Cadavers

I don't remember Cal Ripken as a very good player. I just don't. The first time I can recall hearing about him I was nine years old and he was about to set the record for most consecutive games played in the major leagues.

"Cool," I said. "But he's only hitting .260."

I watched Ripken hang on with bad Orioles teams for the next six years, and listened as announcers and managers fought over who could pay him the better compliment, all while watching wondrously as mediocre Blue Jays pitcher after mediocre Blue Jay pitcher consistently got him to roll over and hit weak grounders. He was a light-hitting third baseman with mediocre range in a high-offense era - a role player on a bad team. And he was treated like a superstar. By the time he got selected to yet another All-Star team in 2001 (his 18th straight) I wanted to scream out to anyone that would listen: HE SUCKS! In the heart of the steroid era, a .637 OPS from a third baseman was light years away from All-Star-worthy, and when he retired the next year I think I was more relieved that I would get to stop hearing about him than I was worried that the Orioles would actually find a good player to replace him.

In 2001 he really and truly did suck, but the truth of it was that he hadn't been much of a player since 1991, when I was a 5-year-old learning how to speak pidgin-English in southeast Asia. I missed the good Ripken and spent most of my life enduring the bad - I can only imagine how it must have felt for Oriole fans of the same vintage.

Corey Patterson was a slightly different story. Shortly after Ripken retired, I joined a baseball message board at the ripe old age of fifteen. The board had its share of Cubs fans, and Corey Patterson had been ranked the second best prospect in baseball (behind Josh Hamilton) by Baseball America in 2001. There was a lot - a LOT - of talk about 30-30 seasons, and the general consensus was that the Cubs had found a center fielder for the next decade. However, since the Cubs were in the NL Central, I never got to see Patterson - I only got to read over the next five years as the Cubs fans griped about his strikeout tendencies, got a little frothy-mouthed at his promising 2003 half-season, before settling into a bitter and uncomfortable acceptance of the fact that Corey Patterson was not the player he had been advertised as. By the time he made his way to the AL East in 2006, I was eager to see what all the fuss had been about. And much like that other famous, shitty Oriole, I saw a vulnerable hitter and mediocre fielder, a player remarkable only in his unremarkable-ness.

In the ensuing years, I never really lost track of Corey. His "bust" status and notoriously poor eye led to an online meme, and even though my message board buddies had long since moved on, Corey was still around.

I never thought the Blue Jays would sign Corey Patterson. He was a player (like Doug Davis, who was also legendary on that message board, and - ironically - Gregg Zaun, among others, had been before) who was so etched in my mind as a journeyman role player for non-Blue Jay teams that I thought he would never make his way to Toronto. It's hard to explain, but I suppose my assumption was that if the guy had played for five different teams, the Jays had had plenty of chances to acquire him already and deferred.

Through the bulk of the first half, Corey is putting up a Corey-like line: .263/.296/.403. He's within 3 percentage points of his career OPS and has accompanied that with terrible defense. He's been exactly the player he was advertised as coming into the season - a little power, a little speed, and not much else.

But that said, I like having Corey Patterson on this team. In his proper role - much as I think the Orioles could have benefitted from using Ripken in his proper role through the late nineties - he's a valuable bench player. He can start in center field while a player like Travis Snider is getting his reps in at the position and a player like Rajai Davis is OPSing .400 over the course of an extended slump. He can sit on the bench and pinch-run for Jose Molina or Juan Rivera in late and close situations. He can occupy a roster spot for a (major league) pittance and be easily disposed of when no longer necessary. He can be called on to bunt - either in the rare circumstances when a sacrifice is in order or, more often, for a hit against a tough pitcher.

Just don't hit him leadoff. OR SECOND!

