Conspiracy Theories

Maybe it's the 3000 km of emotional distance between me and the former Skydome, or maybe it's the fact that I only have time to watch 3 or 4 games a week - or hell, maybe it's just cynical ego-stoking emerging from some dark psychological place in light of my preseason predictions - but I can't find it in me to get worked up about the Jays' struggles over the past few weeks.

Coming out of last year, if I had one concern it was that Anthopoulos would look at those 85 wins, think that the Jays were a passably competitive team, and take a rash approach towards his restocking of the system, passing on higher-ceiling guys for guys who were closer to the majors. And while it was fun to think that a Marcum-Romero-Morrow trifecta could stand up to anyone in the playoffs, and that with a few significant adds a lineup built around Bautista, Wells and Lind could be potent, it would have been shortsighted. Over the offseason, AA seemingly did everything within his power to separate me from my disillusions, and when the Shaun Marcum trade came down the chute I realized something: I hadn't gone far enough. All the front office's talk about "building" was side-of-the-mouth lip service to the casual fan, and this was a classic rebuild.

Trading a 29 year old ace on a team-friendly contract was simply not a move that a club that feels itself to be close is going to make. The rest of the offseason seemed devoted to scouring the bottom of the barrel for retreads, with a focus on a certain build: the fast, shitty outfielder. Patterson, Davis and Podsednik are all fair-to-mediocre hitters with questionable defense who bring one definable skill to the table: basestealing. Add a Mike McCoy to the mix, and suddenly what was a plodding clump of power hitters becomes one of the fastest teams in baseball. New manager, new philosophy - and maybe, in light of the fact that they didn't see winning the AL East as a possibility and a year after leading the world in home runs, the Jays' marketing team thought that winning an irrelevant statistical category was the best way to the casual fan's heart. If Joe Plumber could say to his friends in 2010, "You know, man, the Jays are leading the world in jacks this year," then maybe Jill Plumber could say to her friends in 2011, "The Jays are the fastest team in baseball!"

Cynical? Sure. But it makes for a damn good advertising montage. My point is, you've got to take this season with a grain of salt. Everything about it - the managing, the general managing, the playing. This team is the Las Vegas and New Hampshire Blue Jays as much as it is the Toronto Blue Jays. As I was scouring my twitter feed for player reactions in the wake of Saturday's no-hitter, I realized I was following more minor league players than major league players. That's the makeup of this roster.

I'll admit that Farrell hasn't done everything to ingratiate himself with the intelligent fans in the crowd, and perhaps his approach does raise some questions about the old adage that pitchers don't make good managers. But it's early enough in his managerial career that it's very difficult to distinguish what his rationale is. We simply don't know what MO he's been provided behind the scenes. So sit back, enjoy Jose Bautista channeling Carlos Delgado circa 2000, and prepare yourself for some pain. Somehow, we're still better than the Orioles.

No-no: The Disappointment

Being the itinerant slacker that I so proudly am, my housing arrangements are often precarious and sometimes quite unexpected. It was about nine months ago that I left the salt-sniffing female I happened to be rooming with at the time to discover the homeless hippie in her living room, where she very zenly and peaceably threw him out onto the street. Needless to say, both I and Body-Shop girl have since moved onto slightly more palatable living arrangements.

So in some ways, I guess, it shouldn't be all that shocking that it was in the company of a tanned backpacking stranger that I found myself sitting on my couch Saturday afternoon watching history unfold. For six innings, as I idly absorbed the depressing failure of my team, we shared glorious memories of drunken misadventures as impoverished travelers (she in southeast Asia, I in backwoods Saskatchewan, but what's the difference?). Then, as the sixth inning ended, the Sportsnet camera followed Justin Verlander to the Tigers' dugout and I heard Buck's voice catch. At that point, I sat up, turned up the volume, and proceeded to tune out fresh-off-the-plane-from-Thailand's comments about clothing and Italian coffee for the rest of the afternoon. Gracious host, I am not.

I must admit, it was a little bit disorienting. I've always had an obsession with the broken promise of the no-hitter. I start counting the outs early and lose myself in the dream of what it all could mean. In one of the very first baseball games I can recall watching - it must have been '94 or '95 - Pat Hentgen carried a perfect game into the fourth inning. I was delirious with possibility, but my father warned me three good innings wasn't a huge deal. Sure enough, it was over by the fifth.

