Episodes From a Struggle Against Capitalism in 2018

One of my biggest vices is buying T-shirts. I can't get enough of them. Even though I have two deep drawers that are overflowing with them, I'm drawn to them like a moth to a bug zapper and just keep buying them anyways. It also doesn't help that most of my main interests have turned into glorified T-shirt factories. Punk bands set up a mini-mall in the venue and the Jays have a store the size of an Olympic swimming pool designed to sell things with their logo on it.

Beyond the utilitarian aspect of having a shirt to wear each day, I like T-shirts as a sort of artifact. I think it's cool that when I wear a band's shirt it's indicative of my enjoyment of them, but is also a physical manifestation of my memory of seeing that band on that night. I love my Lifetime shirt because it reminds me of the one time that I'll have gotten to see one of my favourite bands. More than that, it's also an artifact from that specific iteration of the band. I love my Sidekicks shirt because it was from their tour right after Awkward Breeds came out and is a nice reminder of when all of my friends and I were mesmerized by what the band was doing and excited to see them play the legion in Guelph.

This all being said, I am drowning in T-shirts and I am constantly trying to consume less in my life, so I made a pledge to myself in January 2018 that I would not buy any T-shirts (or clothes, really) for the whole year. I know that it's a silly project, but I also think that its non-essentialness and stupidity is part of what makes it fun.

Episodes From a Struggle Against Capitalism in 2018

1. The 2018 Toronto Blue Jays Season

The mighty king of the sports T-shirt world is undoubtedly the "shirsey", a T-shirt with a print of the front of a sports team's uniform on the front and a player's name and number on the back. Since I'm far too poor to chase my dream of a walk-in closet filled with different jerseys to wear each day, shirseys area fun and economical secondary option. Since they are so much cheaper than an actual jersey, you don't have to put as much thought into which player's shirt you purchase, as you won't be saddled with an expensive monstrosity you hate to wear if the guy's production falls off a cliff, or worse, right after you purchase it. As such, getting obscure or silly shirseys is a fun thing to do if you like sports.

As I've already covered on IMU, the 2018 Jays were fucking awful, so names that you would be proud to wear on your back were slim. But what the team lacked in star power, they made up for in spades with "that guy?" options. Curtis Granderson? Steve Pearce? Aledmys Diaz? These all would have been elite additions to my collection of heroes past, but thanks to my extreme will power and personal sacrifice, those shirts will go to someone more in need.

2. Power Trip, w/ Sheer Mag, Fury, and Red Death

Thanks to the rise of large-scale music festivals in North America, the days of elite package tours that travel all over Canada and the United States are a thing of the past. Mid-level bands still come through Toronto regularly, but I long for my youth when it seemed like a band at the height of their powers with several other signed acts were a regular occurrence. I am by no means hating on watching local bands, but it's just not the same as when you would go to a show and see four really good bands who were all extremely tight from playing each night on tour and were diverse musically.

That longing for package tours was a huge part of why I was so excited for Power Trip coming through Toronto in May with Sheer Mag and Fury. The show was rammed inside and each band had an elite merch set up that was as diverse as their sounds. Power Trip do great pastiches of 80's thrash shirts, whereas Sheer Mag's simple logo shirts seem like a classic design from when the "band shirt" was still in its infancy in the 70's. This show was my hardest test. Both bands' shirts would instantly enter into my primary rotation and get a lot of reps during the summer, but I persevered and out-lasted my desire to get one.

Also, at this show I saw a huge hesher metalhead in a battle vest puke on a couple while they were making out.

3. Joyce Manor, w/ Vundabar, and Big Eyes

Joyce Manor has been a favourite of mine for the better part of a decade now, ever since I heard their self-titled first record. Despite my long-standing love and appreciation of their music, I somehow only managed to see them for the first time this year, touring on Million Dollars to Kill Me.

Sidenote: This long streak of missing them included a 2011 show featuring their first trip to Canada, Lemuria touring Get Better. What a show.

I would love to have a Joyce Manor shirt and proudly display my appreciation for a band who's put out 5 good records in a row, but instead they had the misfortune of scheduling this show while I was on my T-shirt exodus. It seemed like there were many good options from afar, but I opted to not put myself through torture and didn't approach the table.

4. Algernon Cadwallader annouce a reissue of their discography

One of the saddest experiences you can have as a music fan is getting heavily into an artist shortly after they break up. Me checking out Television for the first time this week certainly has an air of "I can't believe they were this good the whole time!", but it's not nearly as bitter as realizing Algernon Cadwallader were emo gods only a year or two after they broke up. To make matters worse, there were times I could have seen them, but opted not to! What an idiot I was!

I scoured the internet to see if any record labels or online stores still had stock of Algernon merch, but the band's staunch DIY stance, a huge part of why I love them so much, meant their post-career online presence was next to nothing. I was haunted my image of a t-shirt, long since sold out, in online stores that no longer shipped.

Then, in the fall of 2018, the band announced that they would be reissuing all of their music through Asian Man Records. Cool! On top of that, the band would be reprinting their first t-shirt design and selling that as well. WHAT. ON TOP OF THAT, they would also be printing that design on my other apparel weakness, a black pullover hoodie. It was like Algernon had reached into my mind and plucked out what I wanted most.

But this wasn't about what I wanted. It was about what I had promised myself. And that was to buy no T-shirts during the 2018 calendar year. Mody Dick ate my harpoon and swam away. The marlin decomposed while tied to the side of my boat. I lay on my couch thinking of an alternate world where I would have an Algernon Cadwallader T-shirt.

5. The Sidekicks, w/Gladie, Found Objects, and Wayfarer

Like all good dramas, my quest to buy no new T-shirts was expertly paced. After the climax of the T-shirt I had dreamed of slipping away, the plot resolved with a lesser event. Like how the big death always happens in the second last episode of a season in The Wire. I saw one of my favourite Ontario bands, Wayfarer, play with one of my favourite active bands, the Sidekicks. The Sidekicks came on strong with a white long-sleeve that said "America's Greatest Living Rock 'n Roll Band" on the front and "POWER POP" down the sleeves, but I had already won my war. No shirts would enter my closet this year.

