The 2024 Blue Jays, and how to cynicism real good
The Boys of truly Mid Summer are back. The Toronto MLB team might well have missed their competitive window, but so what? Baseball serves a higher power, and all outcome-oriented thinking is bad.
Impatient, irascible, and ornery is no way to go through your fan life. Even when ‘they were in on him’ was a Blue Jays easy-meme all winter. For flippity-flip sake, their big signing was Justin Turner.
Whatever this 2024 season holds for in a captured market of the Rogers Blue Jays Baseball Partnership, who knows? One set of simulations says 81 wins for the Torontos, the nobody’s land of the sport. Few forecast them racking up 90, the threshold to earn a berth in MLB’s bloated, devalued World Series tournament. Either way, the season ticket holders from Oakville, Forest Hill, and Thornhill have swankier confines. I opt out of the Preseason Predictions game because baseball helps with my mental health, and outcome-oriented thinking is bad for mental health.
Ya, I am a real riot at parties.
This is an exercise in come-what-may. If this scribbling has any point, unlike the Jays’ playoff series in Minnesota last October, it is about the power of being a diehard who separates the “you” from the “them.” Hey, at least this post is ready ahead of Opening Day, unlike seemingly half of every team’s frontline pitchers.
Major League Baseball keeps wanting to speed up the games, and we can speed up the transition from tragedy into comedy. Hey, do you think Vladimir Guerrero Jr. batting second and Bo Bichette batting third will cut the number of inning-killing double plays in half?
I cringe at my whinge here, but baseball has to mean more to me than the outcomes. It is about the ritual, yadda-yadda-yadda; it begins in the spring, the season of new life, and then it leaves you to face the fall and winter alone. Baseball fills in hot summer nights. Since it is the oldest major team sport, and the one most connected to labour and social history, it is also the one that lets you zone out from incessant presentism. So I’m not thinking about whether Kevin Gausman will start on Sunday or Monday. I’m thinking about my historical 26-player roster for the Seattle Mariners, and what to name it.1
Interrogating my personal Zen means conceding this is also a great sport for passive-aggressive knowitalls. There are endless ways to relate to the game and evaluate players, and I overestimate my reasoning. And there is so much I opt out on some of the StatCast numbers do seem like forest-for-the-trees fodder.
All I know is baseball is not slow, and it is never boring. Facts: there are 294 pitches in a MLB game, and 153 plays in a National Football League game. The latter’s games have an average run time that is about 20 minutes longer.
Remind me again what sport is slow?
Right now, as a true-blue Jays fan, finding a slew of space for this vibe is tough. The least-preferred perception is to seem like a total Slappy for the baseball ops braintrust of president Mark Shapiro and general manager Ross Atkins, et al. They can be mendacious about their plans. They stood pat after a nothing-special season. Granted, so did Pat Gillick more than once, but that was a less intense era.
So, picture being between two fjords. Like, in some remote area of some northern European country that you always wanted to visit. As you nibble on some weird protein snack and line up a selfie, you remember what Conan O’Brien said about cynicism on his last night hosting The Tonight Show because your brain turned out TV.
It’s my least favorite quality — it doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen. And then you cringe at your whinge since the world has had its fill of Opening Day columns. No one should try to outdo 1980s Tom Boswell.
The fjords are, actually, both strains of cynicism. One that is well-known and well-practiced in the Toronto sports market. The consolidation of major teams and the media portals, between Rogers, Bell, and MLSE means the End Goal is Driving Engagement. The 2019 Raptors were a happy accident, rhetorically speaking.
Sports media in these parts is all white noise of “Can the (Team Name Here) win?” “Will They Win?” “How Are The (Team Name Here) Gonna Do?” in between the gambling ads. It does not seem to come so much from unconditional support as inviting people to get Big Mad. Nuts to that. There are things to get mad at sports about, but the wins and losses are not it.
Since this will never lead to radical honesty, it must be rejected.
The other is the inlet to learning how to cynicism really good. Laugh through the oh-fers with runners in scoring position, the starting pitcher who gets jocked, and the occasional bullpen meltdown. Erring is human. There is another game tomorrow, and probably the day after that, too.
It is a Long Season. Too long, in truth, and the sport desperately needs a geographical realignment to reduce its resource consumption, but that is another post.
So is this lowered expectations and a form of self-protection? Well, it is, but it is also a better-late-than-never awakening to how corporatism seized our sports long ago. And it is also about reclaiming the idea that the Blue Jays, and about 27 other MLB teams, are starting with a record of 0-0.2
On the first of those points, well, the Jays got me long, long ago since baseball had a better vibe than hockey. It was a bit more relaxed and individualized than the winter sport I received early exposure to whilst growing up in rural southeastern Ontario. Baseball gave a slew of sanctuary from the hockey-industrial complex, no matter how long the Stanley Cup playoffs drag into June.
