The Blue Jays, the balanced schedule and why you ignore buffoons

This might be an appropriate time to vent some Jays angst that's been squeezed into a bitter little ball across the past few years.

Thankfully, we can do this without hitting any ignorami with a whiskey bottle. Joe Cowley got the reaming that should be coming to anyone who judges an entire city, let alone a quote-unquote "Third World country," by what's available on his hotel room TV. At least he provided a prod to finish off a post that has been in the hopper since about 2008 (and as The Ack noted, Cowley had little to say about Cleveland drawing about 5,000 less fans than the Jays did on both Friday and Saturday.)

Remember '08? The Toronto Blue Jays had the third-best run differential in the American League, but finished in fourth place in the AL East. Since most people make their judgment solely on won-loss records, this made their season a total fail to — appropriating the loose Cowleyian definition of most — most minds. You might recall that in '08, the Chicago White Sox, the team Joe Cowley covers and Ozzie Guillen manages, went to the playoffs after winning an AL Central tiebreaker over the Minnesota Twins. Those teams were a combined 1-13 against the Jays.

Going off on a rant at the time was ruled out — the whole whelp-of-a-beaten-cur thing. It did signal the Jays could no longer rate an emotional investment. It was, Call me when there's realignment or balanced schedule.

Call it a Captain Obvious statement, but it has hit the point where you need a schedule converter in baseball, similar to the "neutralize stats" function on Baseball-Reference. As a fan born in 1977 who follows a team which has not made the playoffs since 1993, it would be nice to know how a contemporary team would fare in that 1977-93 era of two divisions and a balanced schedule, and vice-versa. The current setup obscures a team's true worth, which is an intolerable cruelty to visit upon fans.

In the '77-93 era, an American League club played every other team 12 or 13 times. That's a far cry from today's unbalanced sked (18-19 games vs. division opponents, 6-10 vs. other league foes, plus 18 interleague games). Now, there is a general understanding the calibre of competition in MLB varies between leagues and divisions. People have known for years poor scheduling rigs the playoff races.

The popular understanding, though, seems to stop halfway. No one ever applies that 2010 knowledge retroactively, like the characters in Hot Tub Time Machine. It doesn't take Keith Olbermann — although it was gratifying he tweeted it — to know the Jays and Baltimore Orioles need a balanced schedule, or realignment, as Paul Beeston has lobbied for. Some AL East widowers would tack on, "And a salary cap," although that sidetracks the argument.

The reality between the Jays then and now is not so polarized. The difference between the winnin' times in the 1980s and early '90s and also-ran Aughties are less than some might think. It's provable.

To hear people who only pay casual attention to baseball tell it, from 1985 to '93 Toronto simply had awesometacular teams and brilliant management. It is just apologist to point out the scheduling inequities that exist now — what about the 2008 Tampa Bay Rays? Never mind Rays owner Stu Sternberg also wants a balanced schedule.

Many are somewhat unaware of how the schedule is different than it was when Toronto had an annual contender, let alone its impact on a a team's record and its general perception. A 20-something sports consumer might be completely in the dark, like Clark Duke was about meeting women in 1986. Two divisions? Seattle and Boston each having to visit each other twice a year? That sounds ... exhausting.

However, examples abound that if the balanced schedule cleared a path for the Jays' success. Toronto's first playoff team in 1985 fared better vs. the AL West (55-29, .611 winning percentage) than it did vs. the East (44-33, .571). Manager Bobby Cox's boys took full advantage of having a near-equal opportunity to beat up on the bad clubs on each side, going 37-13 vs. the sixth- and seventh-place teams.

Or take 1989. The Jays won the division with a garden-variety 89-73 record. They went under .500 except when they got to beat on the two cellar dwellars, Detroit (11-2) and Chicago (11-1), graced by starting shortstop Ozzie Guillen on-basing a whole .270.

Perhaps lack of confidence stemming from not having the sabermetric chops to do it right, or worrying about not having the influence to make people listen inhibited writing about this in 2008. It kind of lay there dormant. Last week, though, Jonah Keri and Jeff Passan got into a little parry and thrust about the long-term outlook for those aforementioned Tampa Bay Rays.

