Something Special Will Recede as Something Boring Swells

The upcoming season of Toronto Blue Jays baseball feels like one of transition, more so than any one in recent memory. While the team's corporate office tries to constantly remind the fanbase of the landmark years that team is passing, by placing a 40th anniversary patch on an arm or by playing highlights celebrating the 25th birthday of Joe Carter's home run, this period of flux instead came through the natural ebb and flow that all professional sports teams experience. There's several events that had led me to believe that the 2018 Blue Jays season will be very unlike those that preceded it. Here's why, I guess.

The seeds of this shift start last June when Jose Bautista's hot month of batting in May faded into a mediocre June that lasted until September. The strong and mighty Jose, who threw a shitty team designed to secure good prospects over his shoulder and marched towards contention, was now older and not nearly the same player. I was still happy to applaud his accomplishments and he deserves his fanfare until the day he dies, but I will admit that it was much more fun to watch him hit timely, towering revenge home runs than set the team's single-season strikeout record.

Now, the Jays have reported to Dunedin in February without Jose Bautista for the first time since 2009. We've been fortunate to welcome many great players to the team over the last 4 years or so, but none of them usurped Jose as the "face" of the team. To American fans who don't consume all of their sports media through Sportsnet, Jose was the only player they heard about from Toronto. From my perspective as a fan, there certainly seemed to be a "Jose Bautista Era" for the Jays from 2010-2017. That's done now, so a new identity for the team will have to emerge, no matter what it looks like.

Also of note is that the team's all-time greatest player died in a plane crash this past November. Rather than try to write something else about Roy Halladay, I will instead link to something I've already written.

The team recently announced that they will retire his number, 32, on Opening Day and the team will wear a memorial black "32" patch on the sleeve of their uniforms for all of the 2018 season. If Doc is to become just the second player to have his number retired, then it follows that his name will also be added to the "Level of Excellence" which is enshrined on the facing of the 4th deck at the Dome. A new version of the team, with few returning faces from the 2015 AL East Champions, will seem all the more different with a dark spectre of the team's past looking down on the field from above.

If these circumstances were not enough, yet another thread in the history of the Blue Jays was cut this week as the team's long-time radio play-by-play announcer Jerry Howarth announced that he would be retiring from his duties. As with Halladay, it feels silly to try and write a post describing what Jerry has meant to me as a fan when I've already touched on that in the past.

Jerry is closer to the identity of Blue Jays baseball than anyone else on the team. He has been calling games longer than I've been alive, so me hearing a season of the team without him telling me that "Blue Jays are in flight" after they've scored their first run of the game or him proclaiming "There she goes!" after a player turns on a fastball is daunting. Hearing his soft voice through the speakers in my dad's car is perhaps the most comforting sound I know, so I am sad that he has decided to retire.

With advances in analytics and an influx of new fans in recent years, Jerry got a bit of a raw deal with fans who thought he was too much of an old man and weren't cognisant of how much his history means to the team. While some others started to turn on him because of his enthusiasm for back-up shortstops, I thought that this was a step too far. I liked that even though I was part of a new generation of WAR-obsessed baseball fans, I had something which tied me to baseball fans past.

But regardless of what these three giants of Toronto baseball meant to me, the machine that is the team powers ahead without them. A new, different identity for the Blue Jays is already beginning to form, even though it may take me a couple of months to recognize it.