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| 2003 Toronto Blue Jays forever man |
I'm not a person who cares a whole hell of a lot about how Rogers spends their money, and I actually believe Anthopolous and Paul Beeston that there's no actual firm payroll budget, that the money is there and will be spent when it's appropriate, and that Vernon's contract has not (I guess we can say "did not" now, holy cow) kept them from doing anything they've wanted to do. I actually believe all that, which may totally be an outcome of my naive and childlike faith in The Beest. But I have never been one to bemoan the Vernon contract even though it was something that pretty much united the Blue Jays fan base because fundamentally, what do I care? AA and Beeston never said anything bad about the contract even though it was a product of the awful JP and Paul Godfrey (that guy was the worst) era and they could have easily not-in-so-many-words bemoaned it in the papers or on the radio but they never did. And Vernon was obviously cashing fat cheques and I like Vernon (more on that in a minute), so good for him. But what I am getting to here is that although I never complained about it, I totally acknowledge the awfulness of the deal, and so I am seriously astounded that Anthoplous was able to pull this off. For it is some astounding shit.
All of that said, I am 100% certain that I will enjoy the 2011 baseball season less because Vernon Wells will not be playing centre field for the Toronto Blue Jays. This is very possibly dumb but it is nonetheless true. Vernon Wells was my favourite guy on my favourite team and you can go to hell, basically. It's not just that he had such a solid 2010 after a truly, epically miserable 2009, even though that was pretty cool. I got pretty into his hot start, as you can tell by this image saved on my computer as VWTRIPLECROWN2010:
Vernon Wells has fully and completely been my guy. We both really arrived in Toronto in 2001 (unlike me Vernon had a couple of PAs in 99 and 00), but became fixtures during the fairly poor 2002 season. Eric Hinske (oh man that guy) may have won the AL ROY that season, but there was no question it was Vernon was the young player who, alongside Doc, had you most excited about the future. It was like, man, Carlos is still a monster and Doc and Vernon look like the real deal so with little luck we are pretty much in business here. Except as it turned out we totally were not in business here. But that wasn't at all apparent until after the 2003 season, actually my favourite non-92/93 season in Blue Jays history, with Doc's Cy Young, Delgado's MVP-calibre year (eat shit, A-Rod), and Vernon Wells' absolutely raking.
2006 and 2010 were both totally solid years, really very good seasons for Vernon (in the intervening years, we, like Ron Washington in his days as the A's infield instructor, "seen some shit") but man, 2003 was the bee's knees. Thirty-three home runs. Scored 118 runs and knocked in 117 (yeah yeah we don't care about RBI as predictive of anything and rightly so but they measure what happened which is all I'm talking about). And not only were his 214 hits that year more than Ichiro's, they also broke Tony Fernandez's club record. This seemed like a really, really big deal at the time if you were a Blue Jays guy.
It's strange to have gotten this far without talking about his defense, which is now sub-par if you measure it either by the modern metrics or by the eye. He's always been heavy for a CF, and now he looks like he's running in mud. At his best, though, he was right there with Mike Cameron and Torii Hunter (are the Angels really going to keep Vernon in centre and Torii in right? has Hunter fallen off that badly? I should probably know but don't). I clearly remember the game in September 2003 (here's the boxscore) when Halladay took a no-hitter into the eighth against the Tigers, and Kevin Witt, of all people, came in as a pinch hitter and doubled deep to left-centre to break it up. Halladay, being Halladay, went ten innings and got the 1-0 win like it was no big deal, but I mention it because when the ball dropped, I remember that in my section in the right field bleachers it was like UGGGGHHHHH, of course, but also like, well, if Vernon couldn't get to it, it couldn't be gotten to, so it goes.
I saw that game in 2003 because I saw every Blue Jays home game in 2003 in what was both an impressive streak and also kind of the product of mental illness, but whatever. I was in on a pretty amazing Season Pass deal where for $81, you could present this pass at the box office on game day and get an upper deck seat. A good deal for anybody, a great deal if you were willing to amortize it to the extreeeeeeme. They also had a rewards program for frequent attendance where you'd swipe this card at a kiosk and if you went to five games you'd get a key chain, twenty games and you get a hat or something, I don't remember. But if you went to all eighty-one games, you were awarded a Vernon Wells autographed baseball, presented to you in an on-field ceremony, which are magical words. I still have that ball, obviously, along with the vivid memory of just how huge Carlos Delgado is when you're standing about ten feet away from him while he's warming up, and just how shiny his head is, like, way shinier than most batting helmets, even before the current trend of wearing batting helmets that are really, really dirty (note: this is actually a pretty cool trend).
Anyway. The 2003 Blue Jays. Vernon Wells. So many feelings. This is going to take a while.
KS
as someone over at Primer points out, the White Sox took on Rios' 5 years/$59M and gave up nothing whereas the Angels tare taking on Wells's 4 years/$86M and give up two players.
ReplyDelete(i) how,
(ii) the fuck?
KS, during the streak how many times did you almost not go to a game? Were there any amazing obstacles you had to overcome to get to any specific games?
ReplyDeleteOh man the mental image of KS hanging out on field with the Jays because he went to 82 straight home games, is amazing.
