Heart Problems

An integral part of being a baseball fan is recognizing that you're in for a long journey. The season is longer than any of the other major North American professional sports and for the most part, players' careers are longer too. If you're along for the ride, this can be so rewarding, like when you get to watch Roy Halladay develop into one of the game's premier pitchers over the course of a decade. When you've been there for the entire process, it makes the benefits that much more special when they happen and it feels like you've played a role in what happened. It can also be frustrating, like watching a player who once dazzled you struggle to compete with other major league players.

A current example of the former is Jose Bautista's 2017 season. Jose was the most exciting Blue Jay for a long time, starting with hitting 10 home runs in September 2009 and culminating in "The Bat Flip". Jose signed a one-year contract with options to play for the Blue Jays in 2017 and most of the fanbase, including me, lauded the deal and were eagerly "Angry Jose"'s exploits, but instead Jose started to swing through fastballs he used to put in the second deck and his return quickly turned into what feels a lot like a retirement tour. I will always love Jose Bautista and him strapping the Jays to his back and carrying them towards contention was amazing, but now I have to think about how weird it will be to see somebody else play Right Field next season and find myself muttering "I still love you Jose" every time he bats. It's like I'm already nostalgic for Jose's time on the team before it's even ended.

The same goes for another struggling Jay, Kevin Pillar. After two seasons of struggling, Kevin Pillar had an amazing 2015 season, followed by another productive one in 2016. I was all-in on Pillar being an integral part of the perennial playoff-bound Jays, to the extent that I wrote a long piece about loving Pillar and then wrote another post that was just a link to the first one.

I like Pillar's game a lot and found myself thinking "Oh, that's getting caught" every time a ball went near him. But then he started missing a lot of swings and I started to get ulcers watching his back foot come forward out of the box as he swung at terrible pitches. He seemed to be turning his batting approach around, but then got into a well-publicized spat with the Atlanta Braves. It was already a stupid argument to get into, but Pillar did himself no favours by calling the pitcher in question a homophobic slur. As a lifer Jays fan, I will go to bat for our players in almost any situation, but there is a breaking point and this was it for Pillar. In what could be considered poetic justice (I would always argue anything bad happening to the Boys is NOT POETIC), Pillar's season then started to fall apart. He's looked completely lost at the plate and hasn't been getting to nearly as many fly balls as he used to. In 2015, Pillar was the second-most valuable player on the team, but now it looks like he could be easily usurped at the team's starting centrefielder if the right player comes along.

And hey, that sucks. I like the guy and pulled for him; part of me still pulls for him, but it seems like his time in the Toronto sports limelight is probably done.

That's the way baseball works. It's a long journey as a fan and though it might be easy to pack the team's history into neat little "periods" in hindsight, the reality is that every story starts before the one it follows ends and then bleeds into the next one. The next "Kevin Pillar" might be on the team right now, just like how Pillar was kicking around while Colby Rasmus ended his time here. Sometimes a fan just needs to sit back and let the narrative unfold, but that's easier said than done, because all you want to do is rush over and unfold it yourself.

That ain't the way it works though; not in baseball and not in art history and not in music and not in love.