BATTER UP: TORONTO BLUE JAYS

Counting down the seconds till Opening Day when life begins anew involves providing a "starting nine" for every major-league team. Last but not least, the future American League champion Toronto Blue Jays.

1. The hard, is what makes it great: Don't let the media turn you off with their rhetoric that it's hopeless, utterly hopeless for the Jays to make the playoffs. It might be, but that obscures the larger truth.
   
   Baseball is about believing in the possibility of what could happen, even though all the statistical measures nowadays make it easier to take an educated guess. The unbalanced schedule, the playoff format and the absence of a ceiling on payroll makes it pretty arbitrary who gets into the playoffs. One team's 83 wins gives them a shot at the World Series while another gets nothing for winning 87.
   
   If your criteria is the playoffs, your heart and mind are in the wrong place. The focus should be on the Jays putting a good representative team on the field, providing a good overall stadium experience, winning around 90 games and last but not least, causing a lot of angst for the Evil Empires and their fans.
   
   How often can our guys make Red Sox and Yankees fans leave the stadium looking all chalk white? Until baseball gets a scheduling and playoff system which actually gives us a fair shot, whoever makes the playoffs is pretty much arbitrary, so this seems like the best tack. We -- the Jays are the only team Out of Left Field ever favours with an editorial we -- are here to, as Bono once put it, "continue to fuck up the mainstream," namely Bud Selig's bedbuddies in Boston and New York.
   
   This team can do that. Vernon Wells is the DFM. A.J. Burnett and Roy Halladay are lights out when they're actually in the rotation; Gustavo Chacin's spring training drunk driving arrest should not be made light of since it is a serious crime, but at the same time it does quite a bit for his folk hero status.
   
   You could do a lot worse for a third baseman than Troy Glaus (pictured). At first base is the King of Doublin', Lyle Overbay, who can rake and whose lack of pigmentation can be used to temporarily blind right-handed hitters during day games. A.J. Burnett and Roy Halladay could win 35 games, or they could combine for less than 35 starts. The back end of the rotation and the middle relief inspire a gamut of emotions from "enh" to "meh." In short, it's one hell of a toboggan ride, and if the Jays somehow pull this off, it will be that much sweeter since it's so damn difficult in their division.
2. 87 to 97 -- is it doable? Ten more wins works out to 30 Win Shares. Comparing the '05 and '06 Jays, the obvious difference is Chacin and Josh (Oh No, Not Again!) Towers combined for 28 WS in '05 compared to just two in '06 -- an almost nine-win difference. The tricky part here is that there's no guarantee both will rebound all the way back. There's no way of knowing what starts they would be replacing -- good starts by Ted Lilly, bad starts by Casey Janssen, or vice-versa. You having fun yet? A full season of Burnett and new No. 4 starter Tomo Ohka -- assuming his finesse style doesn't get shredded in the AL East -- could replace the Yankees-tainted Lilly's 12 WS.
   
   Offensively, you probably know the Jays were top-4 in the AL in several categories, but only seventh in runs with 809. If they had been fourth (Texas was with 835), their run differential would have predicted 89 wins instead of 86. If the offence maintains its production, that could be worth 3-4 wins.
   
   It would only take small improvements by likes of Overbay, Glaus (who slipped to 16 WS last year after earning 23 in 2005 with Arizona), second baseman Aaron Hill and corner outfielders Reed Johnson and Alex Rios to accomplish this and offset those whose numbers slip. The Jays are closer to 97 wins than people who get paid to write about this would have you believe, but staying healthy is a big part of it.
3. A.J. Burnett is a fraud, pass it on: More than a few baseball illiterates would have you believe Toronto's No. 2 starter's initials stand for A Joke, not Allan James. One Toronto typist who shall remain generic referred to Burnett today as a career .500 pitcher, adding "Roy Halladay is a sure thing. Burnett just looks the part."
   
   Right. Is that because Halladay has thrown 494 2/3 innings over the past three years and Burnett has thrown 464 2/3 over that same span? Apparently, the line between a sure thing and a poseur is 10 innings per season.
   
   Since 2004, Burnett has averaged 2.2 more strikeouts per nine innings than Halladay (8.3 to 6.1) and a starting pitcher's punchout rate is almost as vital for him as being 300 lbs. is for a NFL offensive lineman or being seven feet tall is for a NBA post player. There's a lot of other factors, but that might suggest Halladay is almost as much of a worrying matter than A.J. Burnett. Great.
4. How many times does this need to be repeated for those who don't get it? Anyone whose first point of reference with a pitcher is his won-loss record is a complete knob. The pitcher has no direct impact on how many runs his teams scores, which seems to be about half the game and fielding and bullpen help make up part of the other half. Right as that was typed, one of the sports authorities on TSN's The Reporters said, "Burnett's gotta be more than two games above .500."
5. That's one sure-fire away to land on the Dead to Me List: TV's Stephen Colbert has already excommunicated the Toronto Raptors. What's he going to do the two Hardball Times writers who picked the Jays to finish ahead of the Yankees? (Only one of the site's 14 prognosticators has "us" taking the wild card.)
6. Retro Cool Jay: In the late '80s Jays outfield, right-fielder Jesse Barfield was the heartthrob who was popular with the kids and the ladies. Left-fielder George Bell was the antihero, beloved by born runners-ups for acts such as telling fans to "kiss my purple butt" and his attempted karate kick on Boston's Bruce Kison during the 1985 pennant race. The man in the middle, Lloyd Moseby (centre-field, 1980-89), was just smooth.
   
   The Shaker was the first Jay to score 100 runs in a season and while he was never a superstar, he had no obvious flaw except his throwing arm. He's still the Jays career leader in stolen bases and ranks near the top in nearly every hitting stat, despite the fact the green concrete at Exhibition Stadium meant he had his last good season at the age of 28.
7. Secret weapon(s): A blogger at AOL pointed this out: "One of the stealthiest of weapons in Toronto's arsenal are the girls who work the Rogers Centre seats right behind home plate. And is it just me, or do these girls seem more 'active' when the home team's at the plate? As a guy who watches the games a couple thousand miles away via satellite TV, I can attest to spending a good deal of time distracted by their comings and goings; I can only imagine how difficult it is for opposing pitchers to size up (Troy) Glaus."
8. I get emotional: The Jays are my first and longest-lasting sports obsession. Some would say if I had never been born, Nick Hornby probably would have had to invent me, since the worship is equal parts Rob Gordon in High Fidelity and Paul Ashworth in the better, original version of Fever Pitch. That's just ego talking, since yes, it really is childish to be so attached to a bunch of millionaire jocks and my Jays-worship is probably tied to having been a lonely, shunned child who grew up (sort of) to be a lonely adult who sadly, almost needs to feel shunned to retain a sense of normalcy. That's neither here nor there.
   
   The Jays are to be worshipped in a particular (peculiar, maybe?) way. That does not mean accepting everything they do unconditionally, since it's done with the knowledge they will ultimately disappoint me once again, as they have every single season since I started rooting in 1985. (Both of those World Series should have been done in five games.)
   
   I can be a right prick when the Jays are involved do not feel the need to apologize for this to hackers, dilettantes, fair-weather fans and other casuals who do not pack the gear to commit to the Blue Jays over the long haul. As the TV commercial says, consider yourself warned.
9. Need-to-know: The Jays have a puncher's chance. The last word goes to Jeff Sackmann of Beyond The Box Score: "...in this division, it's 95 wins or bust, and the Jays are built accordingly."

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.