So Once Again, We Have Reached That Point

Travis Snider is at times surprisingly dainty

The point, that is, at which my elation at (and gratitude for) the mere fact of spring training baseball is replaced by my need to see real games that count, pretty much right away, thanks. This is especially true this year because the weather is really nice here, and when this happens, the season should be started early in my view. Pretty much everything the Blue Jays wanted to see out of pretty much everyone has materialized this spring, and the excitement surrounding this 2012 edition of the club has me poised for a summer of unusually bitter disappointment, and I'm ready to get that going, basically.


Also in case you were wondering just how mind-blowingly awful Adam Lind has been, you might enjoy this Drunk Jays Fans post: "The Mind-Blowing Awfulness of Adam Lind." I know I did!


KS

Blue Jays 8, Pirates 5: Travis Snider Answers from the Mouth of His Cannon

still loving the new uniforms btw

Only a day after my most recent denunciation of Travis Snider, dude hit a couple of doubles, drove in a pair on a weird groundout, stole third, and threw a guy out from left. That is all awesome, however I would be remiss if I did not point out to you that he hit like .347 or something in spring training last year, so while you might be thinking this all might auger well I am here to say that we don't know how it augers. We just don't know. How. It augers.  Also, thinking about the Pirates for a minute, isn't it something how the Pirates traded for A. J. Burnett on the condition that they wouldn't actually have to pay him really any money but then in a bunting drill Burnett fouled one off his eye and that shit is broken and he's out for months? Oh, Pirates . . .


KS

ZOMG

"And then I just let it go and it is like *fwooosh* smoke."

I thought nobody was going to show up until Tuesday! That's when Blue Jays pitchers -- and thus, understandably, catchers -- are supposed to "report" to Spring Training, "report" being the paramilitary verb that we have agreed to use to describe that act in which heavyset dudes with mustaches show up in Florida (or I guess Arizona for other, lesser organizations) and try to shake the shit off their arms before embarking on an arduous season of sitting with their feet up behind the left field fence drinking coffee and eating sunflower seeds and just generally fucking around out there. But a bunch of guys showed up early! So now baseball! And I love it. I could not possibly love it more than I do. It is maximally loved by me. Baseball is back. Eat shit, winter; you have been a dick. 


And you know what, this year could be pretty alright! As you will no doubt recall, the Blue Jays finished 81-81 last year, putting them very near the .500 mark on the season. The chief glory of the precisely .500 team is that you can totally you can totally you can totally remember ten games that they could easily have won last year, ten games that it is in fact completely ludicrous that they somehow managed to lose. It is therefore both perfectly obvious and obviously wrong to think that with even minimal improvement, a ninety-win season is just around the corner, and this is what I have chosen to believe. 


Hey, did you see or hear about the ESPN Insider thing that they called "Future Power Rankings" or something, where they had some guys rate every MLB team in a number of categories so as to say where they saw all of these teams in five years' time? The good news is that the Blue Jays were sixth in all of baseball; the bad news is that Tampa Bay, New York, and Boston were all ranked ahead of them. But whatever, man, whatever. I am less concerned with the 2017 season than the imminent 2012 "campaign" in which the Blue Jays are winning ninety. 


If I may however be somewhat sober for a moment: this is perhaps unfair of me, given that The Dear/Great Leader Alex Anthopolous actually managed to pull off the best trade of the offseason for the second consecutive year (more on that in a moment), but it's hard to say that this winter was anything but disappointing just because of the whole Yu Darvish thing. I mean, I have no real expectation that he's going to be the first Japanese starter to really be as awesome as he looks, nor do I think the Blue Jays really should have been willing to spend the kind of dollars it took Texas to seal the deal, but it would have been so cool and exciting, man, it would have been the best. Also even if Darvish only turns out to be kind of OK, that would still go an awful long way in this rotation, because who knows what we've got, exactly? There can be no question as to Ricky Romero's status as a boss (that being: he is one), but after that, things get iffy in a hurry: Brandon Morrow consistently underperforms like all of his peripherals to such an extent that one begins to doubt the reliability of certain modern nerd metrics; Brett Cecil might just be straight-up horrible; Henderson Alvarez impressed but one must be cautious; Dustin McGowan's arm is barely attached and so, again, caution; and Kyle Drabek is thus far a baffling ordeal of a guy. 