It is simply a better game. The only one where the team with the ball is on defense. And it is subtle. They can put all the LED lights in the (Insert Corporate Name) Centre, and it still will not change that baseball is a game that engages all the senses but is not designed to inflame them, like the right elbow of Jordan Romano.
Of course, I am not the team, as ascertained up top. The very name of the Toronto was a tell about who stood to benefit. A riposte from Red Smith called that out right away back in the day.
“the Blue Jay is a raucous, obstreperous, thieving cannibal who robs the nest of smaller birds, eats the eggs, devours the young and then comes around bragging about it.”
Damn, he just described the entire business and political donor class of this treaty land inhabitant-colonial project. You know the meme: Canada is made up of “five banks, two telecom monopolies, three fossil fuel companies, two grocery barons, four real estate developers, three organized crime syndicates, six political dynasties, two housing bubbles, and three rich kids with political parties … in a trenchcoat.”
Wow, Go, Jays, Go, then.
The conscience and slate are clean. I want to see what happens. Somewhere along the way, I have said I watch my teams like a mid-tier sitcom. Get invested in Story, and characters, but don’t expect it to be better than 10 Super Bowls, or even the series finale of Newhart.
I started with some gentle slagging about The Preseason Prediction game. I refuse to make one since it is out of alignment with healthful thinking. Outcome-oriented thinking usually ends badly. There are so many moving parts, and I like to zone in on how a few of the baseball men are getting on this season. If this leads to playoff success, great; if not, there is always next year.
So hope for the best. Be prepared to laugh if it takes a turn for the worse.
If you have hung in for this long, these are focal points for this Blue Jays season, at least for me:
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. gets his swagger back
The projection calls for him to add 20 points of on-base and 60-some points in slugging. That .401 / .601 season in 2021, when most of the home slate was in the minor-league parks, now looks like an outlier, but not that much of one.3 Dude can hit. He barrels up tailor-made double-play balls like a latter-day Jim Rice.
Mostly, though, I need to see Guerrero serve a pitcher of shutthehellup to anyone who has labelled him overrated since he was in Double-A in 2018. It is such a con. Either you look right, or say, “Look, he proved me wrong,” like he had anything to prove to your old arse in the first place.4
If excitement about Ernie Clement lasts over 4 hours, see a doctor
This probably happens everywhere, but one must gird for the fanbase’s clamor to see this Tryhard in the lineup. They will love the grit, hustle, and other codewords Ernie Clement rocks at a Getting Thrown Out On A 6-3 Grounder Party.
He endeared himself by getting on a heater as a fill-in shortstop. Then Clement batted so well in the fakey games in Florida that they had to bring him north as the utility infielder. But he’s 28, so let’s be real. Anyone paid under US$1 million is being paid that relative pittance for a reason.
Let it all work out for Yusei Kikuchi
Every team has that one starter with the off-the-charts stuff that never converts into full-on greatness. I have been to games where Kikuchi hinted at no-hit form. And yet, the ERA is projected to rise above 4.00, and he might have trouble avoiding walks and the home-run ball.
Now or never for Nate Pearson
It seemed fated to be: he’s the namesake of our greatest PM of the last 60 years. ‘Big Nate’ put up numbers as he moved through the ranks, and has yet to put it together in The Show. But he is a righty who throws serious gas. Then again, so does everyone.
Greener pastures
Righty reliever Chad Green always shut down the Jays during his seasons with the Yankees, getting more than half his outs via the K and limiting batters to a .216 OBP. We’ve been nice, so why shouldn’t he regain that form in Year 2 post-Tommy John Surgery?
Just a bit of Votto
Speaking of dudes who hit, one does need to see Joey Votto have a valedictory in blue. Just enough that his Hall of Fame plaque will include, “Toronto, A.L., 2024.” I will take a game-winning home run in front of a big Sunday afternoon crowd. Or on Monday, June 17 against Boston, since (a) fuck Boston and (b) I have tickets that night.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
March 26-28
Hamilton, Ont.
The Emerald City Espressos, Seattle Macchiatos, and Seattle Grungos (whose tickets are printed on some sort of cracker) are all in contention.
So are the Oakland Athletics and Colorado Rockies but, well, you know.
On-base and slugging percentage. I don’t do batting average, grandpa. Also, OPS (on-base plus slugging) is batting averages for millennials and Gen-Z.
Et tu, Sager, shurely?! — Ed.