Passan wrote a column about the Rays' pending loss of heart-and-soul leftfielder Carl Crawford that was pessimistic in outlook. Keri, who is writing a highly anticipated book about the inner workings of the Rays, was more pragmatic.

Keri touched on the realignment question, which one need not point out has been a hot topic since "floating realignment" was put forth as a trial balloon in a Sports Illustrated column.

"Why can't baseball get rid of its unbalanced schedule? Does it help MLB and its teams to have 18 games played between division rivals? Has anyone ever examined all the implications — on-field and off- — of this set-up? I’m not even necessarily advocating for it (we all love to see the Yankees and Red Sox spend 5 hours a night bludgeoning each other to death, 18 times a year, after all), I’m just asking."

It seemed like a fun exercise to try to retro-fit some the Jays' recent records into a balanced-schedule format, and guesstimate how some of their great teams would have fared with the unbalanced sked. Some problems creeped up, of course:

• It's not so simple as sorting teams into their current or former divisions. For instance, in 1992, the Jays could have used 18 games against the Yankees. They went 11-2 against them. The Red Sox finished last.
  
  In '89, the Kansas City Royals had the second-best record in the league. That sort of shoots down the idea of floating realignment, or realignment based on revenue. No one can know who will be good in 10 or 15 years.
  
  
• Won-loss records alone don't prove where a team ranks. Pythagorean W-L (run differential, essentially) is part of casual conversation. Next time you encounter a Jays fan, ask her/him which team had the best run differential in club history.
  
  Chances are, the answer would be one of the World Series teams, or the '85 club. It was actually the 1987 team which lost the pennant to the Detroit Tigers on the final day of the season. You could look it up.
  
  
• Lack of math smarts. Someone much, much smarter would have to figure out how to control for how scheduling affects won-loss records and run differential, then rank teams. (In other words, don't read too much into the conclusions.)
  
  
• No interleague data. There is no way of knowing how the late '80s and early '90s Jays teams would have handled interleague play. The fact the '92-93 teams each won the World Series in six games (small sample size! small sample size!) doesn't mean each would have gone 12-6 in interleague play.
  
  The Jays are an all-time 108-121 in interleague play. That .472 winning percentage works out to 8½ wins per 18 annual interleague games.

One half-assed way of going about it is to rank the Jays' opponents 1-13, making some adjustments based on run differential. For instance, in 1985, the Red Sox finished fifth in the East with an 81-81 record, but had the league's third-best run differential. (In hindsight, that makes their 1986 pennant seem lot less improbable that it was made out to be at the time.)

This is full-on admittedly simplistic, but the method is to take the 2008 team's record against each opponent and pro-rate each based on the earlier team's schedule. (For argument's sake, let's apply that 8½ interleague wins per season when modernizing an '85-93 team's record.)

Conversely, you can put the '85 or '92 Jays into the context of 2008, when Toronto played 63 games against the top four teams in the league, 11-15 more than they would have with a balanced schedule.

In '08, the AL was grouped thusly:

East: 2, 3, 4, 12;
Central: 5, 6, 7, 10, 11;
West: 1, 8, 9, 13

In 2008, the Jays won three of nine games against the league's top team, the L.A. Angels, and seven out of 18 against the second-best, Tampa Bay. In 1992, they placed 12 games apiece against the Nos. 1 and 2 teams, the Oakland Athletics and Minnesota Twins. So the 2008 team gets half-ass pro-rated to four wins in 12 tries against the Angels, 4.666666 in 12 vs. Tampa Bay, and on down the line.

Conversely, that '92 team which went 5-8 against the Milwaukee Brewers would play them 18 times. It's all spread-sheeted, but here are a few of the results:

'08 Jays, with the '92 schedule: 91.09 wins (actual wins: 86)
'92 Jays, with the '08 schedule: 91.66 wins (actual wins: 96)

'08, with '89 schedule: 90.56 (actual: 86)
'89, with '08 schedule: 87.5 (actual: 89)

'85, with '08 schedule: 92.6 (actual: 99, in 161 games)
'08, with '85 schedule: 91.27 (actual: 86)

'08, with '91 schedule: 91.43 (actual: 86)
'91, with '08 schedule: 85.8 (actual: 91)

The 2008 team ends up with 90.1 wins when teams are simply put back into two divisions. (By the same method, the 2006 club had 87.6, not far off its actual total. They'd still have to bust ass to earn it, the way it should be.)

