Making All Our Bones Run Cold

 I've been finding it hard to write lately, so I did what I usually do when that arises and tried to think of a baseball post to write up. Laboured over that for about two weeks, and the end result wasn't quite the "professional" standard I aspire to on the WordPress, so instead it goes up here:

Something I struggle with is the urge to gatekeep being a baseball fan constantly. In my heart of hearts, I don’t want to, and I want to make sure that being a baseball fan in Toronto is fun and welcoming because sports can be such a toxic mess, but every time somebody I know hasn’t been a fan that long says something I find mildly annoying, it drives me up the wall. I understand that this makes me sound like an asshole, but I exclusively direct this attitude towards men if it makes you feel any better.

Most of these fans came on board with the Jays during the 2015 playoff run, which captured the attention of Toronto in a way that no baseball team has done since. Maybe only the 2019 Raptors have done the same thing? I was as excited as I could get about sports during that Jays stretch run, but I also wondered how I would deal with the bandwagon since that was a phenomenon that I hadn’t dealt with yet as a baseball fan. I expected to be holier than thou, much like I am at this moment, but I found it to be a great experience. Ticket prices shot up, but the atmosphere at the park and around the team was fantastic, and there was more energy than ever before. 

Those years of playoff contention proved to be short, though, and it wasn’t long before the team tended back toward its familiar place in the middle of the American League East (somehow, the Orioles shot down to the basement even faster than us?). I found it much harder to deal with these new fans as they navigated the usual routine of the team being mediocre. Fans seemed to live and die with every game the same way they had when the games mattered more, and I wanted to shake people and tell them it was okay to tune out Steve Pearce at-bats.

I wonder if part of me is changing too. I also had a period where I cared too profoundly and dramatically about each game when I was younger and single and didn’t have as much to do, so it might just be a phase that everyone goes through when they’re finding their own identity as a baseball fan. You’re always going to look back to seasons past during the summer, no matter the vibe. 

More and more, I find myself inching closer to my dad as a baseball fan. I used to carry such a massive chip on my shoulder about advanced stats, but now I find it so tedious when they’re brought up on the broadcast. Rather than living and dying with each pitch, I find myself pulling out and looking big picture. It doesn’t matter if Vlad (and Teoscar and Lourdes and Kirk and Chapman) are slumping right now because, to quote my dad quoting Earl Weaver, we do this every fuckin’ day.

I Got Jealous, Now I'm Embarrassed

It's always a joy when something you love returns when you aren't expecting.

Today's iteration of that phenomenon is a new edition of Stacey May Fowles' Baseball Life Advice coming to my inbox. Fowles, like our mutual influence Roger Angell before her, is so adept at describing exactly how the sport of baseball works its way into the lives of its true fans. I'm always willing to admit that she is an influence on how I write about the sport and does "I love baseball and I've got feelings" much, much better than I do. As I wonder whether recent developments are making me lose faith in the sport and I feel like I'm drowning in an ocean of snow, this immediately reminds me of why baseball is one of the best things in the world.

Rather that posting an excerpt, do yourself a favour and subscribe. It's wonderful.

Baseball Life Advice

Read her book too!

Act Like You've Been There a Thousand Times Before

I had heard many horror stories about winters in Québec before moving here, so I braced myself for the worst before the move. I was glad that I was moving in June, since the summer would do a better job of acclimatizing me to my new home. Through December and January in Montreal, I thought that I was coping with the winter fairly well. It was colder to be sure, and we had already surpassed the amount of -20° days that we had had over the last 4 years combined in Ontario. There was more snow and the parks would often be deeper than the tops of my boots while I walked the dog. It sucked, but it was an incrementally worse version of what I was familiar with in Ontario. I could deal with that jump.

Then it snowed for two straight days this weekend. Like 45 centimeters! On top of that, it also hovered around -15° for the whole time. This combination of cold and snow was something completely foreign to me. I had never seen this much snow in my life. Cars were fully covered in the street. Most sidewalks were nonexistent. Snowbanks were up around seven feet. I was shocked. That storm was one of the craziest things I had ever seen.

THEN, it snowed even more this morning. WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!

Fortunately, I don't have any engagements today, so I can work on an abstract, do some reading, and beg students to come to a meeting over email. All things considered, that isn't the worst case scenario.

Two nights ago, I watched the finale of BoJack Horseman. The whole last season was wonderful and managed to deal with heavy subjects in a smart and compassionate way. Amazing stuff.

When the show first came out, I knew it as a "new Aaron Paul thing" because my friend Mark was a huge Breaking Bad fan and introduced the show to me in that way. It was a fun stonery and clever cartoon, but it also folded in some dark material in interesting ways. For some reason or another, I was always trying to convince myself that the show was worse than it was, probably because it was popular and I wanted to be ahead of the curve when it came to recognizing that it had fallen off. But it just kept being really good and ended up sticking the landing better than any show in recent memory. Kudos to its creators and crew as they made something wonderful.

