Tech, Money & Sports: R.I.P., Ted Rogers

Most people have heard that one of Canada’s most well-known businessmen, Rogers Communications Inc.’s Ted Rogers, passed away last night due to congestive heart failure at his home in Toronto. He was 75 years old.

Rogers and his company have had a huge, indelible influence on sports in Canada. Everything from the buying of Rogers Sportsnet, the channel that raised dart tournaments to a new art form, to the September 2000 purchase of your very own Toronto Blue Jays to the heavily discounted buyout of the formerly known SkyDome, thus becoming Rogers Centre, Ted Rogers had a key role in.

While it’s never kind or fair to knock someone who can’t defend themselves or has recently shrugged off this mortal coil, it’s debatable at best that Rogers and his company have been entirely positive for sports in Canada.

For all those who owe their livelihood –- everyone from the poor telemarketers trying to sell Blue Jays tickets in this economy to hard-luck Harry Leroy Halladay to any number of media personalities -- there’s no doubt that today is a very dark day. Rogers had a kind of grandfatherly presence (at least, for media and public appearances –- Ted had earned a reputation in some quarters as hot-tempered, but that’s neither here nor there) for the Rogers’ corporate family. Losing him is a significant blow to the public image of a company that has serious, long-term, systemic problems in the public relations’ department.

These problems at Rogers were never more apparent than in the sports arena.

Ted Rogers, to his credit, invested tremendous amounts of money into enterprises that, in an economic climate like ours, are never easy nor profitable. The Toronto Blue Jays are just one example.

While Rogers deserves much lauding for saving the Jays from years of uninterested, distant ownership when his company bought them from Interbrew SA, there’s no doubt that, after nearly eight years of ownership, the Jays haven’t exactly made good on the investment. The team remains stuck in a middle-of-the-pack position, mired in a division where the economics of baseball are heavily stacked against them. Rogers, understandably, saw the team as a potential vertical for promotion of Rogers’ key assets, such as high-speed Internet or Rogers Wireless. The buy of Sportsnet as the team’s prime carrier of TV broadcasts was supposed to be a millennial, pro-convergence move that would signal in a brand new era of responsible, engaged ownership of the Jays.

Given that he once referred himself as the "village idiot" when it came to baseball, it’s understandable that frustration among senior members of the Rogers empire has only grown since 2000. After all, how much money do the Jays really need to compete? The jury’s still out on that question, but the results have been clear: the team’s not winning and the economic downturn is only going to make things harder for Rogers (and its shareholders) to justify its ownership platform.

And, of course, there’s the lingering issue of the Buffalo Bills making their presence felt in Canada – a business move that hasn’t yielded the results most Roger people thought it would. With sky-high ticket prices and a potential public relations debacle on its hands, Rogers’ efforts to bring the NFL into Canada has been a mixed bag at best so far. Only time will tell if the whole enterprise of the Bills in Toronto will actually work, especially in an economic climate like the one we’re in now.

In many ways, Ted Rogers (and by extension, his company) were and are a two-sided entity when it comes to their relationship with sports culture in Canada. On one hand, it's always great news to see a Made-in-Canada company like Rogers invest millions into sports franchises, broadcast platforms and their ilk. None of it would have happened had they not managed to beat Bell at its own game in the 1980s on the nascent cell-phone market, not only outpromoting them but outengineering them (as detailed in Caroline Van Hasselt's book, High Wire Act: Ted Rogers And The Empire That Debt Built).

Hundreds of people owe their jobs, careers and future prospects to Ted Rogers and his risk-taking approach to investing. As a businessman, philanthropist and proud Canadian, he deserves much thanks.

Of course, there’s always the other side of the coin on Ted Rogers: A man who embodied what a wise man once referred to as “uninterested ownership.” As a businessman, it’s important to consider that investing is usually hinging on a return on that said investment –- otherwise, it’s basically burning money away. While it’s easy and often enough correct to lay blame for the Jays’ perpetual underachieving on Jays management (J.P., Paul “I’m a Postie now!” Godfrey and Goober Gibbons, come on down!), one wonders how big the gap between investing in the Jays payroll and player development to compete with Big Spending Yankees and Red Sox and the results on-field actually was with Ted Rogers.

R.I.P., Mr. Rogers.

Zen Dayley: Rios' release is a payoff kvetch

Saying something is hard really is code for wanting an easy way out, hardly a human failing.

The cynical, snarky response to the hue-and-cry over the Rogers Jays letting Alex Rios go was, "Too bad they don't have a 21-year-old outfield prospect who has popped 14 extra-base hits in his last 45 at-bats in Triple-A. Wait, they do!" That is rather insufficient, on some people.

It is understandable why jettisoning Rios was upsetting to Jays followers. No talk of financial flexibility or how much God's Gift of Sunshine, Travis Snider, is smacking the ball around in Las Vegas is going to brighten the picture immediately, especially for a lower-revenue team. Rios getting the ax is a splinter under the fingernail.

It's right to be irrational and kvetch about the salary dump, for a day or two. There is no reason to buy a full-priced Rogers Jays ticket for the duration of this season, although there are the 20,000-30,000 diehards who keep turning out. The lone reasons to attend a game are to watch Roy Halladay and Ricky Romero pitch or throw support to the Tampa Bay Rays (who come to Rogers Centre Aug. 24-26).

If that smacks of being fair-weather, so be it. Being a sports fan is not supposed to be exceedingly difficult. It is supposed to be fun. Only a deranged few, guilty as charged, get their jollies peeling back the onion and trying to understand the how and why of a team being only-OK when people's vanity and egotism demands awesome. The rank-and-file have enough on their plates. Adding the burden of being emotionally involved with a ballclub which is trying to mow the lawn with a pair of fingernail clippers by playing in the AL East is a little much to ask.