ReplyDeleteAlso it is the same fort of mentally ill thing I would do were I able
Well Harpo, a few things stand out, both in my mind and in my meticulously maintained 2003 scorekeeping book autographed by Josh Towers, Chris Woodward, and Dan Reichert. Foremost among them is the July 26th 7-2 loss to the O's in which Jeff Conine had a big day and Mark Hendrickson (aka LURCH) was lousy, as was the pen. I see that I have a note saying, "I'm probably too sick to be here. This was unwise." As I recall what that really meant was that I spent a couple of innings in the bathroom with my radio on, scoring along in agony. Insane? Yes, entirely. OK, yeah: my notes actually indicate that I spent the entirety of both the top of the 4th and the top of the 7th on the can. At the end of the game, I honestly had a hard time standing, and was like "ok, I'll just let the rest of the section filter out before I try that again" and one of the nice usher ladies (you get to know the people who work at the ballpark pretty well when you hit up all 81 games, and the season before you'd been to 72, etc) came over to see if I was alright. No, I wasn't, not at all, but I wasn't drunk, which is clearly what she had (entirely fairly) assumed. The next day (Blue Jays 10, O's 1, Doc with seven strong and both Carlos and Vernon with HRs), I missed almost all of a Blue Jay's bat-around fourth with the dry heaves, and the top of the sixth throwing up.
ReplyDeleteBut in truth there were literally no times that I even considered not going to a game, not even a little. I was in grad school and it was the summer, so I didn't have any problems with work or anything (other than that my studies were kind of crippling me psychologically). I announced my dumb plan to friends and family before the season started, told them that this was a dumb thing that I was going to do this one summer of my entire life and get it out of my system (because you can never beat perfect attendance, you can only ever tie it, so why ever bother again?). So nobody was ever like, "dude, you are being stupid you should come out tonight" because while yes, I was being stupid, and yes, I should come out tonight, everybody had fair warning and actually thought it was kind of funny and worthwhile as just an odd thing to do. A couple of times I arrived a few innings in because I'd had a softball game, and a handful of times I would leave with a few innings to go because of a kind of early concert or something, but combined that couldn't have been more than like five or six times.
Also, while flipping through the book I couldn't help but notice Vernon hit a walk-off HR against the Royals on April 25th, and the next day made a running over-the-shoulder catch near the wall the next day that caused my (now, not then) wife to remark, "He's everything they said he'd be." And there is no record of this but I suspect I said something like "YEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH."
So anyway yeah, feelings.
also came across my Wonka-style golden ticket on Blue Jays letterhead with the goony 2003 logo: "YOU HAVE EARNED OUR HIGHEST REWARD, A VERNON WELLS AUTOGRAPHED BASEBALL PRESENTED TO YOU ON THE FIELD ON SEPTEMBER 28th, 2003"
ReplyDeletewhat a day man what a day
aaaahahaha former Blue Jays employee and current excellent snarky prospects guy for ESPN Keith Law is behind the pay wall at espn.com but offers the following for free:
ReplyDelete"Vernon Wells isn't a terrible player -- he's a solid player with a terrible contract. And he is absolutely the wrong player right now for the Los Angeles Angels, who have made one the worst desperation moves I can remember."
and oh shit here's the rest, thank you, random poster on Drunk Jays Fans:
"Wells was an above-average defensive center fielder whose bat played well at the position around the time that the Jays gave him his albatross deal, which balloons to a $21 million annual salary starting in 2012. Wells has an opt-out clause good after this season, and perhaps the Angels' plan is to take Wells to all the seediest neighborhoods in the greater Los Angeles area to convince him to bail on those last three years of his contract … but I doubt it.
The problem is that Wells is now well below-average in center and probably should be in a corner outfield position, where his bat is less valuable, and where he may not profile offensively by the time he's a free agent after 2014. His power spike in 2010 coincided with a sudden shift in the Rogers Centre's park factor and a teamwide rise in home runs. He's a good fastball hitter who's not very disciplined and tries to pull the ball on the outer half, resulting in a lot of frustrating rollovers to the shortstop.
The Angels have Peter Bourjos and his 70 (or better) glove to man center, and there's no way Wells will be worth $18 million more than Bourjos this year. Turning Bobby Abreu, a once-great player now showing his age, into a platoon bat/pinch-hitter would make the best of a bad situation. It's still a bad situation, though, and doesn't make the Angels much better off even in 2011.
In exchange for Wells, the Blue Jays get a huge pile of money back in their 2012-14 budgets. A cost once deemed sunk has now been rescued from the depths of the bad-contract abyss. They also get a solid offensive catcher in Mike Napoli, who was underappreciated in Anaheim because his bat is all about his secondary skills and his defense is fringy, and Juan Rivera, a pretty good facsimile for Wells before his power vanished in 2010. I'm pretty sure the Blue Jays would have accepted a box of turnips and a can of potted meat to get out from under Wells' contract, though.
Look for them to plow some of that money into this year's Rule 4 draft, where they have seven picks in the first 80 (including the Angels' second-rounder), as well as into the major league roster next winter, since they have only about $14.5 million committed for 2012, not counting the $8 million option on Aaron Hill. They could become very good, very fast."
And for the record it looks like only $5 million going to the other way. Astounding.
He's so right about Vernon trying to pull shit low and outside, too. When he's going good, you overlook it, but when he's struggling, it is the most brutal thing to see him go 0-4 with three 6-3 grounders and a K like three nights in a row.
ReplyDeleteKendall, you are among the greatest of men, and possibly even the greatest man.
ReplyDeleteNeil you are too kind. More on Vernon in a separate post later. FOR SURE.
ReplyDeleteThe best thing is the last handful of Angels fans who refuse to see the trade as a terrible trade. They're clinging to the hope that he'll somehow opt out. I'm not entirely sure, but I just don't see him telling the Angels he doesn't want them driving the Brinks truck to his house after two years.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the best case scenario? If Vernon manages to hit like 40 next year (in a significantly tougher hitter's park iirc) and the Angels win the division and at least the pennant too, then yeah this is a good trade for the Angels but if almost anything else at all happens, it is truly insane.
ReplyDeleteWHAT A WORLD