Blue Jays 12, Rays 7; Rays 3, Blue Jays 2: It's Just That Hockey Playoffs

The light really is flat in there with the roof closed isn't it.

I am in favour of both Mark Beuhrle and games where Jose Bautista hits a dinger (or dingerz) so I find no joy in having not watched that one and not even having had it on the radio for even like a minute, but the hockey playoffs started, and we got oven-based snacks for that, and also a new kind of ginger ale that I am enjoying tremendously, so it was just extremely not a baseball night, you know? And last night I just wanted to read Chaucer (try it, you might like it!). 

Also, if I may be frank with you for a moment, even though the Rays got all interesting for a while and then receded to not being that interesting again I guess, I have never really cared about baseball games that the Rays were playing. This is nonsense, but it is how I feel about the Rays. I don't like their uniforms and their ballpark is dumb and I don't like how the Blue Jays play them a lot but never really play the Tigers and although that has nothing to do with the Rays I have always kind of held that against them? Also Jonah Keri's book about them was, on the level of the prose itself, just the absolute shits, if you will forgive my plain speaking on the matter.

Up next we have the Braves, and thoughts turn, of course, to the 1992 World Series which meant a pretty staggering amount more than the 1993 one even if the Joe Carter moment is obviously the singular moment from those years but should it be or should it be when Roberto Alomar homered off Eckersly in 92 in Oakland and put his arms up the second he hit it even though it ended up being kind of a squeaker just over the fence in right like how did Robbie know he had gotten enough of it how did he *know* and yet he *knew* and now he is in the Hall of Fame and should have gone in the first year except he spit on an umpire once which is an inappropriate thing to have done but also a fully human act that was long since forgiven by the man spat upon and so who are we to sit in judgement of Roberto Alomar who are we to deny him his propers.

In closing, if you haven't seen the Pillar catch, it was really good, and is here.  

Oh yeah also Jose Reyes got hurt lol.

KS  

Blue Jays 8, Mariners 3: It's About Damn Time

Jose Bautista (left) seconds before being hellaciously bagtagged by Yunel Escobar (right)

After seven innings of making Jason Vargas look like Cy Young, the Blue Jays totally got a hold of the Mariners bullpen in a bat-around eighth that put six runs on the board, three of them coming by way of a Jose Bautista home run that owned particularly hard. (Strangely, for all that Bautista has been a beast thus far [1.125 OPS, haters], he'd only knocked in two runs, both on solo home runs, before the three-run shot today.) 


The Blue Jays went with their B roster today, really, but pretty much everybody ended up with at least a hit, except for John MacDonald, who we do not ask or expect to hit, and Juan Rivera, who can't be gotten rid of quickly enough to suit me. Top of the sixth, he grounds to short, and  he just kind of lopes out of the box until the short stop bobbles it, and so he gets his oh shit run on, and then the throw still beats him by a step. Which is all utter nonsense. I totally get that it's a 162-game season, and it's a grind, and there are going to be times in August when you're hurt and it's hot and you're playing a day game after a night game and they've started testing for amphetamines now and there's just no way you're going to be able to bust it down the line on every single routine play. I get all of that. But today, it's April, and god damn it, you're Juan Rivera, which is to say you've earned nothing. You are the fourth outfielder on a third-place team at best. My wife has never heard of you, bro. Run, Juan. Run.  


Unfortunately for Kyle Drabek, all of this happened too late to get him the win, but he had another solid start, giving up two earned runs in five and two-thirds. He picked Ryan Langerhans off first, too, which was pretty tight. 


And so farewell for now, Seattle: I admire your beautiful ballpark, and have long felt a fondness for you in your capacity as the Blue Jays' 1977 expansion cousins. Also it was awesome how Ken Griffey Jr. played for you, because that guy was amazing. But I kind of can't believe we dropped two of three to you just now, because this year you are an awful, awful baseball team.

Only five-and-a-half months to go, bro, stay strong.

KS

You don't have any idea how awesome Jose Bautista has been in Spring Training so far, do you?