Baseball is now on the horizon and I must admit that I'm a little less enthused about it than I have been in years past. The Jays seem to be making only slow progress in developing their young talent and building around and the part of me that used to revel in bad baseball is having a harder time digging into that long trudge. Part of it is due to being increasingly upset with how the game is run and how players are treated, the Mookie Betts trade last week upset me in particular, and part of it is due to the Raptors being just so good and so fun and so well-run, that the Blue Jays' future seems so much darker in contrast.

Maybe that will change in a couple of years. Maybe my intense love of baseball will emerge along with the grass once the snow melts. Maybe me even saying all of this, while I'm freezing in three feet of snow, is proof enough that it's still there.

I feel like my self-reflection and self-criticism skills aren't as sharp as they used to be and that is starting to show itself in my schoolwork. Why could that be? How do I get them back up to par? Think about myself more? That seems silly. Here's to hoping they magically come back around when I need them most.

Just anything to get me through this winter, you know?

Let's Keep It That Way

A strange thing that I often do is try to convince myself that I'm starting to care less about baseball, my favourite sport, which I talk about constantly. This usually happens when I'm feeling burnt out at the end of a disappointing Jays season and, understandably, do follow each game with the same zeal that I do in April. Maybe I feel guilty about not watching every game? On some level, I definitely do think that it is my duty as a fan to give each Teoscar Hernandez at-bat my full attention, which is ludicrous.

These fits of self-inflicted paranoia about my devotion to the sport are always brief and I feel a huge wave of relief once I realize I'm not a piece of shit or, worse, a bad fan.

During the off-season, I try to fill the void left by the World Series ending by consuming baseball in different ways. In general, this means either playing as a fictional shortstop named Tony Balony in MLB The Show 14, which I haven't done much lately, or reading books about baseball.

My love of baseball literature is something I inherited from my dad, who gave me his copy of The Summer Game by Roger Angell to read as a preteen. This then developed into a fascinated with Jim Bouton's Ball Four, Lawrence S. Ritter's The Glory of Their Times, and, doing his nationalistic duty, W.P. Kinsella.

Recently I've had a hard time reading for pleasure since reading for school takes up basically all of my time. After struggling through a D.H. Lawrence book, I decided to read something about baseball to get my reading habits back on track and picked The Iowa Baseball Confederacy off of my shelf. In high school, I did a project on Shoeless Joe well before I saw Field of Dreams, and then read the short story collection The Thrill of the Grass (one of the all-time best book titles) a little later, so I was well-acquainted with the Kinsella oeuvre. I was surprised then to find this book appealing to me much more than his previous work. Already, I'm getting that deep feeling and can tell that this will be my favourite of his and that rush of relief that I am in fact still very invested in baseball washed over me.

"I saw my grandparents only once. When I was about eight my father and I drove to spring training in Florida. I saw Curt Simmons, Robin Roberts, Allie Reynolds, Vinegar Bend Mizell, Yogi Berra, and my grandparents.

They lived in a very small house on a side street in Miami. There was an orange tree in the backyard. The house and my grandparents smelled of Listerine, peppermint, and Absorbine, Jr.

They left Iowa irrevocably behind them when they retired. They never returned for a visit, never invited anyone from Onamata to visit them, including us, I suspect, although my father never said so.

What he did say, on the drive back, as if he was trying to explain something to me but was not exactly sure what, was, "We are haunted by our past, which clings to us like strange, mystical lint. Of the past, the mystery of family is the most beautiful, the saddest, the most inescapable of all. Those to whom we are joined by the ethereal ties of blood are often those about whom we know the least." I think he was talking about much more than my grandparents.

I listened to my father's tales with half an ear. I knew he was obsessed with something no one else cared about. He wrote letters, articles, talked of a book, which he eventually wrote. Complained. I didn't pay half the attention I should have. Children, thinking themselves immortal, assume everyone else is too. He died when I was a few months short of seventeen."

W.P. Kinsella. The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. Don Mills: Totem Books, 1987: 25-26.

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.

I Wish I Wasn't So Cobain

Dedicated IMU readers may have noticed that there has been a significant drop off in baseball-related writing this year (in addition to the massive drop off in general). That is because the Jays are once again bad. Josh Donaldson has barely played and the general mood of the season can be described by the fact that I've gone from hating Kendrys Morales because he was one of the principle factors in halting the team's success (and had replaced a lovable slugger who is flabbergasted by toilets) to loving him because he wears transition lenses sometimes and I just don't care anymore.

The Jays are by no means a cellar dweller in the American League, but they're not anywhere near contention due to both the Red Sox and Yankees returning to form in the same year. Hello 1996-2013! Since the Jays are well out of the playoff race and have a plethora of veterans on their roster, we've gotten back to what was once the most exciting part of being a Jays fan during the dark ages: The Non-Waiver Trade Deadline. Three players have already been shipped off, with Toronto sports fans chiming in that the trades were terrible, like clockwork, and there are several more to go still. When you are looking forward to the future of the team, rather than the present, as the Jays are now, this time is the most exciting because it represents an influx of hope with new young players and a way to ignore the truly forgettable baseball being played by *checks notes* Justin Smoak and Jaime Garcia?!. Most will not work out, but some might!

