Jose Bautista: Male Witch

 

How Else To Explain It

Although the biggest Blue Jays story in recent days is for sure the enticing prospect of a new ballpark (someday! maybe! although if it ends up anywhere but right where the Skydome is it will probably feel like a mistake!), and the second biggest is Vladimir Guerrero's Jr.'s ongoing wagon-reduction efforts (arguably misguided, I must say, and yet fundamentally I am here to support Vladito in all his doings), number three would have to be the surprising dismissal of longtime Fan 590/Sportsnet Radio Blue Jays commentator Mike Wilner. Well, sort of longtime, longtime for some stuff: although he'd only been doing play-by-play (selected innings) for the last few years, he had been on the radio for about twenty, and first came to my attention as the person whose on-air responsibilities consisted chiefly of reading the Home Hardware Out-of-Town scoreboard, a task to which he possessed adequacy. I would argue that less adequacy -- perhaps not inadequacy, but less adequacy -- was displayed in Wilner's handling of the "Jays Talk" post-game call-in, in which he often treated ill-informed callers with derision and disdain. I will be the first (or at least among them) to admit that the quality of the calls Wilner received was often disappointing, but there was, to me, an unattractive and angry smarty-pantsness (smarty-pantsness is not a good quality) to the way these calls and callers were handled. This smarty-pantsness (or smarty pantsèdness, perhaps), I am pleased to report, didn't especially carry over into Wilner's actual play-by-play work when he was later afforded that opportunity. To say that Wilner was no Tom Cheek, or Jerry Howarth, or Dan Shulman, or Alan Ashby is both totally true and also no great slight, but I have seen very little comment on his dismissal to the effect that "oh man they shouldn't have let him go, he was great!" and instead a good deal along the lines of either "that's too bad; he really loves baseball" (which, as a thing to say, is interesting) or "you know what, I can see it" or, less charitably, "good." I of course have absolutely no desire to see anyone lose their job, especially given our present circumstance (but really whenever). At the same time, I can totally see why the Blue Jays might want to go in a different direction with their radio team. Ben Wagner seems pretty good! Maybe get him another guy! The 2020 television broadcasts were unrivaled, pretty much, as Dan Shulman (with Buck Martinez) is I think the best announcer in baseball these days (did you listen to the ESPN Radio feed of the World Series to hear Dan Shulman? or were you instead like "you know what, I really do like it when John Smoltz has things to say about John Smoltz" as you opted for Fox [haha!]). It felt unnatural for television to be more pleasing than radio for Blue Jays baseball. And frankly I want that stopped. 

The several-day internet focus on Toronto Blue Jays' broadcasters and broadcasting that followed Wilner's largely unexplained (and yet not inexplicable) dismissal on what we might as well call "the boards" has led to some fairly intriguing stuff, like a revisiting of the impressively durable rumours that Jerry Howarth didn't give a hoot about Mike Wilner (conspicuously unmentioned in Howarth's memoir, I am told), and that Wilner himself returned no hoot (of the many thanked in Wilner's note of farewell, Howarth was not among them), all of which is devastating, as Howarth is Toronto-baseball Mr. Rogers, and previously known only to have it in for Jose Reyes (I liked him!) and J. P. Ricciardi (I really didn't!). 

But by far the most important thing that came out the collective remembrance and reflection surrounding Wilner's dismissal is how, in 2015, people kept calling in to Jays Talk to ask if Jose Bautista was a male witch, as immortalized in a reddit thread titled "People keep calling in to Jays Talk to ask if Jose Bautista is a male witch." There is not much more to it than that, other than that a number of callers from the Cambridge/Kitchener area, seemingly in some manner of (coven-like?) co-ordination, kept calling in to Jays Talk to ask if Jose Bautista was a male witch. And Mike Wilner was not having it. Miraculously, a ten-minute audio compilation of several of these calls survives, and I would like to share them with you at this link. The final moments of the final call are the greatest moments in Blue Jays radio history that feature neither Tom Cheek nor Jerry Howarth. Alas that it seemed not so to Mike Wilner, whom we wish the best in all his future endeavours.     

KS

Can I Baseball a Feeling?

Hello, friends!