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.

Flags Fly Forever

I’ve recently had two separate trains of thought returning to my mind and have only just located why.

The first is that baseball is back and I have been thinking a lot about it. It feels good. I’m already rediscovering the routine of putting on the game while I make dinner, passively soaking in what’s happening while I’m preoccupied and then reading articles by John Lott and Andrew Stoeten the next morning about the night before. Rebecca is already outraged that The Boys somehow manage to be on the radio every time we get in the car. It’s familiar and comfortable.

But while it is comfortable, it feels different. The character of this year’s team is much different than last year’s and that is due to a huge turnover in players, which was the biggest since the now-legendary trade deadline acquisitions in 2015. I knew that this would be a “new look” team taking the field but had underestimated how much the change in players would change the experience of watching the Toronto Blue Jays play baseball. It’s slight, but noticeable. Not everyone is gone, but many of the big players in Toronto’s 2015 march to the playoffs have steadily departed and been replaced by players who, while still capable, do not seem as dynamic at first. As I was trying to pinpoint what exactly was at the root of this feeling, it came upon me like turning a corner and hitting a tree:

Jose Bautista does not play Right Field for the 2018 Blue Jays.

I suppose that I had expected this sort of impact to come after a franchise icon left the team, but I was still surprised by it. Sure, David Price led the march to the playoffs and Josh Donaldson won the MVP, but make no mistake, the Blue Jays have been Jose Bautista’s team since 2010.

This was brought up by second thought, which was me reflecting on the story “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” written by John Updike for The New Yorker in 1960. His story follows him as he goes to Fenway Park in Boston to see Ted Williams’ last game for the team he played his whole career with. Updike’s piece is masterpiece and perfectly sums up the career of one of the greatest to ever play the game. Not only running through Williams’ extensive list of accomplishments, Updike also does an amazing job of covering exactly what it means to be a franchise player. You are never universally loved by the fans. You are criticized by the sporting press for not coming through in every high-pressure situation you face. You are deemed greedy for… some reason. There is an ebb and flow to periods of intense scrutiny when you are not singlehandedly carrying the load of an entire team and then even more intense affection when you miraculously manage to do just that.

In hindsight, many fans manage to forget the bitter feelings they used to hold when the occasion for a celebratory farewell comes along. Updike describes Boston coming together to see off Ted Williams, all of them realizing the significance of the situation. Similarly, last year I was present, standing, and applauding as Jose ran out to right field by himself for the last time. Fittingly, Marcus Stroman ensured that the P.A. played Drake’s “Trophys”, which was long Jose’s signature at-bat music, for the occasion.

Saying farewell to an athlete is a unique and intimate situation. It doesn’t carry the finality of visiting a dying relative or going to a funeral. They aren’t dying. They aren’t even going away, necessarily. They are just stopping to do what you have grown to love them for doing. Seeing Jose play his last game at the SkyDome instantly reminded me of all the great things he accomplished for the team. Essentially, you are watching the end of a hero, only instead of a hero valiantly dying, like in the movies, he retires to Florida to play golf.

This past weekend, Rebecca and I visited my parents for Easter dinner. As always, the Jays came up in conversation and shortly after that, Jose. As of this writing, he has still not signed a contract for the 2019 season, so he wasn’t playing baseball. My mom rued that he hadn’t simply retired as a Blue Jay in 2018, which was the right and honourable thing to do in her eyes. She said that that would have been a perfect way to end his time with the team.

This struck me as weird because in my mind his farewell was perfect. It was an organic response by the fanbase and incredibly sincere. Everyone understood the importance of Jose Bautista and giving him an earnest, emotional send off. We stood and applauded when he was introduced, before every at bat, and once more when he was taken out of the game in the top of the 9th inning. To me, there was no way to better honour his legacy with the team.

I started to think about “perfect situations” and whether they exist or not. It certainly would have been great to have pregame ceremony in which his name was added to the Blue Jays’ “Level of Excellence”, permanently adding his legacy to our park, but that was out of the question given the circumstance and him not retiring. The reality is that even if you meticulously plan something out, it will never come out completely perfectly. Perfection is achieved by being present. It is only in hindsight that we can look back on something, disregard any flaws and accept what we received as perfect.

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.

No Doubt About It

It is no small secret that I deeply love the seminal classic rock band Thin Lizzy. While they, like many of their contemporaries, have had their careers mostly diluted to one or two singles, they also have a run of great albums in the 70's that still hold up today. Recently, my jam has been "For Those Who Love to Live" off of their wonderful album Fighting, for reasons I will explain below.



Thin Lizzy wrote this song about George Best, who was a popular Northern Irish soccer player for Manchester United in the 1970's. Best was extremely skilled, but also fit into the playboy athlete archetype who coupled his innate athletic ability with a thirst for partying and womanizing. These types of figures are always charismatic and can so easily capture the hearts of the sports fan who watch them play, because they show you that sports is part of life as whole and doesn't just exist in a self-contained stadium. Thin Lizzy does a great job of conveying that feeling in the song.

I've been thinking about this song a lot as an accompaniment to José Bautista's swan song as a Toronto Blue Jay. I've loved José's time as a Jay, loved his many accomplishments, and loved the style he played the game with, but I think that I'll save a true farewell to him until his goodbye actually happens. Instead, I'll give you this song as a hearty salute to José's time with the team and the cult of personality that surrounds him.

José Bautista is certainly not the man-about-town that George Best was, but I think that his magnetic personality still drew people in in the same way. He was the best power hitter in the game for a few years and the best Right Fielder of this decade. José's many, many revenge home runs were the type of thing you fantasized about doing while playing Little League. He made other teams stomping mad and then would hit towering home runs to rub it in afterwards. As much attention as he got for "The Batflip", a lot of people didn't realize that he had been doing that for his entire time in Toronto.