For many years as fan, this was mostly what I had to look forward to. It was always that if we could send off either Troy Glaus or Bengie Molina or even sadly Scott Rolen to get someone to pair with Lunchbox, Arencibia, and Mr. Intensity, we'd be sure to be in the playoffs in no time. We're back to that now and just like watching them start to lose again last year, it sucks, but is also a little sweet and comfortable.

People romanticize being a die-hard fan of a losing team a lot, but that's mostly done when that team eventually starts winning. You can easily smile while looking back on the harder times because you can now see what it all led to. It's easy to forget that it's mostly just bad baseball played by middling players while you wait for trades and the future.

I still wouldn't have it any other way though.

In other news: Music!

I came across Buddy's new album Harlan and Alondra by way of an excellent article on The Ringer. They describe it as "a sweltering piece of R&B that beads on the skin and paints a necessarily unfinished picture of Buddy and the city he’s from." That works! The whole album is great and is for sure my favourite rap album of the year so far. I think that I could get real deep into more stuff with this vibe.



Also getting pumped regularly is Marshall Crenshaw's self-titled first album. Duff suggested it to me because he knows that I will blare any and all power-pop and also that I love 80's-style production. Those two things combine flawlessly here and as soon as the bassline on "There She Goes Again" took off, I knew I would be super into this for the rest of the summer. Big hooks and perfectly corny longing lyrics that I flip for every time.



We now move on to the third section of the blog post: Books!

I'm currently reading The Great American Novel™️ for the first time, as I had designated it my "challenge" book of the year. It also wound up being a primary influence on the current show of the gallery, so I'm really going all-in on our summer programming. Given the book's high standing, length, and the fact that it was written in 1851, I thought it would be a tough read, but I've found it really easy going so far. The story is one of those that you immediately recognize as archetypal as soon as you start it and there are multiple long stretches of explaining that whales are fish because The Bible says so. It's also surprisingly anti-racist.

Initially, I was fretting about needing to write a post, but having no inspiration to write anything. I then rationalized that I could just start with baseball, music, and books and see where we got from there. Those three things make up a pretty big part of my identity, so why not ruminate on those? Way better than working through two or three "I have nothing to write about" paragraphs before getting to the point, right?

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.

Asked for Nothing and I Got It in Spades

I've felt unmotivated in my personal pursuits lately and have found any writing to be a huge chore to get through. I feel like it's in part due to me having finished my zine and printed it; my subconscious response to that is been to relax and not do anything because I've accomplished something. It's one of my worst tendencies. I was also so caught up in grant and PhD applications that they were the only thing I thought about when I was outside of work (or at work, for that matter). Since I'm done those now, I feel weird and unfocused. Instead of having a big, tangible goal to work towards, I have vaguer ones like "work on this story" or "work on songs". They're less urgent, so I feel less inclined to work on them and then my interest and skill in writing starts to nosedive.

Even though I got a few things out this month, I'm still feeling guilty about not devoting more time to writing in my spare time. That's good, because that nervousness is often the first step towards getting goals done. Today I was hoping to knock out a self-reflective post in which I could dig into some feelings I've been having, but nothing was coming to me, so instead I'm digging up a draft I have saved to see where an old idea gets me.

One such draft was me reminding myself to reflect on my love of the baseball player Vladimir Guerrero on the occasion that he was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. This happened last week, so I suppose I should indulge myself.

Fuckin' Vladdy

As a child, I felt significantly more pride about being Canadian than I do now. This Canadian Pride was enough for me to place an emotional interest in the Montréal Expos, simply because they were one of two Canadian teams in Major League Baseball, and the only team in the National League. Sadly though, my ascent as a ballfan coincided with the demise of Montréal's franchise. While it's debatable if the Expos ever truly experienced "good times", the last breathe of the team was especially sad.

In hindsight, the minor differences between being a baseball fan and a hockey fan in Toronto were funny. To Leafs fans, the Montréal Canadiens were and still are anathema, due to the long rivalry between the two teams. Blue Jays fans, at least more of them, instead felt a kinship with Montréal's oft-ignored baseball team. They were perpetual underdogs constantly fighting against the league and their own ownership. Of all the teams in the league, they were dealt the worst hand. You have to appreciate resilience and the later-year Montréal Expos displayed a tremendous amount of resilience in small batches.

Former Expos and then Marlins owner Jeff Loria is well-known among baseball fans for being a piece of shit. The Expos produced a seemingly endless parade of exciting players (Gary Carter, Andre Dawson, Randy Johnson, Tim Raines, Pedro Martinez, and now Vlad in the Hall of Fame, Larry Walker maybe on his way) and the only thing that kept up with that was the rate at which they sold them to other teams. The one year it looked like Montréal would finally put it all together and maybe win a World Series was also the last time baseball experienced a work stoppage, 1994.