By no means is this a claim any recent Jays club was as good as the fondly remembered teams which went to the playoffs and World Series. The point is to show how much the unbalanced schedule has messed with our heads. The first-place 1991 Jays and fourth-place '08 Jays practically end up trading records.

With the old balanced schedule and no interleague play, the '08 club would have at least had a puncher's chance at winning 90 games, having one of the top four records in the league, and being in a playoff race.

In most seasons, the AL has four 90-win teams.

That shows why MLB should go back to two divisions in each league, with two wild-card teams. It would increase the chances of the four best in the league making the playoffs and prevent the deck from being stacked against teams due to geography.

What's so wrong with that idea? (Better yet, get rid of the divisions in each league and have the top four teams advance to the playoffs, the same way the top four finishers in the English Premier League play in the Champions League the following season.)

No one could say with certainty how this would affect the Jays off and on the field, but one can imagine there would not be this hard crust of cynicism like the one that has formed around the franchise.

Perhaps they would even have enough momentum at the corporate level to justify building a real ballpark, like the new one in Minnesota, or the ones in northern cities such as Milwaukee and Seattle, whose teams have never won one World Series, let alone two. At the very least, FAN 590 callers would be able to "unbind their panties" (Mike Wilner, FAN 590) when there is an early-season crowd of 10,000.

(About that: It was the first two nights of the Stanley Cup playoffs, the Toronto Raptors had a must-win game the first night, Toronto FC had its home opener the second night, and have you noticed what happened to the global economy? The Jays aren't going the way of the Expos, since there is nowhere to go. Relocating the Oakland Athletics is more of a priority for MLB.)

Perhaps this is getting into Ken Dryden territory, where the golden age of sport is whatever it was like when you were 12 years old. However, following the Jays came about thanks to their proximity to Kingston, and their success in those days. Watching the franchise try to push the boulder up the mountain has taken that away.

Going back to the old schedule would not address revenue disparities. It would remain a related issue. Through all of this, there is an awareness baseball's excessive focus on big-market teams has not hurt its equity. It has gone from a $1-billion-per-year industry in the early 1990s to about $7 billion. Small wonder it can abide having about a third of its franchises busted down to being an outlet mall. You grimly walk in to Rogers Centre, get what you need (a baseball fix) and file out without being repaired emotionally or spiritually.

(As an aside, in all those then-and-now Blue Jays comparisons the media likes to make, no one seems to acknowledge how much the business of baseball has changed. The Jays' success coincided with a period when the Red Sox and Yankees each had ineffectual management, the former thanks to the wrangling over the Yawkey Trust and the latter due to George Steinbrenner was batshit insane.)

However, the Yankees and Red Sox could pass the division title and the first wild-card berth back and forth for the next 40 years for all I care, so long as it was possible to have three AL East teams make the playoffs.

Eliminating that unnecessary third division leaves a playoff berth that would still be there for the Jays, Baltimore Orioles, Kansas City Royals and yes, the Tampa Bay Rays. Beyond that, post-season baseball is a crapshoot. A short series in any sport offers a chance for a team make up for inequities in revenue or scheduling, à la the eighth-seeded Edmonton Oilers eliminating the No. 1 seed Detroit Red Wings in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs in 2006.

Until that happens, Toronto is deprived of having real baseball. Continuing to follow it makes me a total hypocrite.

Please do not judge. Resenting a professional sports league yet still obsessing over it is what a simple kind of man must do to trick people into thinking he's "so motherfucking complex it's ridiculous." (Assist to fellow redheaded Kingtonian Jay Pinkerton.) Plus following a ballclub day in, day out, helps frame in that little world one lives in when he's too scared to change.

Obviously, no one gets to stay in the same world they knew when they were younger. Hopefully this shows why it's hard to believe in the Jays until they get to rockin' the same schedule they had when leg warmers, cassette players, George Bell's Jheri curl and V-neck jersey were popular.

A trip back to 1986 scheduling-wise might restore hope, just like it did for the guys in Hot Tub Time Machine.