Holdin' it Down

Before the season started, I set the over/under on Jo-Jo Reyes' time with the Blue Jays in 2011 at one month. And by the end of April, my prediction wasn't looking so bad: winless, with an ERA close to 6 and a WHIP close to 2, his spot on the roster seemed tenuous at best. But partly due to a (debatable) lack of better options and partly out of stubbornness, the Jays stuck it out, and to outward appearances he's rewarded them. He's broken out of a "the streak," and managed to get his season ERA down to a pedestrian 4.34. But don't be fooled: Jo-Jo Reyes is not a good pitcher. There's no harm in leaving him in the rotation to absorb innings while the Jays audition and summarily rotate the likes of Zach Stewart, Kyle Drabek and Brett Cecil, but the fact that he has stayed in the rotation while those guys have yoyoed has a little to do with performance, a lot to do with options, and more to do with upside. Reyes is a little like a younger Brett Tomko...a guy who managed to get 30 starts for four years in a row not because of any illusions that he was any good (a single above-average season over the course of a decade would indicate that), but just because he was, well, there. Tomko was one of those creatures that upbeat play-by-play guys (I'm looking at you, Pat Tabler) call "innings-eaters."

Jo-Jo Reyes has thrown 85 innings in 15 starts, so he can't even say he's really that. In those 85 innings, he's allowed 130 baserunners, which is not good. He's struck out 54, which is right in line with his career number but is hardly earth-shattering. His FIP and xFIP are eerily close to his actual ERA - overall, he's doing exactly what we should have expected of him, and that's not much at all.

Which isn't to say, exactly, that I think the Jays - in the position that they are - should release him. The rotation currently hinges on one ace, a converted reliever and two unpredictable "stuff"y young pitchers. Brad Mills has put up numbers in Vegas which suggest a look is in order, but options do matter and supposing Mills were to get clobbered as he was in two awful starts in 2009, you'd like to have insurance behind him that wasn't named Scott Richmond. Brett Cecil will get another shot in time, but his minor league numbers don't inspire confidence that that shot will necessarily go well. There's pitching depth on this team, but it's all over the place developmentally. And another injury will happen (although an optimist could hold out hope that it may hold off until Dustin McGowan has finished his miracle recovery). Anyway, the point is the urge to retain arms is not a ill-founded one.

But I think we can acknowledge that, even at age 26, Jo-Jo Reyes is not a part of this team's future.

Lineup Reparations (Or: Eric Thames is Adam Lind)

(Full disclosure: this post was conceived as an "Eric Thames should be called up" post. Now that he's been called up, I suppose I'll have to settle for "Why is Eric Thames here?")

The Blue Jays' offense in June has been anemic. Since scoring 17 runs in 2 games against the Royals, which says far more about the latter's pitching staff than anything else, the Jays have scored 35 runs in 14 games, or 2.5 runs/game. Which is...let's just go with awful. To put that in perspective, if the Jays scored two and a half runs per game over an entire season, they'd end up with barely 400 runs scored. (The 2010 Mariners scored 513 runs over an entire season, which says a lot about just how pathetic that team was).

As the offense sputtered through Cincinnati and Atlanta, the cries went up. Snider, Thames, Cooper! Lawrie! Anyone! We need offense! And I must admit, I was among the masses. I wanted to see the kids come up and gag on those inflated PCL balloons being shoved down their throats by coy, nasty major league veterans like Tim Hudson and hotshot rookies with ungodly breaking stuff like Brandon Beachy. There were a few reasons for this, but none of them really had much to do with upgrading the offensive production of the 2011 Blue Jays.

Rajai Davis is a better center fielder than Corey Patterson, but with a wOBA of .277 he makes for a great pinch-runner. Benching Davis to push Patterson to center and open up a lineup spot wouldn't thrill the pitchers short-term, but I think the value of letting Eric Thames (er...Travis Snider/Adam Loewen) flail at sliders in the dirt instead of Rajai Davis outweighs that relatively minor tradeoff on a franchise level.

AA's interest in Davis was entirely reasonable, if belated. Throughout his minor league career, he was a stolen base machine with a great on-base percentage who never really got a chance to crack the major league roster. Snapping up high-OBP guys trapped in other teams' system is the (well-documented, you think?) formula that Billy Beane built an empire on, and Beane acquired Davis in time to give him 500 PAs in his peak, age-28 season. And when Davis responded with a .360 OBP and 40 steals at a 77% success rate, he was pretty much the new Scott Hatteberg.