"Toronto is not Cleveland, with its budget problems, Pittsburgh, with an organizational model that has been a complete failure, Kansas City, which is awful but still wastes money on second-tier journeymen who don't know how to win, or San Diego, which will check out of the contending business for the next couple of years until its farm system improves. Toronto's problem is that it is a good team in the wrong division. 'Good isn't enough,' Ricciardi said. 'You have to be great.' "

Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated, Aug. 4

In that regard, The Tao was nails for saying, "Then there is the 'fan' in us, who is totally irrational and has spent roughly about a thousand hours over the past couple of years irrationally feeding into the hopes and dreams and misery and agony of Jays fans through this very blog. And that part of us is really finding it difficult to root, root, root for the home team's corporate ownership's bottom line."

That is where good friend Dan Rowe got the idea of terming Rogers' approach to its holdings "uninterested ownership." (Jan. 18, 2008). There is scarcely little rebuttal. Jeff Blair's column was spot on: There is every reason to believe Rogers is trying to sell the team. It probably ties in with their NFL ambitions, since that league dictates that owners cannot own teams in another sport.

There is stability with having a corporate owner. Stability is close to stagnation and stasis in the dictionary. The playoffs are a pipe dream with the current ownership and divisional alignment, but the unknown could be worse unless Jim Balsillie is a secret Seamhead.

Within the past couple months, greater minds such as Ottawa residents Howard Bloom of Sports Business News and Pete Toms of The Biz of Baseball have each voiced some variation of "baseball is dead and dying in Toronto." Pete's point is supported by sociologist Reginald Bibby's findings that only one in 10 Canadian teens follows Major League Baseball, down from one in three in the early 1990s.

Rogers can sense the break of the waves. It might well believe Blue Jays baseball is being affected by what Business Week calls the "incredible shrinking Boomer economy" or has run its course as a consumer product in Canada. (That might not necessarily be right.) Stephen Brunt recently related the story about when the late Ted Rogers wanted to invest in wireless. The vote among his company's directors was however many opposed against one in favour, but Rogers was the one in favour. Now you know the rest of the story.

They might have decided to punt, the way so many Buffalo Bills possessions end. The fact the aforementioned Rays might be before to trade leadoff man extraordinaire Carl Crawford (Jonah Keri, SI.com) is an indication that baseball has swung back toward the unfair system it had in the late 1990s.

That being said, talk about the Jays being headed down the same path as the late and lamented Montreal Expos is a bit much. For that to happen, there needs to be a viable market for relocation. MLB already has one lame-duck franchise, the Oakland Athletics, which cannot move.

Toronto is stuck with a stadium no one likes, a corporate owner who does not seem to care and a stacked deck for a division. People can hardly be blamed for begging out of the situation.

As for Rios, the player was often accused of being a no-brainer. It remains to be seen with the move. Baseball Prospectus and Game of Inches thought the White Sox must be out of their minds for taking on Rios' contract. FanGraphs thought it was a steal for Chicago. Walk-Off Walk pointed out if you want to blame anyone, blame Paul Godfrey and Vernon Wells:

"Ricciardi's hand was forced because Rios' talents could not fully shine when an even larger bag of waste was blocking up the dollar flow. Blue Jays CF Vernon Wells is owed almost $100 million before 2014, at which point he'll be 35 and have a mailbox clogged with AARP junk mail. In a move reminiscent of Sophie's Choice, J.P. was stuck choosing between the two big OF contracts and ended up giving up the more attractive one. If Wells wasn't around, Rios could rotate into center. But Wells will be around, jingling the pocket change from his Albert Belle-esque contract without the Albert Belle-esque production."

Bottom line, the anger over Rios is understandable, but misdirected. Whether the Jays pried a player loose from Chicago is irrelevant. Since Kate Hudson was at Monday's Jays-Yankees game, you at least wish they could have got $50 and a case of Heineken, like in Almost Famous, but would people really feel any different if Dayan Viciendo was now in the Jays system? No, they wouldn't. No one wanted to hear about the players whom J.P. Ricciardi got in return for Scott Rolen. Try to be consistent, please.

The point is the obvious, it was right to give into emotion for a while. It's a little rich to start being doom-and-gloom and always blame Ricciardi, who is out the door in October. At the end of the day, the desire is to always want Major League Baseball in Canada, in the worst way. Hopefully that's not the way you'll start getting it in Toronto.

ACTUALLY, THE WORD IS TRAGICOMICAL

Brian Windhorst, who covers the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Akron Beacon-Journal (where Chuck Klosterman worked once) had some telling words for The Big Lead about how badly major media gets it wrong with the blogosphere:

"I think the development of blogs is fascinating and I also think how most newspapers do blogs is comical. Four years ago when I went to my bosses and talked about doing a blog they had no idea what I was talking about. Now, many papers are just reactionary. Editor tells reporter: 'hey, do a blog' and most of the time the writer doesn't want to do it and neither of them know what a blog truly is. You hear all these beat writers bitching about it all the time. I have a piece of cyberspace they call a blog but it isn't, it's a journal." (emphasis mine)

That begs a new term: The iCab.

As in, It's Called A Blog. It's even got that cute lower-case i in front of it which automatically confers coolness on any device or product.

It explains why, for the greater good, this site has to die. By March 1 at the latest.

Suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I'll never have that recipe again

That's right. A MASH theme/McArthur Park mash-up.

It's not about any one media personality or who or did or didn't get nominated for else is up Best Sports Blog. (Although, quickly, Ian Mendes, really? Great guy, class act, terrific TV presence, probably doesn't leave his socks on floor at night either, but for pity's sake, his sportsnet.ca iCab has been updated three times in the past month. Doesn't that violate any number of anti-idling bylaws?