Please excuse the forced reference to a popular movie. It just seemed like the best way to let Joe Cowley to know that Canada finally got its first movie theatre.

Reality Check: Rogers Centre, 20 Years On

I will start this post by saying what most people already think: even now, 20 years after its much lauded opening, my relationship to the Rogers Centre is a lot like a couple married for 20 years: every year, I find more and more reasons to be irritated.

Truth be told, I can still vividly remember the first time I visited the place. It was July 1989 and, amazingly, my dad had managed to acquire tickets (which were incredibly hard to find back during the halcyon days of 48,000+ crowds every game from 1989 to 1994).

For a baseball crazy 12-year-old, it was a wonder to behold: good vantage points to the game, far superior ambience to the unpleasantness that was Exhibition Stadium and it felt, well, just better. Sure, it was cold, impersonal and chock-full of concrete, but after years of attending games at the Mistake-by-the-Lake – the coup de grâce being during a game in June 1988, when a young couple sitting two rows in front of my dad and I got pooped on by seagulls and, in a fit of anger, threw beer cups at them, beer still in the cups and drenching an old man in the process – it was a welcome, welcome relief. I’m sure many young men and women in their mid-20s to mid-30s feel the same way.

This being said, it’s never smart to trust your childhood memories.

Looking back on it, the Rogers Centre is, quite possibly, the kind of monument to Toronto that fits the place as well in 1989 as it does in 2009. Rogers Centre, like the City of Toronto itself, is a collection of competing interests and suffers from a mass scale inferiority complex. It is a soulless ode to the irritating, utilitarian ethic that plagues Toronto in almost every large-scale project this city undertakes.

As Bob McCown and Stephen Brunt discussed on Prime Time Sports on Wednesday night, Rogers Centre was borne out of a need to respond to political interests above all else. Toronto – a city that routinely declares itself as world-class, which automatically disqualifies it from actually being world-class – needed to make a statement to the world, at least in the cash-rich 1980s, that they were capable of competing with the urban big boys like Paris or New York City when it comes to large-scale projects. Being the first city on Earth to have a fully retractable roof was a golden selling point for Toronto – a city that was, to borrow a Simpsonian turn of phrase, "on the grow."

Of course, like all things in Canadian politics, a major project or sporting event -- cough Montreal, cough Olympics, cough -- is not about vision or a projection of the intrinsic values a community shares. Canadian politics is almost entirely about compromise, inclusion, cherry-picking certain groups' needs over others and balancing of specific and sometimes competing interests. This mindset can be positive in terms of local democracy, but is often hellish for developing unique symbols of Toronto's identity. It's hard to argue either way on this point, but this need to pile on an assortment of interests may have directed contributed to the outrageous costs of Rogers Centre (does anyone really believe a hotel and health club was sensible in a development-crazy city like Toronto?).

The Big Idea-driven stadium – think Camden Yards or Safeco Field – that appeal directly to deep-seeded signifiers and symbols in sports was never going to happen in Toronto. For the politicians of this beta-class city, it was always about what could appeal to the broadest community of interests and peoples possible. Don't care about baseball? Okay, sure, we’ll house the Argos here too! Don’t care about sports at all? Don’t worry, we’ve got the SkyTent so you can come watch Pink Floyd or the Backstreet Boys. Who cares if it has no soul or personality? As long as we can make it work for everyone, that will justify the cost.

But you can’t come down entirely on the politicians of this fair land. Naturally, Canadian corporations and various multinationals haven't stopped to keep this vision of hyper-pragmatism going. From Day One, Rogers Centre has been a corporate raider’s dream. Everything from the deeply short-sighted 10-year lease for corporate boxes (always the main money maker for any stadium or arena) to the Sickly Sweet Deal Rogers – once believed to be a godsend for the Jays and their stadium, now mostly tolerated as the quintessential "uninterested ownership" – managed to snag by buying the bankrupt SkyDome, it’s been a great deal for corporations. Of course, this is another aspect of Toronto many of us ponder with astonishment from time to time: the overwhelmingly pro-business, anti-investment conservatism that dominates our city's mindset. It’s quite telling that, as McCown and Brunt noted last night, that claims the Rogers Centre's gaudy, concrete façade was planned to be covered with more aesthetically pleasing panels was abandoned due to costs.