As my fanhood progressed, I continued to hope every time a pitcher came out showing strong stuff. If a guy dominated the first inning, by the second I'd be on the edge of my seat, waiting anxiously to see if this was the night I'd see history unfold. I was eternally searching for that pitcher's ideal, honing in on potential targets. For a while in the mid-90s, I was enamored with Marty Janzen and Huck Flener. Looking at their career lines, I can't imagine why, though I blame Jerry Howarth.

Of course, the childhood game that really niggled at me was the Higginson game. My memories seem to be from the TV footage, but I've been told I was there in person (and speaking of all this talk of post-facto no-no commemorative tickets, that's a ticket I'd love to dig up), but either way, the game has lived on in my imagination. If only it weren't for Felipe Crespo, I thought to myself for years, it would have been a perfect game! I was 13 years old, and I thought I'd seen the rarest of rare feats, even in the wake of Higginson's homer. In the years afterward, I had a few heated arguments over whether Halladay's game was more impressive than Kerry Wood's 20-strikeout game from earlier that summer. Maybe it wasn't, in retrospect, but who cares? I know what I saw, and it was historic.

As the years passed, I began to realize that a pitcher dominating for a few innings at a time wasn't all that rare a feat at all, but it didn't hinder my hopes. Every time I saw a great game for five or six innings, I would start thinking no-no, he's got a no-no - often before the lineup had even turned over once. I even remember one game he-who-shall-not-be-named threw against the A's. If I recall correctly, he wound up surrendering just two singles, both to the same hitter, one of the infield variety. I hated E---- L---- as much as the next Jays fan - but hey, a great game is a great game.

The one that sticks out in my mind - even, maybe, over the ones that lasted into the ninth inning - was Shaun Marcum's six-inning no-hitter against Tampa Bay on May 13, 2007. I was sitting directly behind the plate with my grandmother, a passionate Blue Jays fan who was nearly blind by then. I dared to dream early - maybe the third - and at a certain point I grew terrified that he wasn't going to finish the game. He was straight out of the bullpen, he was on a pitchcount - but goddamnit, it was a no-hitter.

It was agonizing trying to communicate what was happening. My grandmother, who could barely see the field, was left to feed off of my excitement. She didn't seem to understand why I cared so much, since nothing much seemed to happening on the field. She was a dyed-in-the-wool Jays fan from the late 80s, but the kind of casual female fan who's more interested in wearing the jersey and cheering frantically than in actually understanding the finer points of the game itself. In her old age the ballpark experience was more about the crowd than the game. When Jason Frasor came on in the seventh to give up the Carlos Pena homer that lost not only the no-no but also the game, I left the park feeling not only that I'd been cheated of history, but that my grandmother had missed out entirely on the momentousness of the occasion.

Later, of course, there was the McGowan game. And then - of course - the Morrow game last year.

For each of those games, I was counting outs from pretty early in the ballgame, keenly aware of what was at stake. When I think back now, I'm struck more than anything by how many close calls there have been. Romero against the White Sox into the eighth. Several other Marcum games from 2007 and 2008. Brett Cecil perfect into the 7th last year.

What strikes me as odd is, given how many times I've watched my pitcher carry a game deep, how rarely I can remember the Jays being on the other side the same kind of pitching gem. Though I'm sure there have been plenty of six-inning no-nos I've simply forgotten about because it wasn't my guy on the mound, I don't think I've seen the same kind of ninth-inning drama as the Morrow/Halladay/McGowan games in other parks. And I certainly can't remember ever being at the Dome for a ninth-inning ovation for the opposition pitcher like we saw on TV on Saturday afternoon.

I can pinpoint exactly the moment when I transitioned from waiting for the game to be broken up to expecting - even hoping for - the no-hitter: E5's eighth inning at bat. The perfecto had just been broken up after JPA's epic battle, and I can't count how many times I've seen a pitcher walk a guy and then immediately surrender the hit, usually around the 6th or 7th inning. But when Edwin pounded a ball into the ground for an easy double play, suddenly Verlander was three outs away, with three AAA hitters on the docket for the bottom of the ninth. And a strange thing happened - my blood began to tingle.

