Never Move Your Back Row

In addition to feeling guilty about not writing on IMU enough lately, I've also felt guilty that I've barely written about baseball lately. While I was moving the posts I'm most proud of over to my very professional Wordpress site, I noticed that a lot of them were older and I hadn't written  much about the Jays during the 2017 and 18 seasons. Was my love baseball starting to peter out? Was my zeal tied to the team's success in 2015 and 16?

No, of course not.

But it's harder to write about the team now because not nearly as much is happening and the games don't even approach the same level of excitement. There's still small moments that capture your imagination and remind you why you love baseball, like Steve Pearce hitting two walk off grand slams within a week of each other, or Justin Smoak capping off a 7-run comeback win in the bottom of the 9th inning, but for the most part the games are ugly and, worse, in consequential.

The Blue Jays are currently stuck between two eras and can't really commit to either one. On one hand, they regularly look back on and celebrate the two playoff runs because that is probably the best way to engage with the sizable number of casual fans. On the other, the team is biding its time until a crop of younger talented players emerge to hopefully carry the team to success again. As a fan, you're stuck looking only backwards or forwards because there's not a tonne going on in the present.

So if there's not a lot going in the present, what do I write about?

It's hard to write about players because most of the exciting ones are gone. Price signed with the fuckin' Red Sox. Edwin went to Cleveland. We fêted José for a whole year to distract ourselves from how quickly his age caught up with him. Josh got hurt, disappeared for a whole season and then got traded for spare parts. Russ got bad. Strochez broke up and then both got hurt. Tulo turned into something you have to chuckle about to keep yourself from crying. The core that was the most exciting team in baseball evaporated in record time and were replaced with, well, replacements.

Anyone could tell that the team wasn't supposed to contend the last two years. "Raising the floor" was our "trust the process", and that's fine! The team was old and a reboot was absolutely necessary, so that's what happened. Rebuilding the team doesn't mean you all of a sudden have young players who will be superstars in two years. It means you sign serviceable veterans, trade them for young players, eventually package those young players for something, and hope to God it works out okay. It's an ugly process and people often forget that the Cubs and Astros were buried in decades of mostly mediocre baseball before things clicked, to say nothing of perpetual rebuilders like the Reds and Padres.

Those replacements could be exciting at times, as I mentioned above, and you also got to have a taste of great personalities like Curtis Granderson* as they finish their careers, but I can't write out a whole post on them like I could about Josh, José, or Edwin. It's just not the same.

*While watching the Jays play at Comerica Park in Detroit this past summer, a very drunk Tigers fan sighed to himself and said "Granderson has an amazing ass." It's all I can think about whenever his name comes up. Even more so than Slammiversary 2018.

2018 was different than past "bad Jays seasons" because there wasn't one player who stood out as a beacon while everyone sucked. 2018 didn't have Carlos Delgado, or Roy Halladay. In fact, you'd have to go back to the early 80s to find a Jays team as devoid of impactful players as the 2018 version. The team started out bad, with bad players, and wound up bad. Who would've thought?

It's also hard to write about these replacement players when it's a foregone conclusion that they'll be traded before the season's over. The front office signed veterans to short deals so they could trade them and improve the team in the long run and that's exactly what happened. Granderson, Pearce, Happ, Axford, Oh, Loup, and Diaz are all gone now. In times of flux like this, it's hard to get attached to a player to the degree that you can write about them.

So if the team is bad and will continue being bad, and the players aren't engaging, who do I write about? The front office? Though I'm beginning to falter in my faith, I'm not enough of a zombie to do that. The ballpark? Fuck, I don't know man.

All that's left is the Blue Jays and baseball still being a "thing" in my life, so that'll have to play until May and that's alright.