However, as Beane has done throughout his reign, he moved the player once he realized that he had maximized that player's potential. Think back: Koch, Foulke, Thomas, Davis. How many players have departed Oakland and never again had a season as good as their best with the A's? At age 29, he saw Davis put up a .697 OPS and realized that there were flaws in the player that would only be exploited as major league pitching caught up to him. In Patterson's case, the flaw is high fastballs; in Davis's, it's breaking balls at the knees and two feet outside.

In the case of slap-hitting speedsters moving out of their prime, the adjustment is generally negative. But adjustments can go the other way, as well; a young player who had been exploited can develop into a plus major league hitter as he enters his prime. The most obvious example on the current Jays' roster is Adam Lind. Exposed to certain weaknesses over two half-seasons between 2007-8, he exploded in 2009 and appears to be picking up off of that after last year's disappointment. His career major league wOBA progression has gone as follows:

.291-.325-.394-.309-.410

Can you spot the outlier? From ages 23 to 27 he's improved in every season except for last year's hiccup, and will only be entering that all-important age-28 season in 2012. (For reference, in addition to Rajai Davis's career year, age 28 is also the year in which Aaron Hill and Ed Sprague had their 36-homer outliers. It a good age to be a big league hitter.)

When Lind first came up he was a little younger than Eric Thames is now - and, after raking in the minors, he struggled. He OBPed under .300 after never hitting under .299 in the minors. Major league pitchers found the holes in a 23-year-old's swing and never gave him a pitch to hit, and he put up numbers that would have been terrible for a shortstop, nevermind a DH.

But he came back the next year and hit a little bit better. The power still wasn't what it should have been, but he managed to hit some singles. Then came 2009, when he put up a major league line which would have fit in gorgeously with any of his minor league ones.

When Eric Thames first came up for a cup of coffee, the numbers weren't bad in a tiny sample size, but those that actually watched him knew that he wasn't a polished hitter. The swing was pretty, but against good major league stuff he looked as overmatched as any rookie should. In other words, he's not Jason Heyward, and we should expect some tribulations over the rest of the season if he remains with the club. Maybe it won't quite be as bad as watching Rajai Davis flail at outside pitches all day long, but it won't be pretty.

But it's going to happen eventually. And why not get that part over with now?

Because, at the end of the day, I think Eric Thames can become every inch the hitter that Adam Lind is. Their minor league slahlines are almost identical:

Lind: .320/.382/.512
Thames: .308/385/.535

To be fair, there are differences. Lind started younger, so he got more at bats in the minors. He was a year younger than Thames when he put up his .900 OPS at AA New Hampshire - although, given that he had spent an extra year at Dunedin, maybe that age gap doesn't mean the world. And, of course, Thames' AAA line has to be adjusted for PCL inflation.

But, regardless, they profile as very similar players. And as long as it's clear that Thames has nothing more to prove against AAA pitching, we might as well get his .291 wOBA learning curve out of the way in a meaningless developmental year - i.e. when he's only taking at-bats away from the likes of Davis rather than the Sniders and Lawries of the world.

Bandwagoners

I've had a rather busy week. Aside from travelling halfway across the country by rail and eventually receiving a piece of paper with a little too much fanfare to acknowledge that, along with millions of other Canadians, I now have a bachelor's degree, I also made a stop in Vancouver which just happened to fall on Riot Wednesday.

I didn't participate in the riots, nor did I stick around to watch them, much as I would have liked to. I got my fix of police-citizen conflict last June in Toronto when there was actually something to fight for, and given that I was on vacation with my parents, there was no reason to take to the streets. I am spiritually anarchist, so on some subconscious level it was thrilling to see drab Canadians take their lives into their own hands and to see police emasculated. But hanging over it all was the knowledge that there was nothing political about this action, no unity to the mob...in the end, it was just a few shitheads who came to crash a huge party, and then a bunch of drunks having a truly epic bar-fight. Did breaking the doors of The Bay do anything, in the war against corporation? No. But that wasn't really the point.

