The 2013 Toronto Blue Jays Season Is Probably Real Life

always remember to limber-up even if it is just baseball you will be playing

This year I have done maybe my best job of ignoring spring training ever, especially if you consider the extent to which the Toronto Blue Jays are actually totally interesting even to the non-partisan, and are entirely worth paying attention to, or as worth paying attention to as any baseball team is worth paying attention to in spring training (which, again, to me, is basically not at all ever). It occurs to me just now that perhaps my indifference to spring training is not entirely unrelated to my profound disinterest in prospects, in that spring training itself is largely a study of prospects, sure, but also in that spring training is pretty much the prospect of the season. Unless you are a regular season baseball player playing in a regular season baseball game I am sorry but my uncommonly burdensome and involving duties and responsibilities preclude the possibility of me being baseball interested in you in the slightest, for which, again, I apologize but this is how it must be for me and indeed for us both. 

But after Matt reminded me that holy shit baseball starts this weekend (also Game of Thrones, a subject in which I have attained expertise through arduous study that cut pretty directly into my Baseball Mogul time now that I reflect on the shape of my life and experiences over the last year), I went to the MLB site and looked at the probable starters for the first three Blue Jays games, and it was like, holy smokes, all that stuff that happened this winter totally actually totally happened, because it's gonna be R. A. Dickey, Brandon Morrow, Mark Buehrle, and then Josh Johnson (and well OK fine sure also J. A. Happ a little). But what the fuck, right? Like, obviously I was aware of everything that was going on as it was going on, but it is worth noting, I think, that this is real and everything. 

It was somewhat discouraging that the once most boss-like Ricky Romero got sent most thoroughly down, all the way to Dunedin, but man he was brutal last year so what else can you do? As everyone has already totally noted, this isn't really like Roy Halladay going all the way down to change his arm slot and return to the majors as one of the best pitchers of his generation, because Romero is not a kid anymore, and it's nothing major like that they're going to try to switch up with him; they would just like it if he could figure out how to not be awful at pitching, and I sympathize with that, because I got fairly tall fairly quickly when I was a kid and so could throw pretty hard relative to my age for a while there and spent a lot of time on the mound even though I pretty much walked people, hit them inadvertently (but savagely) on the inside of the back ankle, and, when there was no more room on the bases, served up arrow-straight 40-MPH horseshit that got jacked into the woods. Pitching is crazy hard and as much as one's heart goes out to any of these guys (and it does a little sometimes; let us not front, not here, not to each other) my heart goes out to dudes who just lose it out there and can never find it. It's sad to watch. 

So usually I would be gutted by that but who the hell cares really R. A. Dickey is gonna knuckleball people the fuck out in this the 2013 Toronto Blue Jays Championship Season! Everybody else in the A.L. East is totally dodgy! The Red Sox are such a shambles I heard they are lowering beer prices! There is no way the Orioles do anything at all like they managed last year! The Yankees are kind of shit now which means they will only win like 88 games instead of 90-something! The Rays are actually probably totally going to be good aren't they I just kind of remembered that now! And the A.L. West teams will have a crazy advantage for the wild card this year because they'll all be wailing on the Astros this year won't they! I am still excited though because Jose Bautista is going to hit like eighty home runs and also there are new guys! 

Yours in baseball and of course also feelings,

KS