Number of comments on Mendes' posts since Dec. 17, 2007: 32
Number of comments on OOLF posts over same span: 123

It's about the futility of trying to be heard against "uninterested ownership" that controls the major media outlets in Canada (to borrow good friend Dan Rowe's term from a book review he has in the Jan./Feb. Quill & Quire*). There's a perfectly sound explanation why it's 2008 and there is no Bill Simmons or Will Leitch of Canada and there never will be.

I thought I would be, but it obviously isn't going to happen. That is just well considering Simmons, as per the KSK takedown, is obviously finished. (Simmons actually wrote the Indianapolis Colts lost last weekend since they were afraid of the New England Patriots; a grown man actually wrote that.)

If people who are recognizing quality blogs can't grasp that lumping in Chuck Swirsky (love ya, Swirsk) with those whose interested ownership is almost entirely sweat equity is not to true to what "a blog truly is," what's the point anymore?

Anyway, being overlooked, snubbed for something is nothing novel. Hell, I've been a court-certified expert going back to Grade 5 when Stacey Parks invited our entire class -- except for one person -- to the first-ever boy-girl party.

Point being, Windhorst captures the sense of futility of going on with this blog, not to mention writing for free.

He says four years ago he went to his bosses about a blog? Imagine how it feels reading that as someone in the Canadian media who's blogged for five years and who has never once in that entire time been asked for an opinion on the company's online presence, let alone asked to contribute. Never mind that this is coming from someone who has some proven writing chops ...

... screwit. Pointing out meagre accomplishments, that really just removes all doubt about how who really doesn't get it? And that's what is comical about the last couple years of my life.

So your ride is leaving. Some will be stranded, but chances are there are enough iCabs for everyone.

Some damn fine sites are nominated, including Battle of Alberta, Mirtle, Drunk Jays Fans, Hoops Addict and Dinosty. Hopefully one of them wins.

It says here cishoops.ca or Ottawa Lynx Blog and The Tao of Stieb get "it" better than Mendes, Swirsky and their corporate masters. Fortunately, Mark, Carl and Pete, and the shadowy forces behind The Tao have much better big-boy coping skills.

Any concerns, questions, send them to neatesager@yahoo.ca.

(* Straight to the point about my relationship with Q&Q: There isn't one, but I would have loved to have had one. Wrote an article for them in summer 2006 called "The Anti-Sports Book." E-mailed an editor a couple times about writing again. He never replied; apparently he got the memo that Sager is a stupid hick from Napanee. Yet I still asked for a Q&Q subscription as a Christmas gift, which shows I have to be too stupid to live.)

DocTalk: The juice ain't worth the squeeze

Reading anything into the Blue Jays setting up their pitching rotation so Roy Halladay gets two starts at home before the July 31 trade deadline is a fool's play, likely.

It is just that if Halladay was throwing Friday against the Red Sox instead of Sunday, his next two starts would come on the road, assuming a normal five-man rotation with no one getting bumped. This way, with the temporary move to a four-man rostation, Halladay is in line to start a Friday home game on July 24 vs. the Tampa Bay Rays, so if Doc is headed out of Toronto (to possibly Philadelphia, San Francisco or St. Louis) that is the night to head down to Rogers Centre with a black armband fashioned out of hockey tape affixed to a powder-blue throwback jersey. (If they were still using a five-man, it would be July 25.)

Gut feeling: Richard Griffin's rationale that the Jays should hold on until the winter, do some fact-facing and say, "We're not gonna contend in the 2010 AL East," makes some sense. The media and fanbase will be on a less of a hair trigger.

The reasoned response all along was that Halladay was not going to be traded before the end of this season. By the way, the snappy answer to the question, "Where is Doc headed?" is, "Cooperstown." Those of you who like to feed two birds with one scone can say, "They'll trade him the same day the Ottawa Senators deal Dany Heatley."

During the all-star game telecast on Tuesday, FOX Sports' Ken Rosenthal came off like he was backpedalling like a Pro Bowl cornerback when he reiterated that Halladay would be traded, and now he's admitting the St. Louis Cardinals and L.A. Angels are all but out of the running, although Cardinals fans sure were fawning over the right-hander. No doubt you read speculation that the Yankees could take Vernon Wells ludicrous contract off the Jays' hands. Of course, as Jason Rosenberg at It's About The Money, Stupid noted, adding Wells might be too rich even for the Yankees' blood, even with the extra revenue they're bringing in by streaming broadcasts online. It would potentially leave them with almost $170 million committed to nine players come the 2011 season.

"That's flat out insane. Of course, this doesn't include resigning Halladay or any other free agents. They might try to overpay Jason Bay (assuming he's not signed to an extension by Boston), sign Matt Holliday or any of the eventual Rays free agents. Bottom line, that money's gonna be spent.

"Wells might be another Bobby Abreu with a lower OBP and less SB; a solid player with 20 HR power. Is he 'worth' $23M? Not a chance. Is he worth absorbing that contract to land Halladay, assuming you don't have to give up Joba (Chamberlain), (pitcher Phil) Hughes, (outfield prospect Jesus) Montero? I'm not sure. I've been debating this for a long time and I've been staunchly saying that 'there's no way the Yanks take on Wells,' but maybe I am wrong. (Veteran outfielders Johnny) Damon and (Hideki) Matsui are gone after this year. (Xavier) Nady, too. Can you put Wells in CF for the next few years and have greater productivity than (Brett) Gardner and/or Melky (Cabrera)? Probably. Can you absorb Wells' abortion of a contract for the year and a half (at least) of Halladay's services? I'm not sure."

It cannot be stressed enough that all of this is just a fan's futile attempt to, in the parlance of those MacLean's promos which are played ad nauseam on Blue Jays radio broadcasts, make sense of it all. The best one can do is try to offer some guidelines:

• Baseball Prospectus believes the Jays should act with Halladay and the left side of the infield, 34-year-old third baseman Scott Rolen and 33-year-old shortstop Marco Scutaro. A lot of people have fallen in love with those two, instead of merely falling in like.
  