Of all the Expos, the most exciting was by far their right fielder Vladimir Guerrero. He is a Dominican player who at the time was tall and thin, but still muscular, while having impossibly long legs. People like to apply labels like "unconventional" to athletes all the time, but Vlad really was unlike anyone else. He was a giant presence in the batter's box and never wore batting gloves. He hit a shitload of home runs and was one of the most fearsome power hitters of the era, but also swung at everything he saw. People love the image of him hitting a single after the pitch bounced, but I think more impressive is him being able to hit a pitch a foot off the plate in two directions out of the park. Early in his career he was speedy and stole 40 bases in a season, while also having a fucking hose.

It was hard to not like him and as a young boy he quickly became one of my favourite players in the league, Jays included. Every amazing play felt like a slap to Bud Selig's face. The bullshit announce team on the below video exemplifies that.

Forever etched into my mind, but for some reason impossible to find on the internet, is call of a Vladdy home run by the home town Montréal announcers in which one yells "VLADIMIIIIIR! VLADIMIIIIIR!" in a Québécois accent while he circled the bases in his typical gangly style. I thought it was one of the coolest things I had ever seen. 

Towards the end, things for the Expos got especially bad, with the cherry being them playing "home games" in Puerto Rico as an experiment. There were always whispers about how much longer the team would last and Montréal tried its best to support and save the team behind decent 2002 and 2003 teams. Most exciting to me was when they traded for a svelte, in-his-prime Bartolo Colon and made brief noise in the Wild Card race. I think that I wanted Montréal to get a revenge World Series more than a Blue Jays one.

When Major League Baseball announced that Montréal would be moving to Washington DC after the 2004 season, my family made a trip to the city that summer to catch a game at Olympic Stadium before that would be impossible. We spent a couple of days in the city and went to the game on the middle night of our stay. I believe this is the boxscore from that game. Somehow, we had chosen the one game that Vlad had an off-day. I was crushed that I wouldn't get to see him play. I eventually saw him many times as a member of the Los Angeles Angels, Texas Rangers, and Baltimore Orioles (sadly never as a Blue Jay, though I BADLY wanted them to call him up from the minors), but it never scratched the Expo itch that I had while younger. The game was exciting, our seats were close, and the small, but devoted, Montréal crowd was loud and engaged. By the end of the game, the city had won me over, and the memory of fans around me yelling at the field in heavy, throaty French will forever be my memory of what Expos baseball was. I'm fortunate to have that.

Something I like to do is look back on the things I liked a child and draw connections between them and myself now. As a preteen boy I only understood Vlad and the last stand of the Expos as "cool", but now as an adult I like to think that my fascination in them was part of a larger pattern of fighting against power and hating authority. The reason that everyone loves an underdog is because the overdog fucking sucks. Now the Expos are the Nationals now and that team is in the midst of a run of success, but I don't think any ballfans in Montréal take solace in that. I also don't think it will be the same as it was if a baseball team ever does come back to Montréal.

This all being said, the Expos are forever. I'll always hold a place in my heart for the team stuck around as long as they could against seemingly impossible odds and how inspiring I found that. A hearty congratulations to one of my very favourite players ever, Vladimir Guerrero, for making the Hall of Fame. I don't care what cap is on your plaque Vlad, you're an Expo for life.

The 10 Baseball Players I Hate

At some point last year, one of the baseball sites that I frequent, The Hardball Times, published a story called "The 10 Players I Hate" in which the author listed the players who had tormented his favourite team during his time as a fan. I thought that is was a great idea for an article and provided a funny look at the things that you obsess over as a fan and the minutiae and petty differences that can consume you when you devote a significant amount of your time to something as silly as sports.

I'm deep in the "Lost & Directionless" part of baseball's off-season, where the action of the previous year seems so far away that I can barely remember it and pitchers and catchers reporting, let Spring Training games, are still on another calendar page, so I need something to hold me over and remind me of the weird passion that takes over my brain from April to October.

With that being said, here are the 10 Baseball Players I Hate:

Derek Jeter

If you lived in Toronto, Boston, Baltimore, or St. Petersburg between 1995 and 2015 you could set your watch to Derek Jeter dashing your hopes and dreams as a baseball fan. The only thing worse than the unending parade of sportswriters who were eager to feed Jeter peeled grapes was the fact that he kind of deserved it. Growing up, I despised him and thought it was obvious how much of a dick he was, but it wasn't until I got older that I realized that perspective came from me being sour about Jeter leading the Yankees to elite levels of success and a decent chunk of it coming at the expense of my Blue Jays. I'm now mature enough to admit that Derek Jeter is one baseball's all-time shortstops, but I don't think I'll ever get to a place where I don't hate the fuckin' New York Yankees.

Dustin Pedroia

Much like Jeter, much of my hate for Dustin Pedroia derives from the fact that he played an integral part in the Boston Red Sox dominating the Blue Jays. He still plays a part in that. To truly hate a player, they must be good, and Pedroia has been steadily good for a long time. He was the face of the "hustle" Red Sox teams of the 00's, where a new white guy with a beard seemed to turn up every week. He runs to 1st base after walks and was probably his coach's favourite player on every team he's been on. He has a stupid face and I love when he fails at the sport of baseball. Red Sox fans love believing that their team is still a lovable underdog and Pedroia's dumb-ass playing style is a big part of that. Fuck the Red Sox.

