Na Na Na Na, Simulation

Yesterday was the official day that Toronto Blue Jays pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training in Dunedin, Florida. The day itself doesn't mean all that much, as actual Spring Training games, which is the first baseball you get to see as fan since the previous year's World Series, are still a ways away and many of the players have actually already been in Florida preparing for the season for a month or so already. At one time, Spring Training was actually the time that a player would use to get in shape for the upcoming season, and as such the time was a beacon of hope in a cold winter for baseball fans, but that has passed. Athletes are now finely tuned machines who work on themselves for the entire year and they don't rely on a month of sit-ups to get ready for their jobs anymore.

But baseball is a sport that has its feet firmly entrenched in tradition, so even though Spring Training, and to a lesser extent "Pitchers and Catchers", doesn't serve the same preparatory service that it used to, it still serves the same purpose in the hearts of baseball fans. Spring Training is more an ethereal "baseball is coming" feeling than anything else.

It also means that the 2015/16 off-season is officially over. As a Blue Jays fan, this was certainly one of the oddest off-seasons in memory. 2012/13 was weird because the Jays had never made a move like the Miami trade and at the time the feelings of optimism and confidence were SO WEIRD for Jays fans. This off-season was weird for the complete opposite reason, as there was a load of pissing and moaning from Toronto fans and media alike.

What's odd about all of this pissing and moaning is that it was rooted in the team winning the previous season. No, the team did not win the World Series, but they won the division, won the ALDS in dramatic fashion, and, in the words of my dad, for intents and purposes the ALCS served as the "World Series". I am, of course, biased in this, but I am sure that most baseball fans remember more moments from the see-saw, six-game Championship series than the five-game World Series.

By all accounts, this was one of the best Jays seasons ever. It is a time in my life I will never forget. Watching games by myself on a balcony in Guelph. The sweep in New York. Explaining Josh Donaldson to my girlfriend. Explaining to my friends that "I kind of have to go" to watch David Price's first start in my office and them saying "I'm surprised you're still here". Staring in disbelief as they clinched. Standing nervously in the nosebleeds during a heart-breaker in game 2. Standing, mouth-agape being showered with beer in game 5. What may be the best moment of my life. This is more than sports. These are important memories.

Then Alex left. Price left. This was somehow enough for the fanbase to completely turn on the team, but more specifically the team's ownership.

I don't think I can remember a Blue Jays off-season with this much pissing and moaning. I assumed that a lot of this was due to the Jays picking up a lot of fairweather fans through their playoff run. I figured this would happen, but the huge bandwagon was really new to me. I'm totally fine with a lot of people starting to come to games and most of them not really knowing what's going on, but I was not prepared for the inherent awfulness of most Toronto sports fans. I guess that since the Maple Leafs are in the midst of a hard rebuild, a lot of people shifted over to baseball and brought their shittiness and negativity and entitlement and lack of logic with them. The Toronto sports media is this odd little environment that focuses on a few little things so much that it ruins almost everything else.

The first target of these fans and the Toronto sports media, which is just as bad and knee-jerk, was the new team president Mark Shapiro. Most of this is just because he's not Alex Anthopoulos. It kind of reminds of the HBO series Show Me a Hero that I've been watching lately, where a leader is just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of course David Price wasn't going to stay. The Boston Red Sox are paying him $ 31000000 PER SEASON for fuck's sake. Do you want Josh Donaldson here? Do you want Jose Bautista here? Do you want Edwin Encarnacion here? For even one of them to stay, Price had to go.

What's interesting about Shapiro is that, unlike Anthopoulos, he is incredibly candid about his decisions and is completely comfortable playing the bad guy. In professional wrestling, the character who is supposed to be the villain is referred to as "the heel". This doesn't just consist of "doing bad things", it's more "doesn't care about their reception/reputation and will do whatever they have to". And this is Shapiro. His first major move of the off-season was giving Marco Estrada a qualifying offer, which kind of forced him to re-sign with the Jays and then he followed this by signing J.A. Happ. In the minds of misinformed  Jays fans who don't consider bigger-picture, these were somehow moves towards a rebuild, of all things, because they didn't match the huge splash moves made by Alex Anthopoulos during the season.

And this is true. Signing two guys who are, in all honesty, number-3 starters, is not the same as trading for one of the very best pitchers in all of baseball. But in November, Shapiro was faced with TWO of his starting pitchers returning and he had to fill out the team. The moves aren't as sexy as the mid-season moves, but they are equally as important to the team, to be sure. Instead of trying to spin every move to make it sound like the Jays are ahead of the curve or playing towards something bigger, Shapiro is straight-up. He said that they had to make the moves to fill up the team and its minor league roster after Anthopoulos did a number on them. He said that they can't just go out and spend millions of dollars just because the fans want to have the same team as last year. Shapiro just seems to not care what you have to say.

This is very new for Blue Jays fans. Shapiro doesn't care about marketing the Jays as Canada's team or playing up '92/'93 fanservice. He is clearly here to run the team his way.

This is reflected in a trade that almost happened last night, sending Michael Saunders as part of a three-team deal to receive outfielder Jay Bruce from the Cincinnati Reds. In the relatively small social sphere of Blue Jays twitter, which consists of the, for lack of a better term, "smart" fans, everyone hated the trade and was confused by it. Nobody wanted Jay Bruce. I was very confused by it and kind of frustrated. When I reflected on the last few years of Blue Jays transactions, I couldn't really think about any specific deal that I didn't like or didn't understand the logic of. Maybe I just had grown accustomed to having a smart GM. Or maybe I was just more comfortable with Alex Anthopoulos.

What I realized though, is that I'm just going to have to get used to it. Mark Shapiro is going to do what he's going to do. Even though I would like to act like I am perfectly in-tune with the baseball world through my daily reading of stories, stats and blogs, Mark Shapiro knows much more about baseball than me. Any fretting I do over how things are going to work out, before the season even starts, is pretty silly.

I suppose I should just sit back and enjoy the pictures of baseball players practicing infield drills in shorts because that does a lot more for my head than fretting over the Jays employing a player with bad stats when that didn't even happen.