But how about that bullpen! The Sergio Santos trade was awesome, just awesome: AA gave up nothing of substance for a good, young reliever who has closed and not freaked out about it and who is "controllable" in the sense that he is not free to meaningfully negotiate the terms of his employment owing to the economic structure of professional baseball and also he has no access to the means of production so the ninth should be covered no problem. Darren Oliver is a smart pickup, and those few months without Jason Frasor were a dark era I never wish to see again, so it's cool that he's back. I am good with Carlos Villanueva and Casey Janssen and I am not about to start trouble about Jesse Litsch necessarily so what you've got here is a bullpen that has all of a sudden gone from being a hideous, untenable shit show to a strength! Bullpens are supposed to be easy to fix, but this looked really easy. Good job Alex Anthopolous!


An infield of Adam Lind (who can't possibly be that bad again, can he? I am going to assume "no") at first, Kelly Johnson at second (he is way better than you think relative to league average second base production, which sucks tremendously these days), Yunel Escobar at short (.369 OBP!), and Brett Lawrie (a douche, yes, but our douche) at third is going to be plenty interesting, especially since Brett Lawrie is probably going to be Mike Schmidt, basically. I am a strong proponent of E5 "Edwin" Encarnacion at DH, and if you look at last season, he was totally OK except for the part of the year where he was, according to the advanced metrics, maybe the worst player ever. 


And what about the outfield, you ask? That is reasonable of you. Well, I am not over the moon at the idea of Eric Thames being our everyday guy in left if that is what happens but maybe there's a trade out there or something. I have every expectation that Colby Rasmus is going to be fine, and in fact probably even better than fine. Also if it is cool with you I am going to just go ahead and pencil Jose Bautista in for another 1.000 OPS year of being the baddest motherfucker on the planet and project the haters to suck it. 


In short, I am surprised and delighted at just how surprised and delighted I am that there are Toronto Blue Jays grab-assing around Dunedin, Florida right now, several full days before I thought they were going to begin even the most preliminary grab-assing. Internet propers for this thrilling revelation go out to the Blue Jay Hunter Tumblr, which I totally would not know about were it not for the indispensable Drunk Jays Fans, finest of all team-specific blogs in my estimation. Oh yeah finally: Fangraphs Audio was really good today, as baseball writer and stay-at-home dad Dayn Perry (*strange background noise* "don't do that, bud" *further noise*) joined published poet and renowned hipster Carson Harrington Cistulli and together they established that irony began in the early nineties, which is not what my own calculations suggest, but which is worth considering. 


Hey why not close by posting other pictures from Spring Training BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT IS GOING ON IT IS SPRING TRAINING CAN YOU EVEN BELIEVE IT


KS 

Adam Lind (centre) is chubby.

Balk, imo.

Please don't suck Kyle Drabek come on man.

I like Ricky Romero even more than John Farrell does in this picture.

Brett Lawrie, who is probably a dick but who is awesome so you don't really mind, and Adam Lind, who is kind of awful but who seems nice so you don't really mind.

Rajai Davis, as seen through Scott Richmond's crotch.

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

Tigers 4, Blue Jays 0; Miguel Cabrera presumably off his tits

"Florida Auto Exchange Field of Dreams" would be nicer

Conventional wisdom on spring training is that you spend all winter being like come on come on come on spring training, and then once it gets here, for the first week of it you're like come on come on come on let's get some games going, and then as soon as the games start, you're like come on come on come on let's get to the regular season already this is nonsense.  There is I guess a degree of truth to that, but actually spring training games are kind of awesome.  Take today's Grapefruit League debut for both the Blue Jays and the Tigers, a 4-0 Tigers win. Pretty unremarkable, right? You look at the box score with nobody doing anything particularly cool: no home runs, no triples, everybody pitched fine (except Jesse Carlson I guess) but not like a million Ks or anything.  But exactly fifty people played today.  Fifty!  In a baseball game! Isn't that a lot? Also there were two double plays and even though I am now almost thirty-two years old, I find literally every double play to be neat.  Literally every one. Also, look at Brett Cecil's cool glasses:

Brett Cecil has cool glasses

See?  A fine start to the season boys, keep it up. 