Mark Texeira

Though I have following the Jays for my whole life and going to games for just as long, my high school year were particularly formative in my experience as a baseball because that is when I started to carve out my own place as a Jays fan and establish an identity separate from my parents in following the team. For that reason, the Jays teams of 2003-2010 are especially dear to me because they coincided with that time. They were the teams that Timmy fell in love with, not that the Chandlers fell in love with. Those teams also fucking sucked. You know who are great at beating down shitty Jays teams? The New Yankees. A potent force for them during that time was switch-hitting first baseman and noted jabroni Mark Texeira. New York is apparently allergic to players who don't hit 30 dingers and OBP in the upper 300's. During the 00's, Tex was the latest in a never-ending parade of expensive free agents that led to division titles and for that reason I will always despise him.

Note: On May 12th, 2009, I watched Roy Halladay shutout the Yankees by himself. Texeira went 0-4 with two strikeouts and I laughed and laughed and laughed.

Eric Hosmer

Unsurprisingly, most of the players on this, the pettiest of all lists, come from the Blue Jays' rivals.  The Jays played a heated regular season and then playoff series against the shittiest and dumbest of all loser-ass teams, the Kansas City Royals. In their prime, the Royals were led by first baseman Eric Hosmer who sucks for the following reasons: 

-bad at hitting home runs 

-thinks he's better than he is 

-dumb beard, haircut, and douchey face

-leads dumb team that got the luckiest of any team ever at the right time

He talked a lot of shit and came up with clutch, piddly singles with maddening frequency. Thanks for ruining our playoff run you piece of trash.

Kevin Youkilis

Take a deep breathe and reflect for a moment. You're right. It's true. A Major League Baseball player actually used that stupid fucking batting stance you see above. I hate Kevin Youkilis for many of the same reasons that I hate Dustin Pedroia. They played on the same teams that won a lot (including a World Series in 2007) and were the nexus of the Boston "gritty, white baseball players with beards" criclejerk that was the bane of my existence. What a bunch of grinders! Putting in professional at-bats! More like casual racism coated in pinetar. Bud, your name is fuckin' stupid.

Rougned Odor

As a sports fan, I try to act like I am above the typical lowbrow, macho brandishing that the rest of the world associates with professional athletics. I read the things that the New Yorker publishes about baseball. I applaud when teams do things to make their environment more inclusive. I distance myself from the intoxication culture imbued in the crowd. I focus on the small subtle things in the game instead of falling prey to gossip-y narratives given to the public by media corporations. That being said, it's also important to recognize that I am part of that world and sometimes you need to lean into it. Roughned Odor is a rat-faced fuck who was a catalyst in the Texas Rangers taking the ALDS to 5 games and got in a fight with my savior, José Bautista and for that I will curse his name until the day I die.

Darren O'Day

The hateful part of my brain has an expressway attached to it which can only be accessed by players who have wronged José Bautista, Josh Donaldson, or Marcus Stroman. It doesn't matter what they have done, I must stand by my boys and support them. Darren O'Day and Jose Bautista have a, admittedly, petty rivalry that started over the former skipping towards the dugout after a strikeout. Since then, José has owned O'Day and the rest of the Orioles, giving me a huge supply of revenge home runs to watch while I laugh and clap my hands. The best rivalries are the ones where your side relentlessly beats down the other side and never loses.

Chipper Jones

The differences between being an American sports fan and a Canadian sports fan are small. The typical American sports outlets, like ESPN and FoxSports, weren't broadcasted in Canada while I was growing up, but we did get TBS, which has traditionally been the home of Atlanta Braves baseball. As a result, the Braves were more or less the only team other than the Blue Jays who I saw on TV. I hated their announcers, I hated their hats, and I hated how good they were in the 90's. At the centre of the team was their Hall of Fame third baseman Chipper Jones who I hated for being good, for being constantly brought up by the TBS team, and for having a good nickname.

Roger Clemens

I only vaguely remember the time when Roger Clemens pitched for the Blue Jays. He was very good! Then he requested a trade and left to play for our bitterest enemies, the New York Yankees. Not only that, but he won two World Series titles right after leaving. He was the perfect storm of being a jerk, being an amazing player, being associated with steroids when I was vehemently against them, and playing for the Yankees. It was impossible not to hate him and I revelled in his defeats.

Jose Cruz Jr.

For the sake of fairness, I thought that I should also include a Blue Jays player who I hate and the first one I thought of was Jose Cruz (Jr.). Cruz was part of the Jays teams that were thoroughly dominated by the Yankees and Red Sox in the late 90's/early 00's and was, in hindsight, a pretty key contributor. For the life of me, I can't explain why I disliked him so much. His numbers were pretty decent and he was a good player on bad teams. Then he got bad as soon as he left Toronto. That wasn't enough for me though, and I hated him purely for his whole time in the city. One game I went to, they gave out free player t-shirts to all kids under 13 in the ballpark. Once I saw they were Cruz t-shirts, I was dismayed and never wore it once.