Did I feel guilty? Absolutely. Would I have screamed out in frustration if Rajai Davis got a hit the same way I did when Jeff Baker singled off Dustin McGowan? No. I would have been enervated and relieved. But even within that relief there would have been disappointment. That slight hangover. The sense that I'd been brought to the brink and left standing, blue-balled by the baseball gods.

Like my grandmother, the girl on my couch didn't seem to understand what was so special about the baseball game. She was an athlete, but one of the ball-and-net variety, and although she seemed to be trying to invest herself in the game, I soon realized that she didn't actually understand it. Have you ever tried to explain baseball to someone who doesn't understand it? It's a complex game theoretically, much moreso than basketball/hockey/football. You have to try and equate outs with minutes, runs with goals, hits and walks with - I don't know - rushes? And although I think she may have come out of the afternoon with a rudimentary understanding of the game, I'm fairly certain the momentousness of the no-hitter was lost on her.

And in a way, maybe it was a little lost on me, too - or, at the very least, bittersweet. A game, for once, where I wasn't paying attention to the historic potential, at least not until very late. Wasn't counting outs, just registering a general lack of success for the home team. This bittersweetness somewhat echoes the disappointment that has marked my no-hitter experience in general. All the games broken up. The fact that my first came against my team. Halladay's perfect game last year - a game I couldn't watch, for the wrong team, and after over a decade of waiting anxiously for the promise of the Higginson game to be realized, even as he transformed himself into the best pitcher in baseball without needing that no-hitter. And even Saturday's game is coloured by the fact that Verlander threw his gem without having to face Jose Bautista. As a Jays fan, but also as a baseball fan, I wanted to see Bautista pinch-hit in the 9th. It would have provided symmetry, I guess: if Verlander had been beaten by Bautista as Halladay had been beaten by Higginson - and remember, it was the Tigers on that 1998 afternoon - it would have felt like due justice. Likewise, if Verlander had beaten Bautista, it would have been all the more impressive.

But alas, it was not to be. After five years, Verlander has his second no-hitter; after twenty, I have my first. And so, too, does the strange girl on the couch.

Games and Enigmas

Last week, I watched Game Seven of the first round series between Vancouver and Chicago with a closet hockey fan. The man is a born and bred BC boy, more at home in a forest clearing in July than a sports bar in December, but it turns out that in the five years I've known him he's shielded a passionate Canucks obsession inside that woolly leprechaun exterior. Personally, I generally find hockey the most tiresome sport in the world - it's about sixth or seventh on the list of sports I watch on TV, behind poker, maybe ahead of the Strongman competition - but the game was pretty much the zenith of tension and drama. Not just a Game Seven, a double-overtime Game Seven, a Game Seven with the underlying storyline of a blown 3-0 lead, a Game Seven with three years of playoff history in the balance. Had it been a third- or fourth-round matchup, it might have been in the conversation for most exciting game in hockey history, and I don't mean that hyperbolically.

Anyway, so I'm sitting there on the couch, watching the game mostly for entertainment value, kinda rooting for the local team but mostly ambivalent, and beside me my buddy is dying - wringing his hands, screaming out in frustration every time the Canucks blow another scoring opportunity, changing the channel out of frustration during the Blackhawks overtime power play, only to desperately flip back every thirty seconds to see if the game's over yet. Watching him go through the agony, I reflected on my own agonies - nothing so dramatic as a Game Seven, sadly, but memories of myself as a neurotic nine-year-old trying to figure out how from my bedroom I could influence John Olerud to hit a grand slam. Miserable every time he rolls into a 1-2-3 double play instead, but forgetting all that when he finally comes through. What I realized on that couch is what the sports obsessive looks like to the non-sports obsessive. It's a question of investment. Inside every red-blooded male (and quite a few, if not all, red-blooded females) lurks a thirst for competition. To the rest of us, my buddy is elvish nature-boy, but at his most passionate he's just as much of a gamer at heart as I am. And even thinking back to the haters, the slacker-hippies who ragged me for my sports fanhood throughout high school and university...they were peacemongers, sure - until you got them in front of a console. Hell, even the pimply cynics I hung out with in junior high were sneaking off to chess club behind my back. Humans play games - it's what we do.