  
• One should shudder at hearing any rumours about a deal with the Yankees that would send Chamberlain, Hughes, Gardner and Shelley Duncan to Toronto. It's not out of the realm of possibility that Chamberlain has plateaued as a pitcher. Also, he's shown a lack of durability in his career to date, which would make the optics of dealing Halladay even worse.
  
  
• It should have been stressed from the get-go that using the 2008 Erik Bedard trade, where the Baltimore Orioles got all-star outfielder Adam Jones and closer George Sherrill (among others), is a poor baseline. That was more of an anomaly and the GM who signed off on that, Bill Bavasi, has since been fired.


• Meantime, the San Diego Padres' story arc with their ace Jake Peavy is pretty germane. That franchise has overriding internal issues (change of ownership), not unlike the Blue Jays (an interim CEO, a meh attitude in their local market and questions about their uninterested ownership). The Padres were unable to get anything done with Peavy, and are now on course to finish with about 97 losses. The gist of it the Jays probably have to act, but there's a time and place for it and that time is not in the next two weeks.
  

Anyway, you know it's not my style to rubberneck rumours (better to dilettante around committing to nothing, that's how it's done in Sageritaville, right?), but this one was rich:

"The Phillies remain 'very, very interested' in acquiring Blue Jays ace Roy Halladay and are currently putting together a package of prospects that may actually also include recently-signed P Pedro Martinez. The Cardinals are also a favorite to land Halladay if, and only IF they are willing to part with blue-chip prospect, OF Colby Rasmus, along with several other prospects. The Dodgers remain in the action as well and a late entry into the field are the San Francisco Giants who are unsure of the availability of Randy Johnson for the rest of the year. Their package is said to include former AL Cy Young winner Barry Zito and the highly-touted Jonathan Sanchez, who threw a no-hitter in his last start right before the All Star Break.

Halladay and Tim Lincecum in the same starting rotation in San Fran? At least that would be ironic. Another irony for an Ottawa-based Jays fan: Michael Taylor, the one outfielder whom the Phillies are said to have dangled, just got promoted to Lehigh Valley. Oi, a thousand times, oi.

(There's no graceful way to segue into it, but Bart Given has a post up at Inside The Majors explaining what a travelling secretary does in major league baseball. He managed to dig out a picture of George Costanza and Wilhelm from Seinfeld. Kinger referenced Seinfeld when Given was a guest on his CFRC sports show several weeks ago.

YOU CAN'T SHAME A SNAKE IN THE FIELDTURF; OR, GODFREY JOINS THE FLYING BURRITO BROTHERS

This is Paul Godfrey's burrito out the car window. (Video by Drunk Jays Fans.)

The fallout from the Blue Jays letting Tigers and Red Sox fans -- especially the latter, some (not all, mind you) of whom are beer-flinging louts with sewer mouths and social attitudes not of this century -- have first shot at tickets for a couple of April series pretty much reprises the middle act of Anchorman. With a simple act of selling out, everything changed. This is pretty much, "I'm Paul Godfrey. Go fuck yourself, Toronto."

The Jays blogerariat, which like Toronto itself, takes in all kinds, even if you're a Drunk, a Taoist, a Bottom, a Chucker, a Ghost or even a Base player, pretty much spent the weekend hammering out a conclusion that as far as Jays fans should be concerned, Paul Godfrey's ass is grass.

Hardcore fans were pretty much quietly resigned to having Godfrey as president of the Jays. It was much the same as how, on a scale that is a million times more important, that bleeding heart liberals like me back in the first half of 2005 were resigned to having George W. Bush as leader of the free world. With Godfrey, you shrug off his call to play God Bless America at the seventh-inning stretch, the reality he long ago killed any part of himself that could embrace loving something so irrational as a baseball team and the likelihood that he went to a stylist or image consultant before he grew a beard in order to better resemble a human being, never mind an actual man of the people.

What could you do? It's business as usual in Toronto, where purely business decisions rule the day with the local teams.

OH SAY, CAN YOU SEE?

The common thread is there didn't seem to be any way to get through to people. It was only after the levees broke in New Orleans and Anderson Cooper emoted on CNN that people finally got it about Bush and Dick Cheney. Obviously, this a huge overstatement for rhetorical effect. No one should try to trivalize Katrina.

However, the Jays being so bush-league finally makes it clear what has been wrought by Rogers Communications' uninterested ownership (thanks again, Dan Rowe).

Other than for money, why would you want some of the fans from Boston as guests? Some of them have a little trouble accepting they were guests in a foreign land and the customs are a little different. That much was obvious during the 2005 home opener, when many got sauced on the higher alcohol content of Canadian draft beer and started tossing refrigerator magnets out of the upper deck, striking their social betters in the good seats. Of course, this being Toronto, a few people had to imitate the Americans.

The Jays should be busting ass to give Southern Ontario every reason to turn out in greater numbers, not take the lazy way out. God knows (but Godfrey will never understand) that you put up with enough to be a baseball fan in Canada relative to following hockey or the NFL. You give up summer days and nights to watch the team on TV (not that hockey fans' dedication is supspect, but when it's minus-20, the decision to stay in is made for you.)

You suffer people who are serious when they why Joe Carter is not in the Hall of Fame, or whether Roberto Alomar will be. You balance criticizing J.P. Ricciardi with getting mad when cable sports networks and the Toronto dailies when they get it all wrong by acting like missing the playoffs in baseball is the same thing as missing the playoffs in the NHL, which has twice as many playoff spots and no divisional rivals with $200-million payrolls. You put up with second-rate TV announcer crews since there's almost nowhere in this country for anyone who also has to pay for food and shelter to learn the craft of calling a baseball game -- and if we do come up someone who can such as Dan Shulman, ESPN will snap him up.