I, Musical Genius: On Baseball

Almost three years ago, I had the idea that I was going to make a print version of I, Musical Genius because after having the idea it seemed like it made too much sense to not follow through on it. I absolutely LOVE zines and thought that some of my longer entries on here would make great content to fill the pages with. I picked a few entries that I thought I had done a good job on and narrowed in on the vague theme of betterment through self-reflection that permeates my writing on here and started to comb through them for errors and syntax.

I dreamed big on the print version of I, Musical Genius right away. I was going to fill each page of the zine with hand-drawn stuff. I would have one issue on nostalgia, one on sports, one on music stories, etc. If I was finally going to turn this long-term project into a real, tangible thing, then I wanted to put in a lot of effort and make it really good. However, because of those lofty goals, the project really got away from me. I got caught up in small tasks with it and lost interest and never ended up finishing the thing.

When I decided that I was going devote my free time to writing last December (lol), I made finishing that zine part of the goal. Even though I hadn't touched it in ages, the idea definitely still thrilled me and I wanted to do it. While I kept working on songs consistently and short stories intermittently, the zine, again, went untouched for the entire year because I felt like the other goals were more important than printing out stuff that I had already written on the internet.

BUT, a couple of weeks ago, I was approached by a friend to help organize a punk/baseball trivia night at D-Beatstro in Toronto. While I was house-sitting for my parents, with Roy Halladay's death still fresh in my mind, it struck me that I had a lot of baseball writing sitting on here that I hadn't really done anything with and would make for a great zine. What pushed me over the edge was looking at my dad's drafting board and thinking about cutting the paper up. Finishing the zine in time to "launch" it at the trivia night seemed like too good of an opportunity to pass up.

I started planning it right away and made the initial versions of it that afternoon and then kept tweaking and tweaking until it looked the way I wanted.

I got a friend of mine, Octavio Contreras to draw the cover for me. He did better than I could have hoped.

The end result is this: I, Musical Genius: On Baseball, the first thing I've made of my creative writing. While three autobiographical short stories ain't much, I am very proud of what I've made.

So I guess the only thing left to do now is distribute this damn thing. If you are reading this and would like a copy of this, I would be more than happy to mail one to you. I guess I'm charging $5 for it, but you are welcome to pay whatever you would like. Get in touch with me on here, or on Twitter, and we can sort it out.

Thanks.

So It's Come to This: A Baseball Post

I haven’t written a baseball post in what seems like forever. I can discern two reasons for this:

1.    I have been pretty busy at work during MLB’s off-season. Whereas I would obsess over rosters and trades and prospects and lineups in years past, I do that to a lesser extent now. School had a lot of downtime. Fitting your whole life into the eight waking hours you aren’t chained to a desk does not.

2.    The Jays resembled a very large, very hot dog turd at the start of the 2017 season.

But regardless of how much work I have to do, baseball is still never very far away from my attention, so I still have some thoughts which only feel at home on the warm, lime green confines of IMU, so here we go.

The Blue Jays started this season extremely badly. Almost everything that could go wrong went wrong. Josh, Troy, Russ, Sanch, and Happ all got hurt and Jose started looking a lot more like Josh Phelps than Jose Bautista. When a team loses all of its good players in the first two weeks, it typically does not follow that by winning games.

Note: When I was a kid, I LOVED Josh Phelps and was convinced he would be around forever.

It’s funny how quick baseball fans’ expectations and temperaments can change. From 1994-2014, the Jays ranged from “yep, they’re bad” to “two or three pieces away” with nothing to show for it. Then I was spoiled with a magical 2015 season in which everything went right and was the most fun baseball could be, and a 2016 season where the Jays substituted magic with “just playing well the whole year”. I had waited my whole life to see the Toronto Blue Jays in the playoffs and both of those years absolutely met the unreasonably high expectations that I had set.

I, along with many others, had mixed feelings about 2017 though. It seemed like the team was increasingly leaning on the “if this, this, and this work out, we’ll be good” crutch which is always the sign of a middling baseball team. Then, in the space of two weeks at the start of April, the beautiful “playoff team” image of the Jays had been shattered. Josh Donaldson was hurt and Chris Caughlan was playing third base. Aaron Sanchez was hurt and Mat Latos was starting. Edwin Encarnacion was playing for the Cleveland Indians. Jose Bautista was swinging through letter-high fastballs.

Baseball is unlike any other sport because of how long its season is. Playing 162 games over the course of 6 months means that you have to be patient during bad stretches because they always come and are something every team (and more importantly fans) must endure. But the Jays started 1-9 and it got pretty hard to imagine them playing the first place team for the rest of the season. But because it was only the second week of April, you had to say "it's early", instead of "burn it to the ground".