KS

FIRST GAME OF SPRING TRAINING YEAAAHHHHH

We're about four hours from the first San Francisco Giants spring training game of 2011. I don't know whether it will be broadcast on the KNBR website, or on XM, or if it's only on that mlb.tv scam*, but I have a hunch that it probably won't be shown on TV here in the backwoods of Los Angeles.

It's a hell of a thing. The Giants will be starting a mix of World Series Champion stars and Aaron Rowand, and Lincecum will be starting on the hill for an inning or two. It's terribly exciting. Look at that picture up there! The San Francisco Giants won the World Series last year. THEY DID THAT. At this time last year, they were expected to finish third or fourth in the division.

Spring training and 2011 baseball opens here and expands before us, people. Will Mark De Rosa's wrist disintegrate when he fields his first short-hop? Will Pablo Sandoval's girdle burst open at an inopportune time, revealing that he fooled us all during the offseason? Will Jonathan Sanchez be the new and improved Jonathan Sanchez from the first 150 games of 2010, or will he turn into Todd Wellemeyer, Part 2? There's so much we don't know.

I will certainly try to catch as much spring training as I can. Hopefully Buster "What it is Right Now" Posey and Brandon "The Risen Christ" Belt will knock the cover off the ball and make everyone else on the team look like a pile of Aaron Rowands. Whatever the case, go Giants!

And more importantly, go baseball. Go baseball.

position players report

Position players showed up for work today, which means a couple of things. First off, as you can see from above, the Shaggy Jayson Werth era begins, apparently involving some sort of return to slavery for our beloved Tony Plush, who spent the offseason starting malingering brawls in the Dominican Republic... or at least I would assume, except it seems iffy if he played this winter or not to try and get back on track as a solid lead-off hitter. Truthfully, this team is not going to be good, and most likely 5th in the NL East, so if he just gets in fights and does crazy stuff, he's worth my dollar.
Of course the Jayson Werth deal was ridiculous, but so is every big deal done every spring. Werth allows the Nationals to transition towards credibility, I guess, because have both Ryan Zimmerman and Jayson Werth makes it seem like you're better than say the Royals, and at least trying. I guess.
The big deal today though was the mutual appearance of both Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper in Nats uniforms, at the same time, for the first time ever. Of course neither will matter to this year's team (always next year), but just the sheer orgasmic possibilities of the two actually achieving 75% of the hype is enough to drive me to giddiness about long summer commutes up US 29 through the clusterfuck of inhumanity that is northern Virginia to go watch weekday afternoon games in the polluted sunshine of the District of Columbia. There is a giant Wegman's in Gainesville on the ride that has the most ridiculous beer selection ever that could fill up a nice cooler for sitting around the early afternoon in the back of the truck with a selected compadre, getting drunkered up nicely (because even ultra microbrews from the grocery store come out cheaper than stadium cups), and just being good ol' Americans - blowing off work, being unproductive, and dreaming about millionaires standing around not doing a whole lot in front of us. (Jesus, no wonder America is fucking dying. Oh well, when in Jim Rome...)
Strasburg is still gonna be recovering most of the year, maybe get back to the Big Leagues for some trial runs of his bionic elbow late in the summer/fall. Harper is not expected to be pushed into the majors this year at all, though he apparently is carrying himself like a superstar already. Not sure if that's good or bad. This time of year the local beat writers are always drumming the positive djembes of brightness, you can never tell if someone is a giant asshole until it's too late.
Meanwhile, yesterday's 70 degree day turned back into today's 40 degree day. It's still February. It's still miserable. But goddamnit, spring is almost here.

Pitchers + Catchers = True Love Forever

It's the first day of Spring Training!  It's also Valentine's day.  It's actually kind of strange that these two events would fall on the same day, since one is a completely trivial non-event dreamt up by the vast consumerist machine and propagated by a servile, complicit media as a way to make lonely people even more miserable than they might otherwise be by dangling the hope of love and fulfillment in front of them before the harsh realities of a cold and unforgiving world snatches it away, and the other is Valentine's Day.  But whatever, here's to baseball, man, baseball, and, specifically, to the feelings it engenders.    

KS