DAMN YOU, MAN RAM!

Choking on your alibis / But it's just the price I pay / Destiny is calling me / Open up my eager eyes / 'Cause I'm Mr. Brightside.

Those of you in Toronto or in the outlying hinterlands who you want an easy route to the playoffs, stick to watching the NBA or NHL. Uh, bad examples.

You know the spin surrounding the Blue Jays during this news cycle, especially with an off-day today, will be how how they don't have a killer instinct. It's been the same pattern for three series in a row -- winning the first two games and dropping the last one. Each time, it was a two-run loss after the starting pitcher -- Josh Towers against Tampa last Wednesday, Ty Taubenheim against Chicago on Sunday and now, Ted Lilly against Boston -- faltered. In fact, as the CP game story noted, it was the eighth time this season the Jays have failed to complete a sweep. You could look it up.

Hey, it's not like the Red Sox don't have some hitters of their own. Mark Loretta, who might be the X factor for that team as the season unfolds, hit a big two-run homer, and the usual suspects -- Man Ram and Big Papi -- also smoked dingers. (Thanks to On The DL for the above shot of Man Ram, hanging out with more women -- and one random picture-crashing middle-aged guy -- on one given night than I will meet in the next two years.)

C'est la vie. It's never that simple in baseball that you can say a team lacks a "killer instinct" or whatever. The dearth of killer instinct didn't make the Jays suffer an 8-6 loss to the Evil Empire 1-A.

It didn't make Lilly's pitches come in flat and wearing a giant HIT ME! sign on the rare occasions they were actually in the strike zone. It didn't make Vernon Wells' shoulder flare up, causing him to miss the game.

As far as those four double plays the Jays hit into, blame the FieldTurf at the Rogers Centre. The greens at the easiest course on the PGA Tour should slow the ball down as much.

It all comes back to what we've talked about here for the past couple weeks -- the hard early-season schedule, front-loaded with games against the Yankees and both pairs of Sox, makes it hard for the Jays to be elite. Throw in the injuries and inconsistency among the pitching staff, and 29-23, 2½ games out of first place coming into June, doesn't look half-bad.

It just doesn't look half-good, either, which creates all the more temptation to label this crew as a bunch of underachievers.

So it's on to Tampa Bay -- and the Jays will miss Scott Kazmir's turn in the rotation. Do I dare go out on a limb and predict the Jays can sweep this one? Bitter experience has taught me otherwise, but what the hey, it's not like I have credibility or a reputation to lose here.

• Friday: Casey Janssen (3-3, 3.25, .92 WHIP) vs. Seth McClung (2-6,
  6.13, 1.75 WHIP). McClung, the best American League pitcher who has a famous Canadian suffragette as his namesake, beat the Jays three weeks ago in St. Pete but is on the verge of getting sent to the bullpen. Janssen is 1-1 against Tampa; he has a 2.25 ERA in his past three starts, with only two walks in 20 innings.

• Saturday: Roy Halladay (6-1, 2.88, 1.03) vs. Mark Hendrickson (3-5, 3.98, 1.31 WHIP). Not a lock -- Hendrickson's starting with an extra day of rest, although he's 0-2 against the Jays on the year. Tampa gave Doc his only loss back on the opening weekend of the season, but he's since tossed a 3-hitter and a 7-hitter against them.

• Sunday: Gustavo Chacin (6-1, 5.11, 1.50) vs. Doug Waechter (0-4, 6.70, 1.64). Think there's a chance that Chacin will continue to get great run support with Waechter pitching? Famous last words.

HOCKEY

• Top item: the Leafs are about to re-sign Bryan McCabe to a 5-year deal that will pay him more than $5 million per year -- and more than Tomas Kaberle, who's actually the team's best defenceman. So Leafs fans can probably stop kidding around about poaching Zdeno Chara and/or Wade Redden from the Senators. However, makes you wonder if Toronto is going to make a serious run at Jay McKee as a No. 3 or No. 4 d-man.
• As far as Ottawa goes, gut feeling: Redden will stay and Chara's good as gone. Don Cherry suggested on The Fan 590 yesterday that Chara might "join all the Czechs" with the Rangers, which is interesting since Chara's actually a Slovak. Hmmm. How about Atlanta and a reunion with countryman Marian Hossa?
• Sabres-Hurricanes, Game 7 tonight. About a week ago, I talked about how playoff games were starting to take on a predictable pattern since the Playing-Card Five defensive system is so effective when it's 5-on-5: "If you have a generalized idea of how the game turns out when you sit down to watch -- it's going to be a 4-2 final, with two power-play goals for the winning side -- then it's boring."
  
  To that end, James Mirtle notes this series has been a tale of who's had the hotter power play. Don't expect any difference tonight. Carolina's the pick here.
  
  As noted here May 19, Jacques Demers was the only hockey "insider" I came across who picked Buffalo and Edmonton to win the semifinal series.

OTHER BUSINESS

• Get it through your heads, American sportswriters, namely Sports Illustrated hack-in-the-act Adam Hofstetter: The world doesn't care that America "just doesn't get" soccer. This self-confessed soccer dilettante suggests you belly up to the bar next to Joe Theismann for a tall, frosty glass of shut-the-hell-up and let the rest of the world enjoy the World Cup, because it will be played no matter what navel-gazing Yanks think (and I use the word loosely).
  
  Up here in the Great White North, life doesn't come to a standstill when the World Cup is on, but sports fans make the effort to appreciate and relate to the rest of the world's passion. Maybe that has something to do with why Americans travelling abroad often try to pass as Canucks by sewing the Maple Leaf on their backpacks and slathering mayonnaise on everything.
• By the way, how far has S.I. fallen? Pretty damn far if you judge by who's writing for its website -- including but not limited to Hofstetter, Ethan Trex and Jenn Sterger. These days, it seems like the magazine that sports fans used to call The Bible will hire any college kid to write a column, provided it's mostly spelled correctly and meets its quota of lame pop-culture references.
  
  Perhaps the S.I. editors want to capture what ESPN.com has with Bill Simmons, but The Sports Guy was a one-time-only phenomenon.
• We'll see what kind of legs this story has: The sports marketing firm that tried to cozy up to Reggie Bush when he was at USC is being investigated by the FBI.
• One of the posters at CISfootball.org mentioned that today's National Post is supposed to have an interview with Joe Theismann where he backs off his Ricky Williams comments. The Post has a sports section? Who knew?