Quoting myself verbatim, I've said a lot of times that "Nothing lights me up like José home runs." I know that it's a corny thing to say, but there is a jump in my chest every time that José pulls one down the left field line because it's something I've seen so many times before. It's familiar and it feels like home and it only feels like home for Toronto Blue Jays fans. It's our thing that we get to have. Everybody got a little bit of a glimpse into during the 2015 playoffs, but they'll never know the joy that we all got to have from 2008-2017.

So no, "You've got to have a little love for those who love to live" doesn't mean that José succeeded on the field in spite of his vices, it means that while he played baseball, he managed the squeeze the most fun and drama and excitement out of the sport that he could.

Next weekend will most likely be José's last home games as a Blue Jay. I will be there on Sunday and I look forward to getting up on my feet near the end of the game to give him the true hero's farewell that he deserves.

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.

A Lot Like a Loser Who's No Good at Losing at All

I am no stranger to waxing poetic about ethereal connection between the game of baseball and those who watch it. There's a lot of different ways that one person trying to hit a ball thrown by another person into spots where eight other people aren't standing manages to seize hold of my emotions every year and there's an equal mix of emotions that come along with that.

The one emotion that is absolutely crucial to baseball and that fans must never forget about, no matter how "out of it" things may seem is hope. Even when you're at your most sour and can only think about having to return to yet another season of sub-.500 baseball, baseball will pick you up by the hips and toss you in the air to remind exactly how fun all of this is. The greatest quote in all of sports, former Baltimore Orioles Manager Earl Weaver, summed it up better than I ever could:

"You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You've got to throw the ball over the damn plate and give the other man his chance. That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all."

With this all being said, I would like to proffer a piece by Stacey May Fowles, who is a phenomenal author from Toronto. She does the whole "my emotional state is dictated by baseball" thing much better than I do and is way better at explaining the weird emotional bond you make with men you don't know while they play baseball in Toronto than I as well.

Give this read and remember why it's much more fun to cheer the good parts than complain about the bad parts.

Stay in the fight, boys.

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.

Garbage Clowns Inc.

One of the most prominent narratives in sports journalism over the last decade has been between the "established" sports media, meaning large newspapers and television sports networks, and "bloggers", which at the time meant freelance sportswriters who owned their own smaller websites or blogs. There were obvious power dynamics that played into the divide, as the more established journalists were funded by huge private companies and corporations, which granted them opportunities and benefits the bloggers did not have. Bloggers were much quicker to jump on the rapidly expanding field of advanced statistics, now a cornerstone of baseball analysis, and they also weren't shy about letting major sports media know how behind the times they were, were didn't really ingratiate them.

For people who live and breathe baseball, advanced stats and sports blogging was an easy sell. It was a completely new way to look at something that had been around for more than 100 years. It was smart and better than anything else that was being said and everyone who write it knew that.

In Toronto, there were a few exemplary bogs who typified the "blogger" trend, with the two most well-known ones being Drunk Jays Fans and Ghostrunner on First. I started reading DJF, as it was affectionately known, the day after Roy Halladay threw a complete game against A.J. Burnett, who was returning to Toronto for the first time since leaving for New York. The Jays won 5-1.

DJF quickly replaced the newspaper in terms of what I turned to for my Blue Jays news and became an integral part of my daily routine.

In what I considered a coup, Canadian sports network The Score hired all of the cities best young bloggers and writers to publish their online content for them. This meant that DJF got bigger and more resources, while Ghostrunner on First sort of (longer story that I won't elaborate on) turned into the excellent blog Getting Blanked, which focused on all of MLB, as opposed to just the Blue Jays. Everything that The Score made at the time was a perfect mixture of young, smart, engaging, and creative writers being given full reign to make whatever they wanted. Or at least, that's how it seemed to me at the time. It was the best sports journalism that I've ever read and profoundly shaped my identity as a sports fan.

Recently, DJF creator Andrew Stoeten posted a link, through the Wayback Machine archive, to an old post and it immediately sent me down a hole reading posts. One in particular was from Getting Blanked at the start of the 2013 season, which was a very significant time to be a Blue Jays fan. During the preceding off-season, the team had made what is probably the biggest trade in franchise history and unloaded a tonne of young prospects for many established veterans. They also traded one of the current best pitchers in baseball for R.A. Dickey, who is not one of the current best pitchers in baseball, but is still okay!

The trades made in that time turned out to be a flop, as Jose Reyes never lived up to his previous success and turned out to be a piece of hit, Josh Johnson was hot garbage, and Dickey never regained the form that won him the Cy Young award in 2012. Mark Buerhle was really great though! Papa Buerhle!

Still, 2013 was a time of unbridled optimism, as it seemed like the Toronto Blue Jays were destined for the World Series. They didn't get near sniffing the playoffs and it's funny to think that that team, which didn't exist all that long ago, didn't feature Josh, or Russell, or Stroman, or Tulo. Osuna was still way down in the minors and all Jays fans thought Kevin Pillar was bad.

I think it would be fun to re-visit this post and answer the questions posed about the then-upcoming 2013 Toronto Blue Jays season:

The Questions:

Can Ricky Romero rebound after a horrendous season?

No.

Can Brandon Morrow remain healthy for an entire season?

No.

How will R.A. Dickey’s different knuckleballs perform in a different environment after a season in which his approach wasn’t yet known by opposing hitters?

Not great.

Is Mark Buehrle in the American League East really going to be anything more than a back of the rotation starter?

No. Still good though!

Will Josh Johnson’s fastball ever be as good as it once was? Will he be able to throw breaking pitches for strikes?

No. No.

Can J.P. Arencibia actually manage to avoid getting out in more than  70% of his plate appearances?