He hit that shit A TONNE

I am willing to bet that you were all "lol that Bautista contract is nuts what were they thinking" and now you don't even have the decency to follow how awesome he's been in Spring Training so far, which is the last chance for you to know and understand how wrong you were before the regular season begins, at which point your position will become embarrassing and untenable and ultimately a source of shame for you.  Here is Bautista's slash line through nine games and twenty-four at-bats, which every single statistical analyst will tell you is almost too large a sample size to make a meaningful assessment of a player's value: .458/.483/.833.  By my math that is an OPS of 1.316, and while we all agree that OPS is mathematically invalid because you are adding fractions with different denominators and also that it badly overrates the value of slugging versus the even more important ability to get on base, we also agree that you have been totally wrong about Jose Bautista and this is your last chance to get straight, so that's what we'll focus on here. Note also that he has hit two home runs and he's absolutely tearing into the ball and also that he is a doctor and a lawyer and by reputation a really good kisser.

Finally, I have a theory that he might also be Swizz Beatz:

It's Me, Snitches

Easy to claim, tough to prove, I grant you, but here's Jose Bautista -- oh sorry, Swizz Beatz -- with the woman he left for Alicia Keyes:

You'll note that in the above he's wearing a Toronto hat. You slipped up, friendo is what I want to say to Swizz Bautista right now.  You'll also note in the above that there's Swizz's daughter, too, in addition to his ex, so actually none of this is funny at all and I'm an asshole.  

All I'm saying, though, is (i) think about it; and (ii) do something about it.

Content because he has hit yet another home run, or because his beats are so sick?

Protesting too much?

KS

The Blue Jays beat a Yankees split squad today and I am thinking Wild Card

POJIRA!

10-2! And you will be like "first of all, it is spring training, and secondly, dude, dude, dude: it was a split squad." But I will say to you split squad, shmlit shqlad. Yeah, in fact, I totally will: split squad, shmlit shqlad. Kyle Drabek looked great, Bautista hit a homer, Podzilla tore it up on the base paths, and I am pretty sure this is the year. That's all it took, apparently, and to be honest with you I'm a little surprised I have been such a cheap date on this, but I'm sold. Jeff Blair and Alan Ashby spent ten minutes on the radio today being all, "Man, I don't want to get ahead of myself here, but man, they're looking good so far . . ." and in my brain I am also like man and then I think things very close to what they are saying and then I think man again just to seal off the thought at the other end. 


KS   

Jose Bautista and Podzilla? Alex Anthopolous, you are dangerously close to becoming my everything.

I don't know this for sure, but I bet Jose hit the shit out of that one.

This is great.  I feel awesome about this.  The low-risk, low-reward thing for Alex Anthopolous to do with the Jose Bautista contract situation would have been to take whatever decision was handed down in arbitration, and just go with that.  If he went ahead and had another amazing year, Bautista would be dozens of millions of dollars more costly than he is right now, and Anthopolous could have traded him to a contender at the deadline or taken the picks and nobody would have minded all that much. Conversely, if Bautista statistically fell off a cliff, Anthopolous would be applauded for having played it safe.  And yeah, either way that would have been safe, and ultimately fine, but this is way, way better.

Bautista is of course a weird, weird case, a guy who bounced around and didn't do much of anything until the last month of his age 29 season, and then, after identifying and working through some pretty serious mechanical flaws in his swing with coach Dwayne Murphy, flaws that had caused him to be late on virtually everything and foul off an unusual number of hittable pitches, he put it all together.  (You can read about that process in Sports Illustrated, and there actually used to be pictures, maybe just in the print version, that show the dramatic difference in his swing.)  And then, after an awesome September, 2009, and absolutely monstrous 2010 in which he slugged 54 home runs (.260/.378/.617, 6.9 WAR, omg, wtf).   Albert Pujols (and holy cow, what's going on in St. Louis? isn't that nuts?) hit 42, and sixteen players hit in the 30s.  As Neil and I got all emotional about in the comments to the Hank Greenberg post, we've moved into an era where 50 home runs is genuinely awesome again, and not just, like, pretty cool. And so 54 is once again truly rad.