For all we do, Paul Godfrey and his corporate masters figure that they can sell our seats to people from Boston. The Jays should be busting ass to give Southern Ontario every reason to turn out in greater numbers. Instead they take a lazy way out and wonder why more people won't commit to their team.

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

Zen Dayley: You have no right to use that word!

It just seems wrong somehow to see a sports columnist refer to Roy Halladay as the "ace of a nails starting staff."

The sentiment is appreciated. The misappropriation of the immortal adverb popularized by Drunk Jays Fans to describe a a lights-out individual and group effort is not. The usage that has to be known and loved is to say a player or an element of the ballclub is nails, as in, "the Jays' pitching has been nails lately." Some will garnish that with a couple of F-bombs. No one is judging.

This is not some mundane detail. It has everything to do with how baseball fans and creative types get a raw deal every day (two words, people) of their lives in this country, especially the Xers.

It is one word out of several hundred, and it's only in the wrong place. Still, it's the tip of the iceberg that a Canadian baseball nut has to constantly navigate around. Someone thirty-one years old is in no position to make the call on whether it was always this bad, but it's too bad that the media in this country, with a few shining exceptions, is falling so far behind at keeping up with the evolution in baseball analysis.

This is a great time to be a connoisseur of baseball writing and analysis. There's so much -- the hard analysis of Baseball Prospectus and The Hardball Times. The obsessive chronicling of MLB Trade Rumors. The joy of seeing the guys and gals on the beat -- Jeff Blair, Joe Posnanski and Mike Wilner, to name but three -- who are coming to understand the whole notion of a give-and-take with their audience.

There's some of the think-pieces pouring forth from major-outlet writers such as Tom Verducci (his Tim Lincecum cover story back in July was an essential read, and his piece on the groupthink mentality that influences managers' use of their bullpen is a good one too). It's probably easier than it's ever been to be up to speed and whom other franchises have coming up through their farm systems. Last, but not least, there are all the humour-in-a-jockular-vein sites that can take the sting out from loving something as silly as a baseball team and the starch out of the media that purports to take the games seriously, when it fact they've been rendered unserious through uninterested ownership.

All of this reinforces that even though baseball is a game that you can zone on out on more than any other game, like Rob Gordon in High Fidelity categorizing his record collection for the 1,001st time. You can get lost in something, knowing full well it's only a game. That is beautiful and haunting when it's not reflected in how the media outlets in the country, for the most part, cover the sport. It never goes much beyond whether the Jays won or lost, does it?

What's not to understand? The Jays had won 10 games in a row before Roy Halladay -- or Roy (N-Word) Halladay, although that sobriquet probably should not get used more than once, lost last night. That left them seven games behind the Red Sox for the wild-card spot if anyone actually cares to know, but the enjoyment of it was tempered. You knew each win would only entitle more and more of the know-it-alls to slither back out from under their rocks and get it all wrong, or repeat the same bullflop about why the team couldn't play like that in August. (Apparently, those were "triple word score" games or something. It's a 162-game season. Each game is weighted equally, Jesse Litsch and Shaun Marcum were struggling to find their form in August, end of story.)

The Jays are not making the playoffs. The it-getters made their peace with that even before Opening Day. The deck is stacked against the Jays as an AL East team and no, the Tampa Bay Rays being playoff-bound is not proof to the contrary. Their payroll is $44 million and will probably only be in the mid-50s next season, but when you consider Tampa Bay's brainpower and the benefits of having a high spot in the amateur draft, it's clear they are a wealthy team in their own right.

The Rays are kind of the personification of inconspicuous consumption. That probably gets lost on people in a country whose only MLB franchise's corporate parent makes tens of millions of dollars selling cellphones that people feel they cannot live without.

What's not to understand. The days are growing shorter. The season is drawing down. A 10-game win streak, for lack of any other way to put it, is nice. Del Jordan in The Lives of Girls and Women figured out that there could be happiness without scholarships to university, so a Jays fans can certainly have happiness with no playoffs. There's a lot for the mind as a baseball fan..

There should be a moratorium on people who might watch baseball -- but not with the right kind of eyes -- to actually see the game to bat out a column which lends itself to copy editors using the headline, "Meaningful Games Return To Blue Jays."

Every game is meaningful. That should be as easy to nail down as, well, why the older generation doesn't have licence to say "nails."

Should-reads

• There's a little irony in saying the Tampa Bay Rays (now 2 1/2 games clear of the Red Sox) should have gone after Barry Bonds. The improvement they made in their fielding was the equivalent of adding Bonds at his peak. (Yet the same columnist who set me off referred to them as the "Cinderella Rays." Again, what's not to get?)
• Good things do happen to bad people: The Florida Marlins are going to get their new stadium.

Damn, the Jays

• Casey Janssen will be ready to go for Opening Day 2009, according to everyone's favourite GM with a predilection with for obfuscation. In all seriousness, that is good news. J.P. Ricciardi also said on the FAN 590 last night that Dustin McGowan "might not" to pitch by the end of spring training.
• Someone, soon, will wonder if the Jays should make a pitch for Todd Helton as their DH next season.
• Over dinner and drinks last night, a friend wondered why Rod Barajas was batting fifth; Mike Wilner wondered as well.
• The Jays' 10-game roll is done, and wasn't it fun. Not everything has to be overanalyzed. A.J. Burnett should invoke his out clause so well..

Zen Dayley: Price is right for Rays, but will it be for A.J.?

(Rob has the playoff primers in the hopper, meantime, here's some bullet points on this, the potential second-last day of the season.)