Mobs appeal to something carnal inside us. A collection of like-minded people has more strength in its convictions than any one person can, and falling into a crowd can be utterly exhilerating in moments of pure anger and joy. Historically, it's this realization that created labour reform and political revolution, but the closest we can often come in modern Western society is sport (or perhaps music). It is one of the most gratifying feelings in the world to rise as one at a sporting event where something incredible has happened.

One of the most exciting baseball moments I've experienced was Aaron Hill's walkoff walk on June 5, 2007 against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Walkoffs are always exciting, of course, but this wasn't just your typical walkoff. There was expectancy in the air, in the way the inning had progressed. The Jays had scored five runs in the ninth and everyone - everyone - in the stadium was on their feet waiting to see if the sixth would cross. And when Aaron Hill took that fourth ball, that place erupted.

I didn't participate in the riots on Wednesday in Vancouver, but I was part of the mob (at least early on, while the game was still in progress). And what I was down there for, searching for, almost, was that carnal roar. We didn't get a single goal in the three hours I spent at Georgia and Richards; all we got was, early on, a camera angle that appeared to take Tim Thomas back into his own net. The mob cheered, spurred on by each other, but the arms went down as soon as the score flashed back up on the screen. No goal, no joy, no victory.

I'm not a hockey fan. Anyone who knows me knows that to accuse me of being a hockey fan undermines everything about me, that I've spent most of my life railing against the hours TSN devotes to minor league hockey instead of major league baseball, that I haven't played hockey since I was a prepubescent with a mini-stick and a tennis ball, that I absolutely hate the way that hockey must be intertwined with national identity in this country, leading many acquaintances to call me, in half-jest, an expatriot American. I grew up in Ottawa, young enough that while I didn't care about the Sens, I didn't despise them either, but when I moved to Toronto I adopted an irrational distaste for the Leafs. For being terrible and yet still being front-page news, for putting their stadium right next to the Rogers Centre...just for existing, really. And when I moved to the West Coast, I was entirely ambivalent towards the Vancouver Canucks.

I've also, as a hardcore baseball fan, always resented the casual fan. I found it incredibly frustrating to go to a game with someone who had only a casual understanding of baseball, the kind of person who gets really confused by a sacrifice fly or can't understand the concept of a strikeout. Every second I spent explaining the game was a second I wasn't watching the game, and these people had not invested nearly so much into my team as I had, so why should I care about explaining the game to them?

So suffice it to say I was hesitant about becoming a Canucks fan this year. And I'm not, really. I watched one or two playoff games last year, and then skipped the entire regular season except for the occasional check of the standings. And I noticed early on that this year's team was really, really good, at least if points were any indication. Towards the playoffs, I started to ask my hippie friend, resident hockey fan, about the season.

When the playoffs started, I kept track of the Blackhawks series, figuring it was over after two games then checking back in in the second period of Game 7, watching my friend live and die in the moments before Burrows buried the OT winner. The Preds and Sharks series each went by fast, with the odd radio snippet catching my ears when someone brought a radio to work or picked me up in their car. "The Finals," I said. "I'll be a fan if they make it to the Cup Finals."

And they did. And I followed a little more closely. Eager for updates from coworkers. Watching the games, if not instead of Jays games, at the very least simultaneously. The Canucks took a strangelehold. Then blew it, spectacularly. Then lived to fight another day. Then, on Monday night at the airport, I listened to the guttural sounds emerging from the bar as Luongo relinquished one, then two, then three, first-period goals and the specter of Game Seven came into focus.

If I was ever going to be a hockey fan, it was now. How often can you say that your local team is in Game Seven of the final in their respective sport? The Blue Jays have been around for thirty-four years and never seen a World Series Game Seven. The Texas Rangers have been around since 1961, and they've never seen one. The Maple Leafs, that team that I came of age hating so much, hasn't had a Cup Final Game Seven since 1964, when my father was in grade school.

So here I was, in Vancouver for Game Seven, a conflicted hockey fan with the opportunity of a lifetime. I joined the mob, the mob went wild, and we all went home.

And you know, if you tell me you're a casual Blue Jays fan next time I see you, maybe now I won't rip your head off.

Everyone move to Canada, smoke lots of *beep*, everybody move to Canada right now.