No.

Can Edwin Encarnacion carry on with his success from last year?

Yes!

Can Adam Lind actually hit left handed pitching? Will he actually be worth an entire win above what a replacement player might offer?

No. Yes.

Who will emerge as the starting second baseman?

No one.

Will Brett Lawrie emerge as anything other than an adrenaline fuelled swing machine with little power?

No.

How will Jose Reyes adapt his game and hamstrings to the turf at Rogers Centre?

By getting hurt in the first month.

What on earth can we expect from Melky Cabrera coming off his embarrassing drug suspension?

A half a season of sub-par play.

Can Colby Rasmus exhibit the least bit of plate discipline in terms of both strike zone knowledge and swing mechanics?

Yes!

How will Jose Bautista adapt his swing – one so dependent on maximizing leverage through body weight transfer – after a serious wrist injury?

He's getting hurt again.

Who is going to emerge as the team’s closer? Both options – Casey Janssen (currently the first choice) and Sergio Santos – are coming off surgery that can’t merely be shrugged off.

Casey Janssen will be good!

Swing and a Drive

Earlier this year, I wrote a post in which I tried to sum my feelings about Edwin Encarnacion's time as a Blue Jay because I assumed that his then-impending free agency meant that his time on the team was coming to a close. It turns out I was correct, because Edwin just signed a contract with Cleveland.

:(

Edwin played on the Blue Jays for eight years. That is a big chunk of my life. Eddie played on the Blue Jays for 29% of my life. I was a very different person when Edwin came to the Jays. That was one band, two degrees, and many relationships ago.

As I said in the post I linked above, he wasn't an immediate hit, but was a big project, which in turn made me love him even more and gave me a sense of ownership about him. His time in Toronto ran the whole gamut of emotions: disappointment, frustration, hope, awe, and, mostly, just pure fucking joy. He was amazing to watch. I have said it many times while watching games that Eddie is my favourite player to watch hit home runs.

But I don't want to just re-type my previous post. If you know me, you know that I love Eddie and if you don't, you'll get a good idea from that blog.

I'm pretty sad about Edwin leaving. It sucks. As much as things about baseball can be great, there is always an inverse part that pulls you back down. We got the best of Eddie, but now we have to watch him go before his time in the league is done. It sucks. I more or less knew that he was going to leave, but it still feels crummy. Crummier than I thought it would.

Here's my official eulogy for Edwin Encarnacion as a Blue Jay:

It's fitting that Edwin's last game as a Blue Jay was a home game during the 2016 ALCS, because watching him mash home runs was the only fun part of watching the Blue Jays in 2012 and the Jays being in the playoffs seemed so impossible that I never even considered it.

I'm trying to find a silver lining to all of this and this is what I've come up with so far:

The fact that I feel so sad about a baseball player leaving a team after 8 years is, if anything, proof of the substantial positive emotional impact that sports can have on your life. Sports can be simple reactions like muttering "fuck" at a call or they can be over the top reactions like when I ran into my kitchen after Edwin walked off the Orioles this year. Underlying all of that is the reaction I am currently having, which is informed by a very emotional connection that many people are a part of. My personal connection to baseball can never be replicated by anyone else. Thank you so very much Edwin Encarnación for playing such a big role in that.

I'll never forget your time in Toronto as long a I live.

Words that I'll Read and Re-Write

From yesterday:

"I certainly feel like I need to eulogize Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion, but maybe I'll wait until the team's playoff fate is decided before I do that."

I think that one of them, uhhhhh, did something yesterday?




An incredibly exciting game. One of the very best in Blue Jays history.

After playing what then could have been his last home game as a Blue Jay against Baltimore last week, Edwin said something to the effect of "That's not the way I want to go out." He did much more than that, providing me, and all Jays fans, with a moment that will live forever. I jumped up and yelled "Oh my god!" immediately running back and forth across my apartment. The raised arms with the bat falling. Taking the parrot for a walk in the most dramatic fashion possible. These are the moments that you wait and hope for as a baseball fan and Toronto Blue Jays fans have been lucky enough to experience many of them over the last two years because of the high number of special players on the team.

In Eddie's words, from his post-game, champagne-soaked interview:

"Yeah, that's why I want to come back here. And I did it. Yeaaaaahhhhhh!"

Before I go on to give my thoughts about Edwin Encarnacion, I feel that I should link to an excellent article by John Lott on Edwin from last week:

Lott: Edwin Encarnacion can see the end of his Blue Jay career coming, but isn't ready for it yet

I feel a fierce sense of pride and ownership towards Edwin Encarnacion. He's been on the Jays for a long time (came in a trade for SCOTT ROLEN in 2009!) and the early days of that was markedly different from the huge success he has achieved with the team over the last few years. He hit for a bit of power, hitting 5 home runs in four-game series twice in 2010, but was abysmal playing 3rd base and ultimately a mixed bag. He was thrown into the trade because the Jays needed someone to replace Rolen at third and that made me a little antagonistic towards him at first. The joy of watching Scotty fuckin' Rolen play third base for the Jays had been taken away from me, so naturally the guy who replaced him seemed like just the worst.

Eddie's nickname at this time was "E5", the scoring note for an error by a third baseman, and boy, was it ever apt. Throws kind of went everywhere. But he had his moments. I remember going to a game early on in the 2012 season with my brother while talking with him about which player t-shirt he would like to get, him jokingly suggesting "E5" because he had piled up a decent amount of home runs early in the season. The thing is, though, that Edwin never stopped hitting them that year and ended up with 42 at year's end to go along with a move to first base. After Jose Bautista had his coming out party in 2010, Edwin followed and the Jays all of a sudden had as potent of a 3-4 combination that existed in major league baseball.