Should-be-awares-ofs

• The clamouring on the interwebs for the Rays to use David Price as a starter in the playoffs is just going to get louder. The schedule for Tampa Bay's series against the AL Central's sacrificial lamb champion mandates using a four-man rotation. Greater minds have already pointed out that the No. 5 starter, Andy Sonnanstine, had has the hit-lucky horseshow stashed someplace much of the season. The No. 4 man, Edwin Jackson, has a 7.82 ERA in September, although that includes a good start against the Twins.
  
  The Angels chose to play the longer series in the first round of the American League playoffs. It means they and the Red Sox could go with a 3-man rotation.
• If someone asks, the picks here for the MVP awards are the Twins' Joe Mauer in the American League and the Mets' David Wright in the National.
  
  What's not to like with Wright (.302/.391/.536, 115 runs scored, 124 RBI and the smoothest third baseman in the NL)? He's hit .344/.400/.619 since Sept. 1, so the Mets blowing the playoffs (again) can't be pinned on him.
  
  Many would say Justin Morneau is the Twins' MVP candidate, of course. Well, what would harder for the Twins to replace: A solid defensive catcher such as Mauer who also has the offensive numbers of an old-school leadoff hitter (.415 on-base percentage, 82 walks, 97 runs scored) or a power-hitting first baseman? Justin Morneau's a fine player and he's not just riding the coattails of the talented tablesetters in front of him, but Mauer is the unique talent.
• The Rays had an unusual clubhouse celebration -- the rain-soaked Red Sox loss dragged out so long that some Rays left the ballpark in Detroit, and came back for the party.
• For anyone who's wondering about the NL Cy Young -- Brandon Webb in Arizona or Tim Lincecum in San Francisco. It should be taken into consideration that Webb was 4-0, 2-89 against the lousy-hitting Giants. If he played anywhere but San Fran, Lincecum might have gone unbeaten.

Damn, the Jays

• The other, better sites will be all over the news that the Jays apparently have offered A.J. Burnett a two-year extension at $15M per season. The Yankee lovers really want to see him in pinstripes.
  
  There is nothing profound coming to mind. One point is that you shouldn't put too many eggs in the Burnett basket. The bottom line is the Jays' chances of seeing October baseball again rest with drafting and developing. Burnett is another franchise's gem that they plucked away as a free agent, so this whole "we have to keep him," is shortsighted.
  
  The best organizations are the ones who understand that talent is not in such short supply.
• Please read Stephen Brunt in the Globe, "Jays allowed to slip." (The headline might be a bit off, depending on your interpretation.)
  
  It's a good read ... but please don't begrudge a little back-patting. A quick check shows that about eight months ago, this site applied Dan Rowe's phrase "uninterested ownership" to Rogers Communications' approach to running the Blue Jays. Brunt is picking it up and running with it as he only can:

  "And so except for the (perhaps forced) departure of team president Paul Godfrey, this is a business that is being allowed to fall into maintenance mode. Lose a little money on an operating basis, create a bit of television programming for Sportsnet, give the paying customers reason to hope, but without incurring substantial risk."

  That was more or less the point back in the winter:

  "Their revenues are what they are. Aside from the NFL, Canadians only watch sports the rest of the world barely plays, since we're sure to kick ass in those (that goes for hockey, curling and about a third of the Winter Olympics). Rogers, which in fairness, would have to do a lot worse to be as bad as Toronto's other corporate sports owner, will only increase payroll enough to make it look like they care about winning. Do you see what we're dealing with up here?"
  -- Some fat, dumb and bald guy, Deadspin, Feb. 22, 2008

  God love Stephen Brunt. He is brilliant.
  
• Who was saying that "the Jays will lose Burnett and be better for it?"
• The Royals shortstop Tony Pena will finish with the worst on-base percentage of any player who batted 200 times in a season in almost a century. The only player to do worse died 65 years ago.
  
  John Gibbons, about a month before his firing, ordered Tony Pena to be intentionally walked.

Zen Dayley: Of Bonds, Bill Lee, Bud, ballparks and back-patting

Almost 14 months to the day that someone predicted he would never serve a day in jail, it appears Barry Bonds is accused of taking something that wasn't actually illegal.

That sounds like the classic MAD magazine definition of entrapment — "this guy is guilty of crimes he hasn't even been accused of." Yahoo! Sports is promising more relevations, but you can't blame people if they start wondering if the case vs. Bonds is as strong as the San Diego Padres' reasons for signing David Eckstein and Omar Vizquel for their middle infield.

This is more of a notebook-style Zen Dayley. Item the second is that MLB is giving lip service to the notion of participating in the Olympics if baseball and women's fastpitch are reinstated for 2016 (all four bidding cities say they will accommodate both sports). Selig didn't actually say how that would be accomplished, which makes one wonder if all the talk amounts to a belch in a windstorm.

This, that and the other

• Bill Lee's interview with the Toronto Star on Thursday was a scream. That's why they call him the Spaceman:

  " 'There's something inherently wrong with the Hall of Fame,' he offered. 'It's just a bunch of sycophants, apple polishers and everything else. Everybody's got faults; all but Brooks Robinson. Hey, Lucifer had wings at one time. Don Sutton was a cheater. No one cheated more than Gaylord Perry – except maybe Charles Barkley.' "

  Absolutely brilliant.
  