The team’s recent success brought in loads of new fans, which is to be expected when a traditionally bad team suddenly wins a lot in a huge city (see: Raptors, 2013-14 season). However, those fans also don’t know what it’s like to suffer through a bad baseball season (they also *shudders* do the wave), because not only do you have to watch a shitty version of something you love, but you have to watch it every day for six months.

But even though watching Ryan Goins take everyday at-bats for a whole month can be tiring, it is much better than the alternative, which is no baseball at all. The fact that every MLB team plays almost every day (there are 21 days during the season in which I am not blessed with Blue Jays baseball) is a huge part of what makes me love baseball so much. Once you get into the habit of watching the team every night, the team takes a special significance and becomes an integral part of your routine. They are always there. If I have a shitty day at work, the game becomes a nice thing to unwind to when I get home. It’s something I do friends and it’s something I do alone. It’s there when I feel good and when I feel bad. Baseball never stops and I love that so much. Once you are sucked in, watching your favourite team becomes a very meditative experience. It becomes an automatic process in the best way. It’s at once something you can have on behind on you while you cook dinner and something that keeps you on the edge of your seat with your friends. Few things in the universe can exist with a duality like that, but baseball can because it is unique and it is the best.

Sidebar: The fact that the long games and season drive away people who would otherwise be casual fans makes me love it even more. Get the fuck out of here.

Baseball’s meditative nature has turned it into something essential to me: A time to reflect on my thoughts, feelings, and life. Baseball has space, which lets your mind breathe during the game and consider other things. I could conjure up hundreds of examples of this happening in my life, but I will choose the following:

One summer, I lived alone in Guelph after I had finished my undergraduate degree at the city's university. At 23, it was my first time ever living alone and I was very sad and unsuccessful in lots of ways for the entire summer. I spent most of my time alone and it was a very trying time for me. One thing that I had was no-name stereo receiver that I bought at a weird odds and ends store downtown to use with my record player, which also had a radio built-in. Every night that summer, I listened to the Blue Jays game on radio with Jerry Howarth and Alan Ashby doing the call. I had a few friends in the city that summer, but I like to think that Jerry and Alan were my best friends. Listening to the Blue Jays on the radio gave me at least one thing that I loved every day. I would feel pretty bad most days, but that would subside when Jerry's calming voices would proclaim "the Blue Jays are in flight" after an Edwin Encarnacion home run. The team was terrible (4 out 5 starters got hurt in a week and a half in June), but the season was punctuated with small victories that felt like everything when they happened, like Edwin's great coming-out season or Colby Rasmus going 5-5 after moving to the 2-hole.

Another sidebar: Listening to a whole season on the radio was a significant moment in me being a shitty baseball hipster, as baseball on the radio was the main medium by which the sport was consumed for about 50 years. This is unique to baseball because of how old the professional leagues are.

Baseball is so important to me for all of these reasons. It does the amazing task of distracting me just enough to not focus solely on things that are bad while still allowing me to process them.

But this post isn't just a lengthy diatribe on why baseball is just the best. It just mostly is.

I said all of this to give context to the fact that the Blue Jays 2017 season felt a little bit weird to me for the first month. It felt very different. After two years of amazing success, this was such a quick, crushing return to the reality that your favourite baseball team is kind of bad for most of its existence. Unless, you are this guy. The last few years, I've grown a lot more skeptical about the state of the world and find myself continually angered by some of the things that happen and the rationale behind them. It's nice to be able to escape that by watching Brett Cecil's curveball at night. Now they are not doing so hot, but the funny thing is that they can still be that escape,

It's strange because when the team rattled off seven losses in a row, it almost felt like I was returning to a comfortable world I had been away from. I had watched the Blue Jays lose forever. This was just more of what I loved! But it also felt shitty because it was definitely the end of the murderer's row Jay's lineup that had led them to the ALCS the two years prior. It was nice and bad at the same time.

It's an ethereal thing, but the 2017 Jays team feels a lot more like the teams of the 00's than the phenomenal ones of the last two years. Things like Chris Caughlin diving over Yadier Molina are the sorts of small victories that I would pull out the ticker tape for in 2014. The infield tonight, which is currently losing to the Braves, is Smoak-Travis-Goins-Barney. Maybe they'll turn it around. Maybe they'll turn it around in two years. Maybe it will be another two decades. There's no way that I can know.

But thinking about all of these differences, I forgot the most crucial fact of all:

Baseball is always there, every day. They played yesterday, they played today, and they'll play tomorrow.

Sit Down. We Do This Every Fucking Day

Something that my parents instilled in me at a very young age was the importance of reading. Whereas many of my friends in elementary school (let's get real, they're still my friends now) would be getting new Super Nintendo (and then Sega) (and then Nintendo 64) games and bangin' new toys for Christmas and birthdays, I would get a whole lot of books. Though I wasn't the happiest camper when all my friends were jumping on kremlins while I was staring down a stack of literature, I realize now that it was a very good thing. Reading and enjoying a book is immeasurable in the benefits it gives to a person's language and speaking skills and also really develops one's imagination, as their mind creates images to go along with the story it's taking in. Since I got in the habit of reading for pleasure at a young age, it's something that I've continued to pursue since and something that I've noticed people I know do less and less. First TV and now, especially in my generation, video games have more or less taken up all the time that would have originally been occupied by books. Though you'll never catch me bad-mouthing either of those things since I thoroughly enjoy them both, it does really suck that instead of teenage boys getting stoked about all the angst and swearing in Catcher In The Rye, they're getting stoked brain-melting violence. (Again, for the record I would like to state that I really enjoy brain-melting violence.)

