January Blues (Looking Forward)

Welp, hello again. The calendar's flipped to January, and with it an unseasonably warm season has turned wintry all of a sudden here in the Pacific Northwest, balmy Victoria drenched in a foot of white while across the border Washington enters a state of emergency. (Remember all those brown Christmases from Vancouver to Winnipeg to Toronto? Seems long ago, now.)

Anyway, January seems to be the nadir of the baseball offseason - on Prime Time Sports last week Alex Anthopoulos hinted as much by setting February 1 as an unofficial deadline to make any more significant acquisitions this offseason - as the last few free agents sign and teams begin to enter season-prep mode. For Blue Jays fans, that means grandiose hopes (indian summers?) fade for much starker realities. Instead of Prince Fielder we get Darren Oliver, and a whole bunch of cagey talk about payrolls and money management. But it's not so bad. With realignment and the second wildcard presumably delayed until 2013, one gets the sense that the 2011-12 offseason was more about getting ducks aligned. With only Kelly Johnson, Edwin Encarnacion and some of the RP options looming as significant free agents after 2012, I would certainly hope that barring a disaster there will be some semblance of "going for it" next offseason.

It's been mentioned by quite a few people with some surprise that Darren Oliver's free agent contract is the largest handed out by Anthopoulos since taking the reins. I'd argue that statement does more to laud his skills as a trade negotiator than indict the Jays' financial straits - but that surprising fact does point the finger right back at his predecessor. For all of the differences between Anthopoulos and Ricciardi - and there are multitudes: media savvy; scouting and development; focus on defense - it strikes me that the shape of their terms has some similarities. Like Ricciardi, Anthopoulos spent the first few years stripping and realigning a talented but misplaced roster, with trades for prospects and scrap heap free agent acquisitions. (Now, if only AA could grow himself a Scott Downs...) It wasn't until the '05-'06 offseason (his fifth) that he received the big cash outlay for Glaus/Burnett/Ryan/Molina/Overbay. The '12-'13 offseason will be AA's fourth, and with the looming wildcard available, it might make sense to go after a Hamels/Cain/Greinke, a real second baseman, maybe a couple of superior bullpen arms. Add Technicolor visions of a seasoned Lawrie, repaired Snider/Rasmus/Linds, Travis d'Arnaud relegating JPA to backup status, a not-at-all-regressed Bautista, and that roster may have the makings of a division winner, as opposed to a distant-from-competitive 87-win roster. But for 2012...looks like we're holding onto our chips. And that means I've got a whole year to learn how to start caring again.

(Yeah, I did.)

The Seasons, They Do Pass

Long time, no write.

It's a funny thing. The baseball season, beginning with such light and promise, gradually fades into oblivion. In April, you're glued to every pitch. In June, you're tuning in not so much for the game itself as in hopes of seeing a no-hitter or yet another walkoff. Things change, players move on, and by September, the drudgery of yet another season gone by can only be alleviated by the promise of seeing some new faces. (The real reason for September callups: so shitty teams can offer some kind of appeal to their fan bases through the last 30 meaningless dates of the season.)

Yeah, I watched the Jays eke and fluke themselves to a .500 record this year. But it was with little joy and even less fanfare, my enthusiasm growing more and more hollow as the days accumulated. In spite of myself - in spite of my belief in Anthopoulos' skills and ownership's intent to build a winner - it's hard not to look at a team like this year's and not feel like it's deja vu all over again. Remember the Pirates? The first-place, division-winning Pirates? Well, when Milwaukee beat them on the last day of the season to "clinch" home-field advantage, they reached 90 losses for the seventh year in a row. That's consistency. The Blue Jays, though, have won between 75 and 87 games 14 out of the past 15 years. That's consistent mediocrity - it's hard to slice any other way - and it does wear on a fan, whatever may lie on the horizon.

And so we drift into October, clinging to former allegiances to neurotic bearded changeup artists or cyborgs in lieu of a true playoff team. But in truth, watching Shaun Marcum's shell get repeatedly shelled wasn't so much soul-crushing as mildly irritating (You're making me root for George Bush in the World Series? Really?!) and if it weren't for a terrific World Series caught in thirty-minute flashes and occasional scoreboard updates from work, I would have all but given up on baseball season already.

Which isn't to say I'm going away, exactly...just that multiple posts a week over the offseason won't be forthcoming. I still plan to weigh in on whatever relatively minor offseason moves may be made  (for the record: I don't think Johnny Mac is or should be coming back, and the same goes double for Aaron Hill), and there will be more sanguine reflections on the season that was. But in the meantime, I'm going to let my stomach settle a bit as I immerse myself in the first NFL season of my life. I've seen far too many awesome blogs simply abandoned, and I don't intend to do the same with my own. (I don't often buy it, but to excuse myself for now let's just say I'm invoking the "quality over quantity" cliche.)

The LoMo Question

I find it very intriguing that, given Alex Anthopoulos' well-known proclivity for "athletic" players, Prince Fielder has become the Jays' perceived target for this offseason. True, there have to be exceptions - the inability to deviate from organizational philosophy at all is narrow-minded and short-sighted - but between Rajai Davis, Anthony Gose, Brett Lawrie and Yunel Escobar, it's extremely difficult to write "Hustle and Heart" off as a company line. AA has a type, and Prince ain't it.

The other potential target that has been brought to light by a number of fans (and a somewhat tongue-in-cheek Keith Law) is Logan Morrison. Given his young age, power bat, and grievance against his current employer, he seems like the logical Anthopoulos object of desire. The question I have is: why?

