, slumping Frank Thomas. Just a day after the Big Hurt was benched in favor of Matt Stairs, the club released the 39-year-old designated hitter.
And Thomas is livid. He claims the organization benched him to avoid his 304 plate appearances, which would have guaranteed his $10 million option for 2009.
On the other hand, Frank was batting just .167 over the first 16 games of the season, nailing three bombs with a fair number of RBIs at 11. Meanwhile, Stairs is hitting .333 with 1 homer and 3 RBIs over 14 games.
So how shady is this move? GM J.P. Ricciardi denied Thomas' allegations, citing his poor play and little room on the roster for his dismissal.
So, where to now for the 19-year veteran? The golf course or another team?
Monday, March 31, 2008
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.
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Which Way is Up, Eh?
by Sooze, Babes Love Baseball
You'd think, as a big league ballplayer, you'd know when your at-bat is coming up. You'd also think, as a big league manager, you'd realize when one of your players is batting out of order.
The official lineup cards given to the umpires prior to the Toronto Blue Jays game against the Seattle Mariners Saturday had second baseman Aaron Hill as the No. 6 hitter and first baseman Lyle Overbay batting seventh. Not too difficult to remember, I guess.
For Toronto, it apparently was. Overbay led off the second with a fly-out before Hill came to the plate and doubled to left. 
Mariners skipper John McLaren rushed out to argue and the umps convened. After agreeing with McLaren that the Jays were either trying to cheat or incredibly confused, the put out was given to the catcher and Hill's double was ruled a groundout. Toronto had the last laugh however, as they pulled out the 2-1 victory.
Today's lesson is brought to you by this Hot Official.
When playing in any professional baseball event, always remember your batting order. Confusion due to the absence of a standard metric system in Major League Baseball is never excusable, even for Canadian ballclubs.
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