DON'T GET ALL ANGSTY, JAYS FANS; AND A BIG BLOW TO THE SABRES' HOPES

Oh, that was baseball like it oughta be. Played on artificial turf in a converted football stadium, with elastic belts and pullover jerseys.

The line today is that the evidence is starting to mount that this Jays season is going to end in disappointing fashion.

After all, the blueprint -- build around a solid starting rotation, play good defence and hope the upgraded offence comes through -- has been swept off table, stomped on, and used to make paper airplanes.

The Jays are 25-21, 2 games behind the Red Sox, who are in town this weekend, and six behind the White Sox, who follow Boston, in the nascent wild-card race. It's easy to succumb to the suspicion this is a group of underachievers who have done a rotten job of creating their own luck, which is a Skip Bayless-esque way of explaining away the pitching problems and the other aspects where the Jays have not been up to snuff.

Pitching? Beyond Roy (Cy Young) Halladay, it's pretty much a schmozzle. Ted Lilly is inconsistent, Josh Towers in the minors, Gustavo Chacin has elbow problems ... and you've probably heard about the A.J. Burnett saga.

Defence: Sportswriters and fans tend to overrate this. Especially the old-guard sportswriters, who love to wax pointless about someone's acumen with the leather. But after defence was a strong suit of the '05 Jays, this year's edition has made second-most errors (31) in the American League, including a league-worst 22 on throws; the catchers have thrown out just 20% of would-be basestealers, next-to-last in the league.

And then there's the threat presented by those surprising Detroit Tigers, which I wrote about last week. The Toronto Sun's Ken Fidlin noted today that it seems unlikely the wild card will come from the AL East.

But it's germane to refer back to Monday's post about how the Oilers aren't really a Cinderella team because of the travel and scheduling disadvantages Western teams face in the NHL. As Tom Benjamin noted, part of the reason he gave up trying to convince hockey fans of the inequities in scheduling was that "fans preferred to believe that their team were a bunch of underachievers rather than believe that the way the league was structured made it impossible for a West Coast team to be consistently elite." (Italics mine)

The Jays don't necessarily have travel disadvantages, unless you count having to clear Customs at the start and end of each road trip. But in scheduling, they're at a double disadvantage, since baseball tries to have it both ways by playing an unbalanced schedule in order to have more matchups between rivals, but then having everyone compete for one wild-card spot.

So Toronto has to not only compete in a division with Evil Empires 1 and 1-A, but has to play the Yankees and Red Sox more than the Central and West teams who are in the wild-card hunt.

One of these days, I am going to get around to penning my manifesto calling for the Jays to be moved to the American League Central. Alas, today is not that day.

But let's just note that the Tigers have built that major league-leading 32-14 record on the backs of the Royals, Twins and Cleveland, whom they are 19-4 against coming into today.

(Naturally, while I was writing this, the Royals battered Tigers starter Mike Maroth around for six runs in the first inning, giving them a good chance to improve on that 0-for-7 mark against Detroit. Baseball is funny like that.)

Detroit was swept in their only series against defending World Series champion Chicago, whom they play 16 more times, including 13 games after the All-Star Break. The Tigers have played only two games against the AL East, but starting next week, have a 13-game stretch against the Yankees, both sets of Sox and the Jays (in Toronto, no less).

Conversely, the Jays are 15-12 within the AL East, and have played only three games against the weaker Central clubs.

Which isn't to say the Tigers are a mirage or make excuses for the Jays. But it goes to show how the scheduling and the divisional alignment can play tricks on otherwise rational minds.

OTHER BUSINESS

• This is very bad for the Buffalo Sabres: D-man Henrik Tallinder is out for the playoffs with a broken arm. Have to wonder, now, if the Sabres might just lose to Carolina because they're running out of players: Tim Connolly was lost to a concussion in the last round, while on the back end, Teppo Numminen and Dmitri Kalanin are out of the lineup.
• Raptors draft scuttlebutt: The Star's Dave Feschuk believes Bryan Colangelo's talk about Andrea Bargnani is all a smokescreen. If that's the case, this might be the first time the Raptors have ever set a successful screen. Seriously though, the Raptors might be trying to bait another team into a trade, or Feschuk puts it, "What is far more likely is that Colangelo is looking to make a deal that will net him more from the first round than a youngster who's at least a few years away from contributing to the cause." The suspicion here is that this is going to be impossible here, because with this year's draft crop, no one in their right mind would trade up and have to commit No. 1 overall money to a player who's no better than the No. 5 pick. But this is the NBA -- "right mind" seldom plays into it.

That's all for now. Enjoy the Oilers-Ducks game.