Way back before I went to university to read Richard Dawkins and Nietzsche and embrace cynical objectivity, I was quite superstitious. Apathetic toward organized religion, sure, but I did believe that there were occurrences in the universe which were inexplicable and perhaps supernatural. In that vein, I would find myself avoiding or repeating tasks as I cheered on the Jays. If Dave Berg fouled off six straight pitches while I was eating a bagel, I was convinced that as soon as I finished that bagel, he would strike out, and I would take smaller and smaller bites in order to prolong that inevitability. On one level I always knew it was absurd and ridiculous, but then on some level it's those absurd delusions that define the fan's experience. We want to feel that we have some control over the outcome of the game - that's why the temptation exists to use the fourth-person "we" instead of the fifth-person "they" when referring to a given team, to some grammar nazis' eternal chagrin. You could just go ahead and diagnose me as OCD, and maybe that would be fair, but to have superstitions like that is simply a way of investing yourself in the outcome of the game you are watching/listening/dying to. 

Anyways, watching Kyle Drabek struggling yesterday afternoon reminded me of a stretch during the 2009 season, where, finally living in Toronto again, I tried to pick and choose my attendance at Jays' games around Halladay starts, and yet for about three weeks I couldn't buy a win out of it. He was 10-1 going in, but first I watched him hurt himself against the Marlins and leave in the 4th...then he came back (too soon?) and the team lost three straight starts to NY and TB. I was only living in Toronto for four months - and a whole month without a Halladay victory? I started thinking I should stay home and watch Halladay on TV because - clearly - my regular attendance after three years living away from Toronto was what was throwing him off. I wish I could corroborate it with an anecdote about how I watched on TV as he finally shut down the Red Sox for a complete game victory on July 19, but I have no idea where I was for that game - I just remember the drought, and the fact that I caused it.

Up until recently, Kyle Drabek the Toronto Blue Jay was more myth than man to me. His September callup starts perfectly coincided with my work schedule for that month. This year, a couple of his starts came while I was working, a couple came while I was playing ball, and the one or two I was around for happened to be games for which I had no television feed. Eight starts into his big league career, Drabek had six quality starts and I had (more or less) never seen him pitch. Then, last Saturday, the amazing happened - I had the day off to move into my new apartment, the cable was hooked up, and there was a Kyle Drabek-AJ Burnett matchup on Sportsnet. So what happens? Eleven baserunners in the span of seven outs, and the shortest outing of his big league career. Yesterday - again, I can watch Drabek on TV, and again he gets roughed up a bit.

I'm sure his struggles have nothing to do with the fact that I was watching the past two starts, though my inner child wonders. Being that cold, cynical, university graduate now, though, I can look at his numbers and say that the good Kyle Drabek I heard about never really existed. He's allowed 25 walks in 38 innings this year, for an absolutely atrocious BB/9 of 5.9. Last year, the only pitcher who got any kind of innings and had a BB/9 that high was Josh Roenicke. It went with a sparkling 5.68 which landed him solidly back in AAA in 2011.  The only starter who had walk ratios at all like that was Dana Eveland, and we all know how that worked out. Needless to say, Eveland and Roenicke are not fun comps for the superstar prospect headlining the Halladay trade, though those numbers at 23 are a little less scary than they would be at 30. If you want a warm and fuzzy comp, Halladay's BB/9 at Drabek's age was 5.6 - but, of course, Doc's 2000 was the worst pitching year in the modern era, and required a rebirth of sorts.

So it would appear that I'm stuck: if I watch Drabek starts and he continues to struggle, Vegas can't be far away, and I can't watch him if he's in AAA. But if I don't watch his starts, then I'll never get see him pitch anyway. Kyle Drabek, like my hockey-obsessed friend, you're an enigma.

Electioneering

Tomorrow, while the Blue Jay team golfs and suns themselves...or whatever it is millionaires do in Florida in May...back in this country we will by all reports be witnessing an overhaul of our parliament. While I could give a shit about politics in general - my leanings would be somewhere between libertarian and anarchist, though not very ideologically grounded either way - I have spent about 98% of my life swimming through a sea of Orange, and I'm curious to see how giving my acquaintances/friends/family a political say I honestly thought they'd never see will actually work out.