Thing is, and this may be hard to accept for some, is that Rogers Centre is exactly what we deserve.

I'm not going to come down on those loyal Jays fans that have suffered for years in front a sub-par product. I won't do that to Argos fans or those millions of people whom have seen concerts, trade shows and countless other events.

Yet it’s become harder and harder to ignore the reality that Toronto is a city that tends to gravitate toward the new and the trendy. You can see this in everything from our recent building projects like the Michael-Lee Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum to the condo building boom around the city’s southern edges. We’re a city that tends to follow the leader, whether that is ideas developed in Berlin or in Brisbane. We lack a signifying, unifying cultural meme that defines Toronto. We are constantly looking outside of ourselves to find meaning and identity – a trait that at one time might have been just cute and politically expedient, but is now just plain sad and frustrating to those of us looking for something more than just a “high-tech” building like Rogers Centre.

All the multi-coloured lights, HD screens and grilled Panini stations can’t change the fact we sacrificied vision in the name of political expediency. For that reason alone, we should keep Rogers Centre around for years to come.

Zen Dayley: Thanks, Hank, for revealing yourself as a closet Jays fan

The best posts, like the best trades, are the ones you don't make.

Case in point: Yankees co-chairman Hank Steinbrenner last week pretty much ruined anyone who hates MLB's divisional alignment from ever begin taken seriously on the subject. It was a Carnation instant column. Steinbrenner, a member in good standing of the Lucky Sperm Club if ever there was one -- yaya, born on third base and thinks he hit a triple, just like Bush; thanks Tips, for the overly obvious connection that would have been ballsy back in 2003 -- is a fine one to complain about "unfair."

It was easily dismissed as a cheap shot at universally beloved ex-Yankees manager Joe Torre, whose Dodgers won the NL West with an 84-78 record.

The hell of it is, it was not a bad point. It simply a case of someone being a bad pointer-outer.

The current playoff system, which ensures baseball of having most major media markets in the U.S. and no markets in Canada represented in the post-season, is just slightly short of an abomination. Who knows, perhaps Hank Steinbrenner acts the way he does because deep-down, he really would like to be part of the Blue Jays -- they were the only visiting franchise that had a winning record at Yankee Stadium.

Don't get me wrong. You can still enjoy tonight's San Diego County Credit Union American League Central playoff between the Minnesota Twins and Chicago White Sox. (That's not the official name, but a one-game playoff between a pair of 88-74 teams should have the same corporate imprimatur as one of those Dec. 28 college football bowl games, don't you think?)

The three-division, one wild-card team setup for the playoffs and the unbalanced schedule (quoth The Tao of Stieb: "Our kingdom for a balanced schedule") are in bad need of a divorce mediator.

Baseball tries to have it both ways. Maximizing revenues by having more matchups such Yankees-Red Sox, Dodgers-Giants and who can forget, Marlins-Nationals, is good for business. At the same time, though, it's hypocritical to have only one wild-card berth when not everyone runs the same race.

It's been mostly forgotten that before it instituted the three-division alignment began in 1994, baseball floated the idea about keeping the two-division setup and having two wild-card teams per league.

From a pure competitive standpoint, that would be an improvement. There should also be a balanced schedule (in the 1977-93 era, the Jays played each AL East team 14 times a year and played 13 games against the other half of the league; now the arrangement is more like 18 and nine -- and you wonder why they can't win in the same division with the Yankees, Red Sox and information-rich Tampa Bay Rays).

The current setup ignores the strength-of-schedule questions entirely. It's like having a 100-metre dash where some runners only have to run 75 metres and some have to run 125 -- and no one notices.

(Digression: It also ignores that the whole history of baseball is a history of money, as greater minds such as Charles P. Pierce pointed out long ago. One argument is that if you want to have three divisions, then divvy the teams up by the Forbes MLB Valuations.