  
• It has been almost exactly one year since this site first co-opted Dan Rowe's phrase "uninterested ownership" to describe Rogers Communications' approach to owning the Blue Jays. It has, if one can be totally smug about it, made it easier to accept the Jays' winter of inactivity or not getting to hear Jim Hughson do play-by-play, which was a nice change of pace for the team's other TV voices. It is all water off a duck's back at this point.
• Geoff Baker, a former Star baseball writer who's now at the Seattle Times, is pretty candid about what it's like to cover a ballgame at the Rogers Centre, which he rated ninth out of 14 in the AL:

  "The press box food is pretty good, but the team is stingy on the portions. It's famous for putting up signs warning people not to take more than one cookie or pudding (most parks don't limit this). The press box is comfortable, but very high up. At night, the setting sun causes a glare around gametime that makes it tough to see your computer screen. The wireless access is among the worst in baseball despite the fact the team is owned by a cable giant. They also haven't figured out how to control the temperature in here and when they close the retractable roof after games, all the humidity gets trapped inside and turns it into a sauna. Getting to the clubhouse in this outdated, 1980s-style ballpark requires a hike down a long hallway, a ride on a terribly slow elevator and then a march down a very long basement concourse area. Security staff are not as bad as at Yankee Stadium, but tend to consider themselves as Canada's frontline to the War on Terror. No, that's not a joke. Well, it is, but it isn't."

Related:
Ever-drifting Spaceman cries out for integrity shift in Hall balloting (Richard Griffin, Toronto Star)
Bonds blockbuster: 'The Clear' was legal (Jonathan Littman, Yahoo! Sports)
Pressbox view of best/worst AL ballparks (Geoff Baker, Seattle Times)

WHO OWN DA CHIEFS? OH RIGHT...

The tin-foil hat is down off its hook after reading the Citizen's dog's breakfast article about the Blue Jays needing to change their Triple-A affiliate and Ottawa being a quote-unquote "possibility," which it is only is in a pig's eye.

It's curious why the Citizen had a key fact -- the Jays do not own a Triple-A team and would have to buy one in order to put in Ottawa, or any city of their choosing -- buried in the 15th graf of an 18-paragraph story. (Miles Wolff points it out.) The Syracuse Chiefs are owned by local shareholders. It's their team. The Jays provide the players the way Coca-Cola provides a local diner with soft drinks.

Secondly, the major game of minor-league musical chairs that might take place after this season was not acknowledged. Seventeen of the 30 Triple-A teams will need to sign a new PDC (player development contract) with a major-league team. Most won't change at all. The Jays will have an open look at striking a deal with Buffalo (the Cleveland Indians are going to make a play for nearby Columbus) or Rochester (whose deal is up).

It's a lot more penny-wise than buying and operating a team. Thanks to my pal Dan Rowe (a Syracuse resident, oddly enough), we're well-acquainted with Rogers Communications' concept of "uninterested ownership," so which route do you think they would choose?

That might have been important to mention before going off and stuffing Glebeites' heads full of this "maybe Ottawa?" nonsense. It's curious, to say the least, why the paper of the Ottawa establishment does this story now that Wolff is well on his way to getting the Can-Am League team set up in town.

It's not news that the Jays and Syracuse Chiefs are on the outs. There were rumblings over the summer. It's been in the upstate New York papers and circulated among Jays-themed blogs for three months (The Tao of Stieb was the first blog to note it).

There was almost certainly no malice intended. However, can't you hear people saying, "but I heard we were gonna get the Jays farm team!" at some point when the subject of giving the new a chance comes up.

Posts are also up at Can-Am Ottawa and Carl Kiiffner's Unofficial Ottawa Lynx Blog.

Related:
Jays would explore all Triple-A options -- maybe Ottawa? -- if new home needed (Geoff Nixon, Ottawa Citizen)

Zen Dayley: To mould a new reality, closer to the heart

Observing the sleep-on-it rule seems to be the best way to avoid saying, "The Jays will go as far as John Gibbons will take them." Talk about one cruel evenout, losing four straight... but Vernon Wells is back, Roy Halladay throws on Sunday and then the lousy Mariners come to town.

• Discuss among yourselves: A.J. Burnett is a straw man for everyone in Toronto who craps on the Blue Jays to avoid having to say what they really think about the Leafs.
  
  Burnett -- who tipped his cap to booing fans after getting jocked today -- and Roy Halladay have each made 13 starts this season. Burnett's given up four or more earned runs four times; Halladay's given up four or more earned runs five times. His little gesture -- which might have sent the message, relax people, it's only a game -- had a point.
  
• Jeff Blair noted that draft day is when Rogers Communications' uninterested ownership shines through: "Time for the Blue Jays to get with the flow and go over slot like everybody else."
  
  Over slot is Seamhead-speak for paying a high draft choice more than MLB's suggested signing boni, which tend to fall on te low side. More teams are realizing that lavishing a big bonus on a top-end prospect is cheap at twice the price, since there are ceilings on young players' salaries. Damn whatever the knee-jerkers say about giving $2.5 million to a high school shortstop or a college left-handed starter.
  
  Rogers' corporate cynicism dictates that you raise the major league club's payroll just high enough to defeat any charges of not wanting to win. "But the payroll is $100-million!" Add anyone who was pretty good back in 2003 and whom casual fans know from years of sports highlights and their fantasy league, and stir. Granted, that's what you would expect in Toronto, where sports franchises set out to win press conferences, not championships.
  
  There's nothing miraculous about why the Tampa Bay Rays are so good all of a sudden. They shelled out for to find players at the grass-roots, and now they're (knock on wood) headed to the playoffs.
  
• This never happens if George Steinbrenner was still alive ... 6-6 tie in the seventh iinning, bases drunk with Kansas City Royals ... Joe Girardi opted to leave Andy Pettitte to pitch to José Guillén. Never mind that Guillén had a .952 OPS this season vs. lefties, compared to .648 vs. righties, the first swollen considerably by a homer off Pettitte, who had thrown more than 100 pitches.
  
  Boom, grand slam. Back in the day, King George would have fired the manager before the plate umpire fished a new ball out of his pocket.
  
  (The Yankees, won 12-11, but when you have to score 12 runs to win, to quote Dave Smart, "You've lost already.")