Edwin hasn't let up since and has turned into one of the true offensive forces in the game. A once-in-a-generation player for this team. Edwin and Jose Bautista are Toronto's "Bash Brothers" or "Manny and Papi". An offensive force that is as fun to watch as they are talented and something that the rest of the league wishes they could have. During Spring Training in 2014 my dad and I were talking about the team and he described Edwin at-bats as "just a joy to watch". There is no better way to describe them.

While Edwin was still struggling through his 2009-2011 seasons with the Jays, Jose Bautista was at the peak of his career. Jose was everything. Maybe the best position player in the league and a peerless power hitter. Couple this with a fiery temper, and we (Jays fans) all thought he was the best thing to happen to the team in a long time. The prospect hugging that I had gotten used to with the Jays suddenly turned into "We can't waste this version of Jose Bautista." Something I thought was weird though, was that out of all the players on the team, Jose seemed to be best friends with Edwin Encarnacion.

The first time I noted this was when the two of them went on a fishing trip together on a day off. Why wasn't Jose friends with the better players on the team? It didn't make a lot of sense to me at the time, but is really funny to think of in hindsight. The two of them started to do a "flex" celebration after one of them hit a home run, which is absolutely the precursor to the popular wild and complicated handshakes that the Jays have with each other now.

Only after a few seasons did I start to get a sense of Edwin's personality and how he is the most care-free, joyous, and funny guy on the team. A big part of this is that he rarely does interviews in English, so Torontonians who receive most of their information on players through English media outlets aren't as privy to his character as his teammates are. His teammates all seem to love him, so it's been a neat ride over the 8 years of discovering the type of guy he is through small snapshots of clubhouse life through twitter and instagram.

Once I saw what Edwin was actually like, it was hard to believe I ever disliked him and thought he was bad at baseball. I hate that I ever thought he was bad at baseball, because he brings a great joie de vivre to the Jays is absolutely integral to the team's identity and also its success.

Case in point is the interview he did after hitting a colossal moonshot in the 11th inning yesterday that also sent the team to the ALDS.

First he gives a fairly standard answer, through a translator, to the fairly standard question of "What were you thinking in that at-bat?" The reporter then asks about his apparent goodbye salute to the 'Dome and Edwin responds, in heavily-accented English:

"Thass why, thass why I wanna come back here because that happened tonight! Yeaaaahhhh!"

This sounded like it was little league player talking about a walk-off home run he had just hit to give his friends the victory and I think that that type of boyhood astonishment and "Man, that thing I just did? That was awesome!" tone is so endearing and amazing. It makes me happy to see him succeed after he endured early in his career here and it certainly contributes to the "older brother" feeling I have towards him, despite him being a Dominican man who is 6 years my senior.

I never want him to leave because there is no doubt in my mind that if he stayed he would become a David Ortiz-type figure for Toronto. And I just love watching him play so much. But he might. He probably will.

But that's also a conversation for December. For now the conversations should all be about the home run he hit last night and how we've seen him do it so many times before and we're going to see him do it a few more times this October.

Luck Be a Lady Tonight

After the Toronto Blue Jays lost back-to-back series against the Boston Red Sox and Tampa Bay Rays, dropping 2 out of 3 games to each, most Jays fans had resigned themselves to the fact that the team would probably be participating in the Wild Card play-in game. I tried to convince myself that they would go on a big winning streak and jump over Boston one last time to win the division, but I think that was mostly a deliberately optimistic response to the deluge of overly-negative haters in Toronto (a problem that plagues the city's sports teams), and I think deep, deep down, I mostly knew they were going to the Wild Card game.

This will be a significant episode in my life as a Blue Jays fan because it's something that's never happened before. The stupid, ridiculous, engaging, and exciting one-game Wild Card game was brought in in 2012 with the purpose of keeping more teams in the playoff hunt later into the season and, in the process, keeping more fanbases interested for longer. Despite how silly I might think a one-game playoff is, it has, without a doubt, done what it was intended to. I personally don't think that the game of baseball is well-suited to the "win and you're in" style of the game the way that American Football is. But it is must-watch. I don't want the Jays to participate in it, because any team can be great for just one game and no matter how you slice it, the Jays' chances are 50%. I would love if they had won the division and guaranteed a best-of-5 series. But that chance, the darker 50% chance, is what makes it crazy. You don't know what's going to happen.

Like I said, nothing like this has happened to the Blue Jays before. The Wild Card game is new and this is the first time that the Jays have participated in it, so I'll remember it forever. It'll either be an addition to last year's story of winning and playoff participation led by Jose, Eddie, Tulo, Russ, Josh, or it will be another addition to the much longer story of the team falling just short of contention.

But at least they're playing at home. It will be crazy and it will be loud.

I've really felt the need to write about the end of this baseball season and the myriad feelings it has wrought, but it's hard to do so and make it relevant always and not just tied to one specific weekend in the 2016 season. A sportswriter I am not. I certainly feel like I need to eulogize Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion, but maybe I'll wait until the team's playoff fate is decided before I do that.

Beat the fucking Orioles guys. Let's go.

Don't Forget the Good Parts

From Monday to Wednesday of this week, the Blue Jays played a three game series against the New York Yankees in New York. The Jays entered the series in first place, 6.5 games ahead of the Yankees, but lost all three and now sit a game behind the Boston Red Sox for the division lead and just 3.5 games ahead of the Yankees.

It was a rough series, to be sure, but I think that my days of huffing and puffing and being anxious when the Blue Jays lose are past me. I still always want the Jays to win and I still get that tightness in my chest during close and stressful games, but I don't beat myself up about losses when they happen. A big part of this is that, if we're being realistic, 2015 was the most fun Blue Jays season that I will ever experience. This doesn't mean that there won't be great moments in the future or that I'm not having fun watching the team anymore. It's more that last season came right at the perfect time and was magical and ethereal and unbelievable. It will be hard to recreate that. A lot of the stress I used to tie to the team was due to me always hoping for something like 2015 to happen. Now it has and my experience as a fan is changing.