One never knows, does one, when one will have baseball feelings (or indeed Baseball Feelings) visited upon them by some strange confluence of present circumstance and the strange weight of remembrance, but given that eventuality (indeed, that inevitability), it is really pretty good, isn't it, that we still have this nice little blog with Bert Blyleven in a low-key off-colour t-shirt atop it wherein we might, at both the very least and the very most, note them (the feelings). (Blyleven does not seem to be loading "on mobile" and I can't explain it; I am sorry.) Lately, I have been paying much closer attention to this ill-advised and almost certainly wrong baseball season than I would have guessed, and find myself in a surprisingly September Baseball mood, so much so that, in addition to having actual games on with greater regularity than I have in years, I also have a non-actual (and yet so actual) game of Baseball Mogul open presently on the selfsame computer from which I now type to you (hey why didn't the 2001 Blue Jays pick up Sammy Sosa and Roberto Alomar without even giving up all that much? Explain yourself, "Gord Ash.") If you want to get weirded out by the primary world of our experience being folded into and around the subcreation (in Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories" sense [I am not using this correctly]) or second-order world or our imaginings, then I think you'd like it; the 2017 one is free; give it a shot; it's for computers. I used to play a lot of it years ago and ran it with a "baseball card mod" that replaced the generic, logo-wiped player pictures with old baseball cards (be they Topps, Fleer, Upper Deck, Donruss, Score, O-Pee-Chee, and that's it I can't remember any more old baseball card kinds really [Leaf! I had a Ryan Klesko Leaf rookie card that the guy at the store gave me two more packs for! Leaf!] but now I find there is a genuine charm to these objectively charmless images to the extent to which they participate in an æsthetic I have come to think of (just now! you can get it on the ground floor on this one!) as j o s t e n s w æ v e. 

I mean look:

Yung Doc (R.I.P.)

this one is also
v l æ d w æ v e

So I haven't changed those and instead wish to inhabit them insofar as I am able. But this is a seductive æsthetic and in time you may have to come for me. When that happens, I hope that I am able to accept your help graciously and gratefully but there is honestly no telling what kind of state I will be in (because of it).  

Another "state" I would like to talk about is the "state" of Blue Jays baseball! (Yessssssssss.) It's a lot of fun! I should begin by saying that I recognize that I am a jerk for even watching, in that I felt actual relief when the federal government decided not to permit Major League Baseball to hold games in Canada this season, given MLB's somewhat lax "well maybe not everyone will get sick necessarily" approach to public health; if it was not super cool for the Blue Jays to play baseball in Toronto this year (and it was not), it is not all of a sudden super cool for the Blue Jays to play baseball so long as it is an hour-and-a-half drive away in Buffalo (in a pretty lovely minor league park [park loveliness will not save you though, man]). And so none of this should be happening: the playing, the viewing, the enjoying. But this is a pretty fun team! Of spirited young men, many of them rather heavyset! Although my personal preference has long run towards slick-fielding speedsters lean as whippets, the lure of the big fat station-to-station slugger is by no means unknown to me. Although no one thing defines these 2020 Toronto Blue Jays, with the exception of comically awful baserunning (which, from a sheer entertainment standpoint, is very much to their credit), heft is a major theme and almost certainly the predominant one (the only other real contender is how fondly I remember everybody's dads). The off-season addition of 류현진 Hyun-jin Ryu (a move willed into being by a single-minded twitter pal of mine), perhaps the Blue Jays' girthmost starter since David Wells, was a bold step in this probably correct direction, but it was Vladimir Guerrero Jr.'s off-season addition (oh ho!) of a whole bunch of extra in the middle (and lower-middle) that cemented it. Lest you think I am in any way body shaming through a thin veil of irony let me assure you I am on the contrary body encouraging with all sincerity: I am here to venerate and embrace every bit of this, and to celebrate the "all bodies are beautiful" nature of baseball as a sport. There are those who have suggested that Vladi Jr. has taken his natural baseball-bod gifts too far in quarantine, and that his current physique is to his detriment, but I am here to say: let's let this play out; let's see where this goes. 