AL Upper Class: Yankees (1st), Red Sox (3rd), Angels (6th), Mariners (11th), White Sox (14th)
AL Middle Class: Indians (15th), Rangers (16th) Tigers (17th), Orioles (18th), Blue Jays (22nd)
AL Lower Class: Twins (25th), Athletics (26th), Royals (27th), Rays (29th)

Please bear in mind the Twins open a new stadium in 2010, so their equity will increase. In case you're wondering why a rich team like the White Sox, in a market the size of Chicago, doesn't play in the AL East, well, owner Jerry Reinsdorf is tight with Bud Selig, hence the cushy setup. It's like the old Norris Division in the NHL, where two out of the Original Six of Chicago, Detroit and Toronto was assured of making the playoffs -- and even that was not enough for the Leafs sometimes.)

I can already hear people going Bob Costas on this: But if you had two wild cards, then before long a third-place team would make the World Series. This season, the 89-73 Yankees had the fourth-best record in the American League, so wouldn't they have been bailed out if your idea was in place?

That is no worse than what is happening already. The Twins and White Sox, one of whom is eight wins from going to the World Series, played .368 baseball against the AL East. This includes a combined 1-13 record against the Jays. In other words, neither of them was demonstronably better than a fourth-place team:

Vs. the entire American League
Jays: .542 (78-66)
White Sox: .528 (76-68)
Twins: .514 (74-70)

Vs. AL East
Jays: .514 (37-35)
Twins: .371 (13-22)
White Sox: .366 (15-26)

Vs. AL Central
Jays: .667 (24-12)
Twins: .597 (43-29)
White Sox: .597 (43-29)

Vs. AL West
White Sox: .581 (18-13)
Twins: .486 (18-19)
Jays: .472 (17-19)

Interleague
Twins: .778 (14-4)
White Sox: .667 (12-6)
Jays: .444 (8-10)

Please don't take this as an apologia for the Jays. There is no excuse for their results in interleague and vs. the AL West. (Give them the Twins' interleague record and the White Sox's record vs. the West, and they would have won 10 more games, enough to make the playoffs.) It just needs to be pointed out, at a time when cracker-ass cracker Canadian media outlets are calling an 86-win season in the loaded the AL East "dismal," that the system is broken.

It's broken as far as rewarding good teams goes, but baseball is getting what it's wanted. There is no New York team in the post-season for the first time since 1993, but the second and third-biggest TV markets on the East Coast, Boston and Philadelphia, are represented.

A White Sox victory tonight would put both Chicago teams into the playoffs for the first time since they met in the 1906 World Series. Only one team west of the Rocky Mountains played winning baseball outside its division, but both Los Angeles teams are represented, yes, even those Joe Torre-helmed L.A. Dodgers with a $118-million US payroll and 15th-best record in a 30-team league.

One has to keep the horse in front of the cart. Baseball is business. It's a lot more enjoyable, and more rewarding when the Jays get the better of the high-dollar Red Sox or Yankees and all the funny-sounding fans who follow them up from New England and New York State, not to mention the the soulless sellout Southern Ontario types whom you just know all of a sudden became lifelong Bosox fans sometime around Oct. 19, 2004. It would not be the same if they were playing in the same division with Chicago, Minnesota and Kansas City. (Does anyone even remember the Jays and Detroit Tigers had a rivalry?)

It's just needs to be pointed out that the balance between revenues and TV ratings and the true spirit of sport is out of whack.

Baseball went to this format in the mid-1990s because, in a desperate hour, it lost sight of the truth that the game will always win over all, eventually. That left us with this abomination of a playoff format. It also begat interleague play, unbalanced schedules the steroid era.

Anyone who keeps saying "the Jays missed the playoffs" is missing the point entirely. They have run out of excuses, that's true. Another truth is that their race is longer than certain other teams'.

Hank Steinbrenner argued the right point, just for the wrong reasons.

Damn, the Jays

• Please read The Tao's fair and balanced take on the Paul Godfrey years. You have to credit a man who be president of a team for eight years and never learn a damn thing about the game.

Ken Gray: The O-Royals could come to O-Town!

Opportunities to get a Triple-A baseball franchise don't come along very often so the City of Ottawa should jump immediately on this one.

Mayor Larry O'Brien is a great salesman, after all he convinced Ottawans to elect him despite having never held political office, so it is time for him to show what he can do. It is possible the Omaha Royals, the Triple-A affiliate of the Kansas City Royals, will be without a home stadium after the 2010 season, as their current home is being torn down and plans to play in that city's new downtown stadium being built for the National College Athletic Association's College World Series have fallen through.

