Zen Dayley: Alex Rios should provide such wallop

As you were helping Dad set up his new inflatable barbeque ...

• Obvious joke in 3-2-1 ... the Blue Jays finally found a way to guarantee fans they will actually see solid contact.
  

  "The girls of the Pillow Fight League are going to be leading the seventh inning stretch at the Toronto Blue Jays’ game versus the Atlanta Braves on Friday June 27th at 7 p.m."
  -- Jananas (the blog of a bona fide PFLer)

  It would have been something else to have been on a fly on the wall when the Jays brass signed off on partnering up with Pillow Fight League. Baseball crowds are typically prety conservative, plus the Jays must be gun-shy since the Toronto media is often quick to criticize their various marketing campaigns.
  
  Pillow Fight League, by all accounts, is good, clean fun (it's debatable whether you can really extricate from the whole gender politics thing), but women hitting each other with pillows ... there's a lot of potential for misunderstanding. It's quite something that a P.R.-paranoid major-league sports team would welcome this, but hey, the Jays have to try something.
  
• It just felt right to start with a little levity, since Jeff Blair is writing as if John Gibbons' firing is imminent: "It's minutes to midnight."
  
  One game below .500 after 71 games despite a better run differential than a first-place team who's playing .600 ball, being chronically unable to bring runners home with two outs, having the odds of making the playoffs go from from good to slim in barely more two weeks, well, someone has to pay the price.
  
• Watch the footage of Yankees ace Chien-Ming Wang being assisted off the field after suffering a potential season-ending injury and explain why the National League still insists on having pitchers hit and run the bases. A great compromise would be to have a courtesy runner for pitchers if they actually get on base -- that way you can still laugh at their feeble hacks and .071 batting averages, but the injury risk would be minimized. It would also be an end to pitchers looking ridiculous standing out on second base on a 90-degree July day wearing a jacket.
  
  (Wang's out for six weeks, minimum. It's still stupid to have pitchers running the bases.)
• As a public service, let's withhold the name of the Toronto columnist who wrote this: "Riddle me this, Batman: How come the San Francisco Giants are better without Barry Bonds than they were with him?"
  
  The Giants are 30-40. A year ago, with Bonds, they were, wait for it, 30-40. Their vast improvement of zero wins, mostly thanks to Tim Lincecum and his 1.99 ERA in 90 2/3 innings. At this time a year ago, he had a 5.25 ERA in 48 innings. In other words, their phenom right-hander has been phenomenating and their record is exactly the same. Like the man said, they're a better team without Bonds.


• Roy Halladay is a modest guy.
  
• Incidentally, Dave Trembley came out on top against John Russell in the all-important series matching the last two managers of the Ottawa Lynx. Trembley's Baltimore Orioles took 2-of-3 from Russell's Pittsburgh Pirates club. OK, the series won't be remembered quite the same way as either of the two World Series those teams played in the '70s.