Logan Morrison plays three positions, potentially - first base, designated hitter and left field. Moreover, he plays those positions with a left-handed bat. In the Jays' system, there are currently six players vying for those positions next season. Five of them (Lind, Snider, Thames, Cooper, Loewen) are left-handed. One of them (Encarnacion) is right-handed.

Morrison is younger than all of those players except for Snider. He also has the highest major league OPS of the lot (of those with any significant playing time). So in a vacuum, I'll submit his late draft position out of high school and his potentially contentious personality and call him the best player of the seven. If you didn't have three or four of those guys - or, and this is important, if you had them but didn't think their upsides were worth their rookie contracts - then Logan Morrison would make a lot of sense for this team. Because if you had slotted LoMo into the cleanup slot instead of Lind for 500 ABs, you probably would have been better off. How much better off? 15 runs? That's the wRC+ spread between the two on Fangraphs. It's also the spread between fifth and fourth place in the majors in runs scored. (And it's going to take a lot more than Logan Morrison to jump into Tex/Bos/NYY territory.)

Anyway, the more pertinent question is probably whether Morrison makes sense in left - where, remember, he blocks one of two players who are also in the age-24 range, are also left-handed, and are also highly-touted. Is Eric Thames' upside so low that you're really willing to sacrifice a strong package of prospects to send him to AAA? Has the Snider ship sailed? I don't think the answer to those two questions is yes, but if Anthopoulos does, then maybe he feels adding another young left-handed power bat with limited positional flexibility makes sense.

That said, there are a couple of scenarios where adding Morrison makes sense:

1) If he's dirt cheap - in which case a lot of other GMs will be after him, but we've seen Alex work magic like this before.

2) Challenge trade. If AA believes that Morrison's upside has passed Snider's and the Marlins are willing to take that gamble just to get Morrison's Twitter account out of their clubhouse, then that trade is a possibility. You could also do something similar with Thames, with the Jays presumably kicking in a marginal prospect.

3) If there was a mythical GM ringing Alex's phone off the hook over Thames, Lind or Snider - especially if said GM was dangling a second baseman and Kelly Johnson had declined arbitration - then acquiring LoMo in a companion deal would make sense.

4) If all the other cards come up face (let's say, if Darvish, Harden + Brandon Phillips sign), then maybe he's the last piece added to a contender. This is especially true if you're forecasting a sophomore slump for Thames.

But really, I look at a team that got a .904 second-half OPS from Encarnacion, a terrific rookie year from Eric Thames, a team that has two (three, if you count Loewen) first-round busts knocking down the door in AAA, and still finished 5th in the majors in runs...I look at all these things, and I don't see corner outfield as a priority. While some may see the lack of a definite starter in left as a need, I see it as an opportunity. With five talented guys in the system, I'll take the odds that any one of them might have as good a year as Logan Morrison in 2012. In the long run, Morrison probably projects to be much the lumbering, unathletic, bottom-of-the-spectrum defender that Prince Fielder is. It's not Anthopoulos' type, and it's not the most important part of a team to build young.

That Warm Fuzzy Feeling

Living in this hippie hinterland of British Columbia, I have a very good friend who makes his living off of his idealism. For him, relentless optimism isn't merely a character trait but a business asset. Needless to say, a baseball fan's endemic pessimism often gets in the way as we debate the merits of donating an hour's wages to a hypothetical starving child in Kenya - me skeptical of his charity's intentions, he arguing that it's just one less six-pack a week (while helping himself to all the beers in my fridge, it should be added).

I'd like to think my selfishness doesn't make me a bad person, just a realist, but there are moments when this skepticism-as-life-philosophy gets in the way of a good story. Sometimes that's a meaningful piece of literature, sometimes it's a story that same buddy tells you about fucking off to do blow and get laid this weekend, and sometimes it's a feel-good baseball narrative.

Let's face it: comebacks are pretty played out. There was Tommy John, back when the surgery was unheard of. There was Joaquin Andujar. Then, Dave Dravecky. Josh Hamilton. Eric Davis beat cancer - and hell, so did the guy on the mound opposite McGowan much of Tuesday night. Doug Davis - the man behind my online SN - did it too.

The fact that there's been an award handed out for the past 45 years should indicate that a comeback, in and of itself, is not a unique and meaningful occurrence. If a guy was good enough to make it to the big leagues at an early age, he's generally going to have exceptionally above-average physical tools even after going through health-related purgatory. There's a reason Adam Loewen was the highest-drafted Canadian in history. These guys have been trained to believe they're invincible, and to some extent they are.

But it seems like making a comeback(TM) is a lot like making the big leagues for the first time as a rookie - the difficulty being not so much in getting there as staying. Eric Davis had a couple of great years, but basically retired having missed out on the prime of his career. Dravecky immediately broke his arm and watched the cancer return. And our very own Comeback Player of the Year, golden boy Aaron Hill, is now plying his trade in the desert as a probable non-tender. Lester and Hamilton have been great, but often the wear and tear of the physical trials leave their mark later, as baseball careers - short, fitful things in general - stall at replacement-level or end prematurely.

Anyway, that's not to say that it wasn't awesome to see McGowan and Loewen appear in back-to-back games for the Jays this week. If you scroll down, you'll see that in my most recent post I argued that Loewen should be given a chance to battle for a starting job on this team down the road. But am I teary-eyed about the fact that they appeared in a single major league game?

Show me the money.