The Royals have a long history with the Toronto Blue Jays, our local major league team -- they beat them in the World Series semi-finals in 1985. They even have a powder-blue jersey -- ust like the Jays do -- which is symbolic of blue sky thinking. We have one of the best minor-league baseball parks around and a professional sports market. Ottawa was also previously a farm club of the Philadelphia Athletics -- right before they moved to Kansas City in 1955 -- and Ottawa fans have long identified with Montreal, which once had a Triple-A baseball team called the Royals. There is a natural synergy.

The Ottawa Lynx were never sold very well to Ottawa's business community or the public. The Kansas City Royals know how to market baseball and have fan identification for their players and brand in this market. A Kansas City Royals farm team in Ottawa would boost the major-league club's TV ratings in Ottawa and provide a source of revenue for the Royals if the team were owned outright by Kansas City. That would give the Royals an interest in marketing the team here.

The Royals' distinctive KC insignia could be remodelled to an OC -- for Ottawa, Canada, and for the old municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, which would no doubt help bring in fans. Another tie-in would be with Ottawa's iconic Royal Swans.

The mayor should be on the phone today with the Kansas City Royals arranging a meeting between him, the baseball club, some councillors and city staff to explore this option. Mr. O'Brien need not get hung up on the fact that the Kansas City Royals, like the Toronto Blue Jays, do not own their Triple-A team or that the Ottawa Royals would not have a Canadian rival playing in their league. As well, moving players between Kansas City and Ottawa is very easy with superb air links. That would balance out any worry that the Royals' nearest opponent, the Des Moines, Iowa farm club of the Chicago Cubs, would be 1,500 kilometres away from Ottawa.

This kind of opportunity occurs but once or twice in a lifetime. Let's not lose a chance to properly use the $15-million taxpayer-owned ballpark on Coventry Road.

The Ottawa Royals. It has a nice ring to it.

CARRY ON MISSING THE BLATANTLY OBVIOUS...

Possible conclusions to draw from the Citizen's farcical "let's play ball" editorial, in which Ken Gray carries on like there's an opportunity to get the Blue Jays AAA franchise here:

1. It's gotta be a parody of how those blogs link two new stories that are barely related to jump to ridiculous conclusions: "Hey! Syracuse is kicking the Jays out! Hey, Ottawa doesn't have Triple-A anymore! There's a story there!"
   
   The Jays do not own a Triple-A team. Come the end of this season, they will go, caps in hands, to sign an agreement with another International League city. Logic, geography and Rogers Communications' bottom line would say that is Buffalo.
2. Some of the unelected pencilpushers down at 10 Laurier Ave., who wield more power than most city councillors, must really, really want Miles Wolff's Can-Am League club to fail. Why shouldn't someone suspect that this part of some quid pro quo between City Hall and the Paper of Record?
3. Or it could be that the Citizen is really that out of it that they can't grasp some basic facts about baseball that even an 11-year-old could understand.
4. Did the paper here in the nation's capital forget about the effort to make the Coventry Rd. ballpark a home for Baseball Canada, which would be impossible with the 144-game schedule in Triple-A?

The Jays don't own a Triple-A team ... The Jays don't own a Triple-A team ... The Jays don't own a Triple-A team ... The Jays don't own a Triple-A team. Hopefully repeating it will get the point across to Mr. Gray. (Hey, if we have to play by the Citizen's rules, that includes honorifics.)

Look, off on whatever cloud-cuckoo-land Mr. Gray is calling home, maybe it looks like the Jays putting a team here, if they had a team to put here, could work. The rest of us, alas, live in the real world. That's where average Joes get up and go do work that doesn't include being paid to write editorials that don't make a lick of sense and wouldn't pass muster as a blog post.

We have a shot at something very special and very real with the Can-Am League. One would hope that this doesn't lead to people looking at our new team and saying, "Oh, this is why we don't have the Blue Jays farm club." The potential is out there.

Related:
Let's play ball (Ottawa Citizen; thanks for link goes to Jean-Pierre Allard and Pete Toms)

(UPDATE: Check out the comments.)