Case point is the game from which the above photo comes from. The Jays coughed up a late lead and were behind 7-4 when they started an amazing late-inning rally to score two runs and draw close to tying the game. Edwin Encarnacion got boned on a catcher's interference miscall and then did the unthinkable and legged out an infield hit. A few missteps by the Yankees combined to let the Jays draw close to overtaking the lead. Justin Smoak hit a ball very deep, but Bret Gardner jumped to make an amazing catch (pictured above) on a ball that was about a foot away from being a home run and seemed destined to drive in runs.

There was certainly the customary giant exhale after the pressure of a tight ballgame was released, but no anger came. I was more just happy that I got to witness such a great game. After the catch, Gardner yelled and fist-pumped which was very uncharacteristic for the normally stoic and even-keel Yankees. Part of me even liked seeing the Yankees crack and show emotion like that.

I think that this is a sign of me maturing as a baseball fan and continuing further down the path of valuing the narrative of a game over the result. To be sure, I still root as hard as I can for the Jays, but I would rather seeing a pitchers' duel in which the winning run is driven in by Kevin Pillar than a blowout that ensures a win. I think part of this comes from Roger Angell's books which tell the narrative of a team and its season. The personal stories of the players and cities is really the meat of baseball and what keeps fans coming back. Not the trophies.

I would say I've even grown to a point of respecting rivals. I recognize the history and cultural value that surrounds the New York Yankees. As much as I hate how the team has beaten on the Jays consistently throughout my existence, they are the Yankees and that is what they do.

Not Boston though. I think Pedroia will have to retire before I can even begin to start coming around on that shitpile of a franchise.

I could say something like "the last two years have marked a turning point in my life as a baseball fan", but that is just not true. My experience watching and following baseball is an ever-changing journey that takes on a lot of new parts all the time. The true beauty of something that you keep with you your whole life is that it grows with you and changes just like you do.

Defend With Me the Liberties of Day and Mysteries of Night

During last season, there were so many amazing moments for the Toronto Blue Jays that it is very easy to forget many of them in lieu of the very memorable major moments. I mean, obviously Jose Bautista throwing his bat into the other team's dugout after the most significant hit of the season is going to take precedence in my mind over something like Danny Valencia hitting a home run in Kansas City during a game the Jays lost. But the narrative of the 2015 Toronto Blue Jays was made up of so many stories that all contributed to the excitement surrounding the team.

I could rattle off about 50 different plays that made me jump out of my seat last year, but this one is one of my favourites:

The New York Yankees came to Toronto on September 21st for a three game series, trailing the Jays by 3 & 1/2 games. It was exhilarating to see the Jays in first place, but September was also a stressful month schedule-wise because of how many games would be against Toronto's division rivals. First the Jays had swept the Yanks in New York, then the Yankees came in and took two out of three in Toronto. The Jays were ahead by a nose, but that could change quickly if the Yankees won a series against Toronto. It was a weird (great) time as a Jays fan because on one hand you felt on top of the world and confident in the team, as it truly felt like they could do anything, but there was also a familiar sense of doubt that crept in at moments like these. I had seen the team collapse late in the season so many times before, so even though I knew that the Jays were the best team in the league, there was a tiny negative voice trying to drag this down in the back of my mind.

David Price started the game and it turned out to be a very tight game throughout. The Jays came into the 8th inning leading 4-0, needing the bullpen to hold the Yankees in check to secure the win. Aaron Sanchez, the team's right-handed set-up man, had had a bit of a problem with his control all season and promptly walked the light-hitting shortstop Didi Gregorius (a great baseball name). Dustin Ackely followed this with a single and suddenly there was two runners on and a win that seemed to be in-hand was very much falling out of hand. There were still no outs, so the Yankees scoring and tying the game, or worse, taking the lead, was not an unreasonable expectation. Given the playoff implications of this game, that the Yankees could jump up a whole game in the standings by winning, the atmosphere was extremely tense. I was watching the game in the apartment I share with Rebecca and I couldn't sit still. I could feel my discomfort in my chest.

For the last 22 years, the New York Yankees had routinely made an example of the Toronto Blue Jays in their yearly marches to the playoffs. I had experienced the Yankees crushing my excitement about baseball in Toronto far too many times. At one point the Jays had lost 17 straight games at Yankee Stadium. This season was different though and the Blue Jays seemed to be getting the better of the Yankees at much better clip.

Aaron Sanchez was taken out of the game and left-handed curveball virtuoso Brett Cecil was brought into the game. Brett Cecil is one of the longest-serving Blue Jays on the current roster. Once part of a promising, young starting rotation in 2010, Cecil had trouble replicating that success over the next two years and spent most of 2011-12 in AAA. Cecil found his place in 2013 after beginning the season in the bullpen and becoming a lights-out left-handed reliever for high-leverage situations. During the 2013, '14 and '15 seasons, Cecil was one of the best and most valuable bullpen pieces in all of baseball.

The at-bat he was coming into against Jacoby Ellsbury was a very high-leverage situation. This means that it would probably mean a lot to the eventual outcome of the game. Ellsbury hit a single and now the Yankees were on the board. This was not the way that Jays fans wanted a series against the Yankees at home to start. The Jays had backed themselves into a corner and basically the only way out was strikeouts because anything else would probably score runs. Striking out batters, especially when there are runners on and the batter is trying to put the ball in play, is very hard.

Tell 'em Britney:

With the score now 4-1 and there still being two runners on with no outs, Cecil struck out the Yankees excellent left fielder Brett Gardner on a beautiful curveball. I finally exhaled. One out.

Alex Rodriguez, one of the very best players in baseball history, someone who stands a reasonable chance to break the all-time home run record, came up next. Rodriguez has had a tumultuous relationship with Blue Jays fans since this happened. Again, Brett Cecil struck him out on a curveball that looked like it was by the hand of fucking Michelangelo.