Another thing that my parents lovingly forced onto me at a young age (that I briefly touched upon in an earlier blog) was a deep love of baseball. With both my parents being die-hard Toronto Blue Jays fans, I was going to games before I knew how to talk, let alone walk. You know how it's a somewhat common practice for parents to keep a newspaper headline from the day their child was born? My parents cut out and kept the boxscore from the paper that day (A 4-3 walk-off win over the Mariners ending in dramatic fashion with George Bell scoring on a wild pitch after Fred McGriff tied the game with a ground-rule double.). While most of my friends growing were playing hockey and gushing over Mats Sundin, I was going to way more Blue Jays games than they were Leaf's games and worshipping the life-sized cardboard cut-out of Joe Carter on my wall. Eventually I started playing softball and then baseball and began to understand the ebb and flow of a 9 inning game and all the little elements that make it so great. Through my adolescence and now into adulthood I've started to realize the love/hate relationship and stress that comes with loving and supporting a team that is perpetually on the outside looking in when it comes to October. You start to realize after a while that baseball is a constant in your life. Unlike other sports, during the season baseball is there pretty much every day and it's something you get used to; the game starts at 7 (usually) and it's the way you end more or less every day from April 1st until September 30th. After a period of time you develop a kind of fatherly relationship (or about as fatherly as a relationship between a teenaged boy and 25 grown men can be) (welp, that came out wrong) and you invest a whole of emotional energy into wanting to see them succeed on the field.

So, what exactly do these two long-winded, seemingly unrelated  paragraphs have in common? Well, I just finished reading Season Ticket by Roger Angell and before that read The Summer Game by the same author and both were amazing reads. Angell is a columnist for the New Yorker and regularly contributes baseball and non-baseball work, but his stuff about the diamond is by far the best. It's completely obvious in his writing that while he's a through and through New York Mets and Boston Red Sox fan, he's a fan of the game first and foremost and a good deal of each book consists of him taking pleasure in seeing the game in all its different forms in different cities. Pretty much every page has at least one great anecdote about baseball, be it from Angell or the ridiculously large amount of players he interviews over the course of each volume. Some personal favourites were Earl Weaver (One of the all-time great managers and characters, managed the great Baltimore Oriole teams from the late 60's and 1970's) sitting in his underwear, drinking a beer and explaining why exactly he likes baseball so much; (a reporter asks him if he thought the Orioles were going to hang on to their lead and win the World Series) "No, that's what you can never do in baseball. You can't sit on a lead, run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You've got to throw the ball over the goddamn plate and give the other man his chance. That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all." Another was Ted Williams (The best Red Sox hitter of all time? Yes. Without a doubt.) describing the process he would go through in his mind when deciding where to swing on a fastball. It is truly a moment when you have to sit back and think "Well, that is why you are the last man to hit .400 and I only played houseleague."

But by far my favourite part of the two books was Angell describing seeing the expansion New York Mets for the first time in 1962 (the worst baseball team of all time), through to seeing them win the Series for the first time in '69 and then edging out the Sox in '86. Since the Blue Jays were an expansion team, joining the Majors in '77), they suffered though the usual fate for new teams in sports: many years of mediocrity. I've been to Blue Jays playoff games and got to witness them win two World Series, but unfortunately that happened when I was 3 and 4 years old, so I don't remember that happening (save for this of course, I'll never forget that.), so basically I've watched the Jays struggle to stay afloat (often fail at doing so) for 19 seasons. After a while you get used to the losing and learn to love the team despite their lack of success. Angell gives these long descriptions of going to Mets games and having an absolute blast at the games with the rest of the Mets fans, despite them being absolutely awful on the field that I immediately drew parallels with. It's especially great with the Mets because they came out of nowhere to win the World Series in an upset in 1969.

Angell was there from the beginning and then got to watch his boys win it all and get the ultimate gratification in the end and this is something I can relate to now. So far in the off-season the Blue Jays have pulled off a major trade and signed a few key free agents to greatly improve our chances in the American League East and in some cases become the favourite to win the division. I know that our club's certain betterment on the field will inevitably bring in hordes of band-wagon jumpers who will be a little annoying, but it sure as hell won't make the giant shit-eating grin that will be covering my face while I watch this new and improved version of the Blue Birds on the field any less enjoyable.

Even if you don't have any interest in baseball, reading either of these Roger Angell books (or any of his others, I'm sure) will make you look at the months of November through February with great disdain and make the news of pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training seem like the second coming of Christ. The guy is the Mark Twain of the old game and his absolute love of every thing that goes along with it is completely contagious.

Oh, and uh GO JAYS GO!