Also let me say here that if you want to be all "lol steroids" on the subject of Jose Bautista, you can pretty much go to hell.  Bautista has himself been pretty reasonable when people have brought this up, adopting a very patient "I can see why you would ask that, but I assure you this is not the case" approach.  And reporters, particularly the loathsome Damien Cox in a piece called "Gotta At Least Ask the Question", have been so horseshit about it, with the kind of "I'm not saying, I just think it's important that we think about it" stance where they don't dare make an accusation, exactly, but deride anyone naive enough to not make an accusation.  Do they think that (a) performance enhancing drugs are completely out of the game except for those supposedly used by Jose Bautista, which explains his monster year relative to an otherwise clean league, or that (b) steroid use is still rampant but Jose Bautista has happened upon some kind of megasteroid previously unknown to athletics or even science and so has lapped the field?  In the absence of anything remotely resembling evidence, it's just so lame to chalk Jose Bautista's 2010 up to steroids amirite? as though that is the only way to explain it.  (Read the Mitchell Report and be dazzled by the raw power numbers of those named. Dazzled!)  I think Keith Law had the best response to the whole "don't you think we need to ask the question?" thing last year when he said something like this to John Shannon (that guy is the worst, by the way) on the Fan 590 in Toronto: "It's not actually fair, in fact it is completely unfair, because what if I were to ask you, 'John Shannon, are you a horrible racist?  I'm not saying there's any reasonable evidence to support it, I just think it's important to ask the question.' I've just called you a racist in the most cowardly way possible."  I am quoting from memory and probably being meaner to John Shannon than Keith Law was, but not by much.

In the event that Bautista gets popped for fifty games, you can bring this all back up with me, and I will not feel like I need to correct myself or anything.  Could he be on steroids?  Well yeah, sure, why not, who couldn't? But is a monstrous breakout season like his 2010 strong enough evidence on its own to even suggest that it's likely?  Not if you have any knowledge (in the obssessive, guy-with-both-baseballreference.com-and-FanGraphs-open-in-separate-tabs sense) of the history of baseball.  Weirder things have happened before (non-greenie) performance enhancing drugs were a part of baseball.  Much weirder.  It is a weird game where people do things at least this nuts (in one way or another) almost regularly.   

Anyway, I love this deal.  Bautista is hardly getting paid as though anyone expects him to ever repeat his 2010.  They've got him slotted in roughly as a guy who will hit 25-30 HR, draw a bunch of walks, not strikeout all that much, and offer some defensive versatility.  Given the apparent going rates these days, $65 million over five seasons with a team option for a sixth is both fair now, and, if Bautista struggles a couple of years in, still a totally moveable contract, or one that you can simply swallow without too much trouble.  It's really not that much money.  Stoeten, of Drunk Jays Fans fame, is not nuts about the deal, but I really don't see the hangup.  I just like this deal intuitively on its surface, without getting too into the math of it, but Dave Cameron breaks it down pretty convincingly at FanGraphs to satisfy the head as well as the heart.  Jonah Keri was on the Jeff Blair show today, and said he likes it but thinks it comes a year too early, which I think misses the point: if Bautista has another monster year, which is unlikely, or even if he regresses significantly but is still putting up solid power numbers, which is totally likely, there is no way he signs a deal anything like this.  If Bautista is a useful player this season, which I expect he will be, this is not a deal you can sign him to once he gets to free agency.  He is not going to for $8 million and then a bunch of $14s, which is how this one is structured (and, well, the $8 million is buying out his final arbitration year, not a free agent year, but you get what I'm saying here I'm sure). 

And plus Jose Bautista is just awesome to watch.  If you don't like watching Jose Bautista, there is a pretty good chance you don't like watching baseball.  That is my bold and confrontational view on this crucial subject.  If you're as excited about this as I am (note: you almost certainly aren't), here's audio of the press conference, and then Jose Bautista and Alex Anthopolous on Prime Time Sports this evening.  What can I say, I just like that guy.  And in case you were wondering, he's willing to play third this season, even though both Bautista and Anthopolous see him probably returning to the outfield in 2012 if things go the way they expect (this would mean Matt Lawrie as a starter not this year but next, is my guess).  He's not exactly Adrian Beltre out there, but he's way more valuable at third then as a corner voltigeur, so I am completely down with this.   Completely. 

To summarize, this is awesome, and also we got Scott Podsednik for some reason!  When you Google image search his name you mostly get pictures of his Playboy Bunny wife Lisa Dergan who, did you know, holds a degree in Art History as well as the bonered attention of men?  I'm kind of on the fence about posting a racy picture of her though, because I, like all of us here at Baseball Feelings, am a sex-positive feminist and so while raciness itself is awesome, is the sterile, ultimately sexless and woman-effacing pseudoraciness of Playboy or it's lad-mag equivalents really what we want here?  Am I -- are we -- willing to be complicit in that?  Maybe a little, but only a little:

KS