A big change for me and my own experience of baseball is that I am no longer principally "of the radio," despite long maintaining that radio is the medium most decorous with the game itself (this is not an "original" nor necessarily even "good" thought). My circumstances, though, are this: Jerry Howarth, my favourite baseball broadcaster ever (to such an extent that I enjoyed lead-Jerry with Alan Ashby as much or maybe even more than Tom Cheek [may peace be upon him; may Allah be pleased] with Jerry Howarth as his number two) has earned the rest of what we can only hope will be a long and happy retirement (I think I am going to read Jerry Howarth's book! if I do I'll let you know about it, how about?) and what little time I have spent with baseball on the radio since then has not been the same, and I say that with no disrespect intended towards (let me check wikipedia . . .) Ben Wagner, Mike Wilner, Kevin Barker, and Duane Ward, all of whom I am sure are doing a good job. But when you can type "Blue Jays stream" into your phone and three clicks later have an HD feed of the legitimately great Dan Shulman on play-by-play and Buck Martinez on colour, that seems like the thing to do. (Buck Martinez: an actual problem on play-by-play, a true joy on colour; it's so weird.) This is new but I like it! The last few seasons most of my Blue Jays Awareness has come through following the team on twitter, which, since they only really show you the good parts, is a pretty misleading but very cheering way to keep up (after a fashion) with a baseball team that isn't winning many games but which has some players who are neat. But now they're good!

So here we are for some September baseball, the Blue Jays ahead of the Yankees (against whom they have ten games, including the one they are losing right now, in the next few weeks) for second place in the A.L. East, and well-positioned, it would seem, for the strange playoffs we will presumably get to see (should we be spared), and I am really enjoying it. I do think the Blue Jays' powder blue jerseys are excessively mannered, and I say that fully aware of how Angela Carter in her rejection of the term "literary post-modernism" accepted that there was a new mannerism, so don't even start with with me (please). But that is my only real problem with the team these days (the baserunning, which is complex, we've covered). I see from looking at my most recent posts on this blog, and how they are from years and years ago, that we have definitely not spoken since the Blue Jays improbably hired the great Carson Cistulli, formerly of both Fangraphs and the viewless wings of poesy, to a position in analytics or scouting or the intersection of those two things (perhaps of all four of the things just named, maybe; who can say). I wanted to note this truly excellent turn of events through positing two old photos and then a "Rate My Professors" student evaluation from Cistulli's time teaching on contract (I am pretty sure; if am mistaken please correct me [that's how I have taught for more than a decade so this is no diss]) at the University of Massachusetts long ago; here we go:

Which is just devastating.

And that's more or less where I am at with my Baseball Feelings at present. I'm way in: Blue Jays baseball on my phone while I do other things (let's not go nuts), scoreboard watching, Baseball Mogul, Jomboy podcasts and videos (they know so much and are so merry! and yet they are young and so do not recognize Kent Hrbek on sight), searching "川﨑 宗則 Munenori Kawasaki" on youtube and watching all of the results; realizing "my new hat" is like nine years old; just the whole works, man. 

I mentioned earlier that I'd had a look to see what my most recent posts here had been, and I found that there was one from E5's walk-off in 2016, and a bunch before that in 2015. At the end of a 2015 one where it looked (to me at least) like the Blue Jays were not going to get any further than the ALDS with Texas (I was mistaken!), I wrote this:

"But even if this is pretty much it, and the Blue Jays don't even get out of this round (maybe not this weekend, even), I did see people on their break at Sobey's playing catch outside on the grass yesterday, and just totally firing it in there, so this excellent half-summer of everybody (really, it seems like everybody) enjoying baseball here, at least a little, has been really nice, and I look forward to it being really nice again when it happens when I am 58. None of our current cats will be around then, so let's enjoy their company as much as we are able, and also, to a lesser extent, some baseball games."

It made me sad to read this, but once I had, I wanted to close by wishing the best to any and all cats of that era who are with us still, and to ask that we take a moment, if we could, to reflect on the memory of the cats of those days who are no longer around, except in the broadest sense.    

Your pal,

KS

PS Vladi Jr. just hit a two-RBI chopper past the first basemen with the bases loaded and then stole second by a lot: let's let this play out; let's see where this goes . . . 

PPS ten-run inning, Blue Jays 12 Yankees 7.