Now confidence began to swell. I felt a lot of pride towards Cecil because he had been on the Jays for some of the bad years. He had come up in 2009, when there weren't many redeeming factors about the team, and had been there for the monumental disappointment of the 2013 season. On a team that was mostly made up of new faces, Cecil was a crucial link to the team's past. He also loves really bad rock/metal like Three Days Grace and Avenged Sevenfold and him being so unabashedly into something that lame just makes like him even more. He's always been a guy I rooted for and genuinely wished well on, so seeing him succeed made me really happy.

Brian McCann came up and though the stress of the first two at-bats had lessened, he still posed a huge threat, as he has always been a more than capable hitter and has significant power. At this point my thoughts had turned from "Okay Brett, get the team out of this" to "Strike this fucker the fuck out right now Brett". Once again, curveball, down.




I jumped up and down on the couch. Cecil dropping anvils on Gardner, A-Rod, and McCann consecutively to strike them all out in the top of the 8th was one of the best pitching performances I had ever seen. This is Ricky Vaughn coming in at the end of Major League. You just need to substitute "Shepherd of Fire" for "Wild Thing".

Many people often mistake the last outs recorded by the winning team to be the most impactful because they seal the victory, but that is incorrect. Brett Cecil came in here in what was without a doubt the biggest situation the season up to that point and, as they correctly mention in the above video, the biggest moment of his career. This is the type of thing that only happens once a season, if you are lucky.

This was more or less eclipsed two days when Russell Martin hit a huge 3-run home run to put the Yankees away for good in 2015, but I swear to God, I will remember Brett Cecil striking out the side as a definitive moment of the 2015 Toronto Blue Jays for my whole goddamn life.

Sillhouette

With the Major League Baseball season inching ever closer and Spring Training coming closer to its end, I would like to do something I've never done on imusicalgenius.blogspot.com and direct you to a previous post of mine.

Last year (season) I did much more Jays writing on this blog than I ever have in the past. This is of course because the team went on a historic run, basically didn't lose for two months, won the division, won the Divisional Series in the craziest way possible and basically grabbed a country by the face and said "Look at us". I suddenly had things I could write about the team beyond "They are bad and I'm still watching". They were exciting in ways I wasn't used to.

I started a series called "Reasons to Love the 2015 Blue Jays" early-ish in the season, hoping that it would encapsulate why I loved some of the players on the team so much and maybe explain why I kept coming back to the Toronto Blue Jays year in, year out. Ultimately I kind of stopped this because I was too busy watching the games. I've got a memory tied to everything that happened and remember exactly where I was for everything. I didn't to showcase the players when they were doing a much better job of it every goddamn day on the field.

I think that I will do something along these lines this year too.

I still think the stuff I wrote is pretty good, so today I would like to point you to my post on Kevin Pillar, which, to brag a little bit, was written very early on in his 2015 coming out party.

I fucking love me some Kevin Pillar.

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.

October 14th, 2015

On October 8th, I resolved that I had to buy a ticket to see the Blue Jays play a playoff game at home. My mom has told me that I had been to a playoff game, but given that the last four times the Jays before 2015 were 1989, 91, 92 and 93, and I was 0, 2, 3, and 4 in those years, my memories of those playoff drives are hazy recollections of Toronto freaking out about Joe's home run at best. They were about to play their first that afternoon and I figured that buying a ticket for the second game would be a good bet, in case the series ended before it came back to Toronto for the 5th game. I paid a 70% mark-up on a 500-level ticket and watched the Jays lose in 14 innings on October 9th, to fall within one game of a series loss. That was an absolute heart-breaker of a game to be at, but the experience of being at a playoff game in a hot crowd was just wonderful.

I never lost faith in the idea that the Jays would come back and win the series, despite being down 0-2 and going to Texas, but I had resigned to the fact that the October 9th game would be my only playoff experience for 2015 and I was happy with that.

The Jays then won both games in Texas, like I knew they would.

I came home on Tuesday morning to find a note from my mom saying that her and my dad had gotten seats for the 5th game of the series and that my dad had to work and couldn't go. In terms of surprises, this was pretty far up there. Not only was I going to a playoff game and not only was it in good seats, but I was going to see this series be decided.

By now, most of the world is passably familiar with how the game went. Really what you need is this:

I have been to a lot of Blue Jays games in my life. Probably more than 95% of people. This was the best and craziest, but most importantly, most emotional from a fan standpoint that I've ever been to. You could not ask for more from a baseball game. This game was up and down and up and that final up was just about the highest one you could get. Being a Jays fan, I experienced pretty much everything thing that you able to feel while watching a baseball game during it.

I've said this many times, but my family is a Blue Jays family. My mom found it was a great and affordable way to do things with my brother while she was a single parent. Hearing her describe the first game they went to, in 1983 is heart-warming. While they were at The Ex, the Jays were giving away free tickets to that afternoon's game, the Jays of course still playing at Exhibition Stadium at that time. Upon entering the gate, they found that the team was giving away free hats as well. My mom was supporting herself and my brother on just her salary as a new high school teacher, so to have something so affordable to do with him was absolutely great. From there, she started to buy more tickets, before eventually getting season's tickets in left field behind her favourite player, George Bell.

Before Wednesday's game, to our surprise, George Bell threw out the ceremonial first pitch. My mom immediately jumped up, in her George Bell jersey, and started screaming "GEEE-OOOORR-GGYYYYY!" and it put a smile on my face a mile wide. The two fans in front of us turned around to give us a thumbs up and we struck up a conversation with them. It turned out that they were from Long Island and had grown up with the game's starter Marcus Stroman. They showed a bunch of pictures of them with him and they cheered with us all game, giving high fives and hugs whenever the Jays got a hit or made a play. Given that Stro is my favourite Jay, it was a great and positive section of fans to be in.

