Who Am I?

If you’re a baseball blogger, then I guess you might call me your worst nightmare. See, I’m the embodiment of everything that comes to the mind of your average privileged jock or insular sportswriter as they curl their lip around the very essence of the word. Blogger. Scum.

A brief summary of my credentials: post-grad Slacker - capital S - living at subsistence level lacks gainful employment or permanent residence (job, not career; house, not home). Is working on messy, unpublishable first novel on spec, with little to no imminent publication prospects. My internet credentials are slim – a handful of posts over at Robbie Alomar’s defunct All Your Base Are Belong To Rios a few years ago would be the most relevant.

Could I be any more self-parody? You tell me. But along with whatever else might define me, I’ve been a Blue Jay fanboy since the day in 1993 when seven-year-old me turned to my father and asked why Duane Ward was playing left field. (Sadly, Turner was the far inferior player to Duane, and Duane was about to lose his career to arm troubles.) A steady diet of Tom and Jerry was my baby formula as I struggled through Shawn Green and Alex Gonzalez’s formative years and a lot of hyperbole about how good Juan Guzman and Joe Carter used to be. John Olerud for Robert Person almost sapped me of my Blue Jay blood, but after I moved to Toronto in 1998 it was regular attendance at the Dome and years of waiting for the trifecta of future Cy Young Award winners to materialize in three guys named Halladay, Carpenter and Escobar (2-for-3). I’ve been on the left coast for half a decade now and seen my devotion wane a touch out of necessity more than anything else, but I’ve let MLBTR and the Drunks guide me even through the darkest of cable-less days.

Now if all this seems a little too honest and heartfelt for the cynics among you, don’t be fooled. I won’t do the Angell thing and wax poetic about the colour of the outfield grass (though the odd literary or lyrical reference isn’t out of the question), and I can be an irreverent ass when I find a contentious topic worth defending. (For example, I fully expect the 2011 Orioles to finish ahead of the Blue Jays. While the additions of Reynolds, Hardy, Lee and an aging Guerrero aren’t likely to transform a 66-win team into a 100-win team, the losses of Wells, Marcum, Buck and Downs will do much on their own to make up a 20-game gap. I took a lot of flak for it over at Getting Blanked but we’ll see how things falls out.)

Anyway, I can be snide but I’m not a stats geek – I trust WAR and FIP to some extent, but I couldn’t define them – and my beer goggles are in the filing cabinet these days, so I’ll need to find something else to define myself against the twitterspheric masses. Hope you stick around.