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| my problem has never been with Henderson Alvarez |
The last few weeks have been, on the field, anyway, pretty much passable, but the actual baseball took a backseat to the thing where borderline Hall of Famer Omar Vizquel (I probably wouldn't put him in but nobody is going to ask me and I have no problem with Vizquel and furthermore what kind of monster would) spoke publicly about how basically this team is bullshit: the dumb kids make the same dumb kid mistakes again and again because nobody straightens them out re: their dumb kid ways. Brett Lawrie, for instance, who we were only able to pick up because he had earned himself a reputation as an uncoachable hothead before even playing a major league inning, totally turned out to be an uncoachable hothead: not only has he not followed up on his legitimately amazing 2011, but he just made a ton of dumb aggro mistakes and then insisted they weren't dumb aggro mistakes when writers would ask thim about those dumb aggro mistakes. Running into outs in the name of hustle is some Raul Mondesi-level shit and as such I oppose it with Carlos Delgado-like dignified vehemence (still miss u bro hope u are well).
Also everybody got hurt. That was another problem. Never before in my baseball-watching life, which is a pretty sizable chunk of my overall life-watching life, have I seen arms go down like they did this year for the Blue Jays, so, I mean, even if everything else went totally awesomely, this still would have been an utterly lost year without a rotation. But the shitty way(s) everything else went makes you forget, almost, that at the heart of this whole disaster was an historically awesome rash of injuries. But even before that, things had started to go south: Ricky Romero, who was terrible even early on in the year when he was winning, persisted in being terrible throughout all stages of this Blue Jays season but the wheels were well and truly off just before everybody else got hurt. And Jose Bautista, dear sweet Jose Bautista, who was totally getting it together until his wrist exploded in New York. Brutal.
So what did I enjoy this year, other than the dulcet tones of Jerry Howarth and Alan Ashby, both of whom I am enjoying a great deal even as we speak, friends? E5 turning into an absolute monster of a dude is the standout thing, I guess, what with the forty-two-dang home runs that I totally did not see coming. Darren Oliver, who I have always liked for some reason, had a tremendous year out of the pen despite being a million years old, so that was cool. Right now, the crowd in Toronto is giving Omar Vizquel a really nice ovation, and yeah, it's been neat having Vizquel around this year, sure, why not. He's neat.
But beyond that, it has all been shit. Pretty much everybody has been hurt, fair-to-middling, or disappointing. The kids who came up have been OK but not thrilling. I don't even know, man. I haven't felt like this since 2004, when the Blue Jays followed the totally, totally fun 86-win 2003 season where Doc won the Cy Young and Carlos made a serious run at AL MVP with a 94-loss disaster, at which point management decided Toronto was a tiny provincial town with broke owners, and let Delgado walk without so much as an offer. It was fucked, and eight years later I can still totally see Carlos lingering on the field for a good long while before walking down the clubhouse steps for the last time and apparently I am not done having hard feelings towards J. P. Ricciardi for all of that because I am getting sort of worked up at the moment actually which is a sign that is time to wrap this up.
In short, I have hated the 2012 Toronto Blue Jays baseball season, and the last couple months of it have been the least connected I have been to the game in years. Bring on the freaky deaky new play-ins and then a bunch of postseason games that keep me up to absurd hours of the night despite real-world commitments that are completely non-negotiable. I am totally ready for all of that to happen. Also next year Jose Bautista will hit a thousand home runs.
KS
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