As much as baseball is fun to watch, for me it also has a much deeper emotional resonance. It is a physical manifestation of my family's strength and bond. We've joked that main reason my dad, a life-long fan of the sport well before there was an MLB team in Toronto (He traveled to see a World Series game in New York in the 70's! He can remember his teacher putting playoff games on the radio during the 50's!), married my mom was the season tickets. They are truly in love and are a picture of a successful and loving marriage, and while it would be stupid to suggest that they got married because they were both ballfans, it would also be stupid to suggest that the Jays and baseball don't play at least some type of role in our family's relationship.

I always wondered why other kids went on vacations while my family didn't when I was younger. It seemed like every kid in my class got to go somewhere, while I stayed put in Toronto. It was only later that I realized that we got our Jays tickets every year instead. Maybe I was jealous when I was younger, but I'm certainly not now. Going to games for my whole life with my tried and true ballfan parents is how I learned to truly appreciate the game and all its subtleties; realize the importance of a lead-off walk, appreciate the pitcher throwing a 0-2 pitch in the dirt, runners taking an extra base. There's a lot that goes on in the game's quieter moments and when you become aware of this ebb and flow and the minor mindgames that accompany these miniature battles, it's when you become aware of the true beauty of baseball. It's through these that you realize what makes a great player great.

I hate to play the superiority card and talk about how I'm a good or a true baseball and Jays fan and most people at the game aren't, but following the shitshow at yesterday's game I kind of have to. There were two very drunk and very bro fans behind us at the game who were indicative of many of the fans there who clearly have no idea how to act at a baseball game. This has long been a condition that you have to deal with as a Jays fan, because Toronto is not a "baseball" city. Or maybe no city is a "baseball" city and most fans have no idea how to act at sporting events, but I know that when I went to a Mets game in New York, that they sure knew how to act. But Toronto does seem especially bad sometimes. The two bros behind us incessantly yelled "HAAAAMM-ELLLLLS!" all game and yelled that every Rangers batter was "A JOKE". I can understand being a vocal fan and cheering loudly, but if you are here to only heckle the other team and not cheer for your own, then fuck off and give your ticket to someone who actually cares. If you are calling Adrian Beltre, ye of 413 career home runs and 74.9 career WAR, objectively one of the best 3rd basemen of all-time and one of the finest ballplayers of the last 20 years, a joke, then all you are doing is calling attention to how much of a joke you are and how little you know about the game.

Of course the biggest embarrassment in the game was when the fans started to throw beer cans onto the field following an odd play. For the record, the umps absolutely made the correct call and double checked with the office in New York to make sure. They did absolutely nothing wrong and went out of their way to make sure that they didn't. The imagined slights that fanbase keeps yelling about are starting to get tiresome. NEVER THROW SOMETHING ONTO THE FIELD. If you do, you deserve to get kicked out and I hope you do. There are few things that say "I don't know shit about baseballs and am knee-jerk reaction garbage" than what happened last night. As soon as the downpour from the 500's started, I said "Embarrassing." and our new friends from New York agreed with me.

Your own players were telling you to stop. Fuck all of you.

But this does not detract from what followed that inning. Elvis Andrus forgetting how to field, a bases-loaded RBI by Josh and then, of course, Joseeeee, Jose, Jose, Jose.

I commonly tell a story, mostly about how you should never give up hope on your team, in which my Dad ceded going to game 6 of the 1993 World Series in favour of a possible game 7. This meant that my mom got to see Joe Carter's walk-off home run to win the World Series in person. In terms of Jays moments, you can't get better than that. That is her personal "Jays Moment". 

It has been different for me, because I have watched mostly out-of-contention teams throughout my life and each of my favourite moments have been singular player accomplishments. I was at the Halladay-Burnett game, which was a big one, Jose's 2010/11 seasons were also up there, watching Carlos Delgado mash for 12 years, everything that was Roy Halladay, I couldn't say that I had my own moment in Jays history until yesterday.

In my last post I mentioned that the beauty of the playoffs is that you can't expect what comes next and you never know what type of things can go right. Of course this also goes the other way, as for 15 minutes or so many people that the Jays could possibly lose the series on a momentary defensive lapse by Mr. Defense, Russ Martin. To have gone 22 years without playoffs, go down 0-2 and then battle back at the away park to tie the series, only to lose it on a mind-boggling, albeit correctly-called, play would have been the ultimate injustice. To go all-in trading for the biggest names in baseball only to lose in the first round. In my mind, I knew it wouldn't end like that, it couldn't. My mom and I immediately stood up to sing "OK Blue Jays" as loud as we could.

Jose Bautista has gotten a little bit of a rotten deal in Toronto. For some reason, until yesterday, the city has been very hesitant to embrace him as the home run-on-base-arm strength machine that he is. First it was because he was too good, too fast. Then because he yelled at the umpires too much. Maybe all the white Torontonians thought he was too Hispanic, I wouldn't be surprised. Everyone refused to accept that he was "the guy" despite the fact that he could not more obviously be "the guy". He is a generational talent who excels in many aspects of the game and seems to be a strong presence among his teammates. He is the best right fielder of this decade. He magically turned around his career out of nowhere with the Blu Jays, and still Toronto was hesitant to embrace him as our baseball overlord.

It had to be Jose. All along, it had to be Jose. After the high tensions of the seventh inning and the fans going crazy and the high pressure situation he got himself in, it had to be Jose.

This will forever be my Jays moment. I was there and nothing can ever erase that. It really does feel that the last 26 years of my existence as a Jays fan, all the games I went to, crying when my Dad and I left early during a blowout as a child, all the games watched at home bemoaning the lack of getting the runner at third home, re-watching plays from '92 and '93, it was all just a build up to the release of this specific moment. Jose's home run was perfect in every way and even though I was in a building filled with 54,000 people and we were packed into tight seats in section 125, it felt like my mom and I had our own little space there in seats 6 and 7. I could not imagine a more perfect way to celebrate the home run than I did, hugging my mom beside me.

Go Jays.