Of course, the main reason this election has captured the imagination, for someone so disinterested in the system as myself, is that the Orange surge follows such a traditional baseball storyline. See: Colorado Rockies, circa September 2007. Underdog comes from nowhere to take down eternal incumbent (or incumbent opposition, in this case - just as it was the Wildcard and not the West that was won on this day): everyone goes apeshit for awhile, then the Cinderella run ends either with a win or a loss and everything goes back to normal.

Now...if I delve any further into this line of thinking it will no doubt devolve into some meandering search for unity in my ideology as I question if it is really possible to affiliate oneself with a baseball team run by a cold corporation but not our democratically elected governing body...initiating system crash, end of blog, end of fanhood, baseball suicide. That's some dangerous emotional ground.

So let's not go there. Instead, I want to move onto another vote that should be coming down tomorrow, if it hasn't already: Jose Bautista's Player of the Month Award for April. Jose could have cleared space on his mantle for it before this current road trip, and his numbers have only become more eye-popping since he left Toronto.

Bautista is beginning to scare me. I'm starting to worry he's never going to stop getting better. First, he puts up a .944 OPS in Sept 2009. Then he follows up a .903 OPS spread over the entire '10 first half with a ridiculous 1.099 mark in the second. Flip the calendar to '11 and a month into the season it's over 1.3. That's ridiculous. Put another way, if he can keep it up that high for an entire season? It'll be the sixth-best season of all time by that metric, behind a few of Ruth and Bonds' peak seasons. If you use BBRef's WAR instead, prorating Joey's 2.7 WAR over 156 games gives me the number 17.55, which would be several wins ahead of Ruth's 1923 season at the top of the list.

If he keeps this up, Bautista won't just be a great hitter, he'd be in the conversation for the best hitter of all time. Hey, remember when we wanted to non-tender him because $2.4M was too much for a bench player?

(For the record, I wasn't one of the ones who wanted rid of Bautista prior to last year - easy to say now, but it's true. At the time, I thought much the same that I think now about Eddy's roster spot - nothing wrong with seeing if he can develop a bit as a hitter and build up some trade value.)

The Fall has to be coming. I mean, there's no way he's this good - is there? Is there?

In a way, we've seen this tune play out before, if on the flip side of the plate. When Roy Halladay went to Single-A in 2001, he was 24 and not 28, but the purpose of the demotion was to try a mechanical adjustment. Halladay came back up, put up some decent September numbers, then had a great 2002 and won his Cy Young Award in 2003. But the fact that Mel Queen rotated Doc's arm six inches clockwise didn't magically create a Hall of Fame starter out of the ashes of a shellshocked 23-year-old. Halladay took that arm angle and did what you will with it - pitched to contact, pitched to non-contact, added pitches, subtracted pitches, murdered babies, whatever. He reinvented himself as cyborg, and calmly took on all comers until he finally became acknowledged as the best in the world at his craft.

Likewise, quickening his load did not transform Jose Bautista from Edwin Encarnacion into a right-handed Barry Bonds overnight. What's it's pretty clear it did do, though, was give Bautista room to change his entire approach at the plate. Subjectively, as observer, it seems that what the best pitchers and the best hitters do - or the best at any athletic endeavor, really - is control the game. When you throw a pitch to a Manny, you're throwing it over his plate. When you stand in against a Rivera, you're swinging at his pitch. With a great eye and a power stroke, the new Jose has managed to create his own hitting environment - one where the onus is on the pitcher to get him out, rather than the other way around. On the one hand this is pretty obvious, on the other I'm parroting every stock quote of every colour analyst in history, but I think this much is true: greatness can often be measured in psychological dominance. And Bautista has now got that in spades.

I think back to Alex Gonzalez, the first. Gonzo was a disappointment in a lot of ways (well, for us male fans at least), but he was a useful player; anecdotally, he played terrific defense, and he had a little bit of pop for a shortstop. But he never learned to lay off the high fastball that was neither a strike nor hittable, and so his career OBP barely scraped .300. Because Jose can get to every pitch - and because he doesn't chase madly - he forces the pitcher to a) come at me, bro or b) run and hide. And as evidenced by 28 walks against just 16 strikeouts (who is this guy, Joe DiMaggio?) a lot more pitchers are running than coming.

(Pic is Danny Bautista, a random Spanish politician. Not socialist, sadly. And not that Danny Bautista.)

So anyway, speaking of elections, can we get this beast an All Star start this year? I'm talking to you, @BallotsBautista.