• It's cold comfort to know that Jays GM J.P. Ricciardi at least has good taste when it comes to unrequited crushes.
  
  Tim Lincecum, whom the Jays were trying to get in the winter, is vying to be in the all-time, top 5 for pitchers who had the best years pitching for terrible teams. He has a 2.15 ERA, twice as good as the 4.68 for the rest of the San Francisco Giants staff. The Giants are 10-3 in his starts and 16-32 the rest of the time.
  
  No one's ever going to touch Steve Carlton's 1972 season, going 27-10, 1.97 for a last-place team. (He started in 29 of the Phillies' 59 wins.)
  
• Geddy Lee from Rush is the closest thing the Jays have to a celebrity fan, which makes it less of a surprise that he would be a benefactor for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Lee donated more than 200 balls autographed by Negro Leaguers, many of whom are long dead, to the museum.
  
• Washington Redskins tight end Chris Cooley is apparently a Jays fan.

Yes, losing two straight to the Baltimore Orioles is especially teeth-gnashing. The Red Sox and Yankees have money and brains. The Rays have brains. The Orioles organization is patchwork quilt that has neither.

Zen Dayley: The '09 Blue Jays; this is what you wanted

Fist-bump to The Ack at The Tao of Stieb for this pick-up, from a spring training feature on the Jay's youngins. They might actually go over slot for top-end prospects:

"The Blue Jays, under interim CEO Paul Beeston, intend to become even more aggressive in that regard by employing a new willingness to pay signing bonuses above Major League Baseball recommendations. That was a big no-no under old president Paul Godfrey and the shift in philosophy may help (GM J.P.) Ricciardi secure more high-end talent.

" 'That's definitely going to be an area we look at differently," said Ricciardi. "The gloves are off." — Shi Davidi

It would be welcome news and it would represent a welcome break from what has prevailed during Rogers' uninterested ownership. This scrap of news is in keeping with a feeling toward the Jays' '09 season and the accompanying cynicism, which boils down to five words: "This is what you wanted."

(Digression: Jeff Blair's latest, in a sentence: Lyle Overbay and Scott Rolen out, Orlando Cabrera in, maybe.)

The vox populi of Toronto sports fans can be a huge bunch of knee-jerkers who expect everything and make no effort to understand anything, which means they have no functioning memory. Perhaps it's like that in other places too; one big problem is Toronto tries to act like it's New York when it comes to sports, when it's really a snowy Atlanta, a regional hub which by sheer size and affluence, rates a team in every major sports league (except the NFL).

The common refrain with the Rogers Jays over the past few winters was that they were throwing too much at free agents (A.J. Burnett and B.J. Ryan in '05-06, Frank Thomas in '06-07, David Eckstein in '07-08). At least two of those four were spot-on. This winter, everyone whined when, alone among the 30 MLB teams, they didn't sign a Type A free agent. It is human nature to carp, but at least be consistent in your kvetching, eh. A middle-class team such as the Jays has to focus on bringing guys up through their minor-league system, instead of going for the quick fix:

"Over slot is Seamhead-speak for paying a high draft choice more than MLB's suggested signing boni, which tend to fall on the low side. More teams are realizing that lavishing a big bonus on a top-end prospect is cheap at twice the price, since there are ceilings on young players' salaries.

... Rogers' corporate cynicism dictates that you raise the major league club's payroll just high enough to defeat any charges of not wanting to win. 'But the payroll is $100-million!' Add anyone who was pretty good back in 2003 and whom casual fans know from years of sports highlights and their fantasy league, and stir." — June 7, 2008

It does stand to be a long baseball season in Toronto. No one wants to hear that if the Jays end up losing 90 games (which they probably won't thanks to pitching and defence) it would be only their third 90-loss in 25 years (counting 88 losses in a 144-game season in '95). They probably are a near-mortal lock to lose 90, but at least they're not the frickin' Kansas City Royals or something.

However, shifting to bringing along homegrown talent, although it will take years and a complete overhaul of the scouting system which Rogers gutted in the early 2000s, is what people might have wanted, deep-down. They might not be willing to admit it just yet, but hey, sometimes it takes time to come around.

The draft in June (where the Jays pick 20th overall) will be more proof of whether there has been a change of heart in the Jays' headquarters. It is always an easy out to say you're rebuilding and or shifting your focus to player development when you have little else going for you this season, but it's one of the first bits of good news to come out of Dunedin, failing a switch to another division.

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.

With fans and TV friends like these, there's no happy medium

Travis Snider's splendid home debut betrayed everything all that is soulless and wrong about the Rogers Blue Jays, their main TV carrier and Toronto's alleged sports fans.

It was twofold. Sportsnet, as Drunk Jays Fans pointed out, was doing an interview with an ex-Leafs hockey player and thus ignored the super-prospect's first at-bat. Secondly, the lack of a warm welcome when Snider came up was described as "shameful." (Miked Up.)

For a diehard fan, there's only so much you shrug off before you want to get your Billy Jack on: It's only a silly baseball team which hasn't been in the playoffs since I was in Grade 11, and I want you to know, that I try. When well-meaning family members and friends say that "it's only baseball" and tell me that I'm supposed to control my violent temper, and be passive and nonviolent, I try. I really try. Though when I see Travis Snider ... who is so special to us we (ought to) call him 'God's gift of sunshine' ... and I think of the number of years that he's going to have to carry in his memory ... the savagery of this idiotic moment of yours... I just go BERSERK!

No one's asking for the kind of saturation coverage TSN gives to hockey players who roughly the same age as the 20-year-old Snider. However, when the best homegrown hitting prospect the Jays have developed in relevant memory comes up to bat in his home stadium for the first time, pretty please with sugar on top and you can make this a Christmas and birthday present, focus on his at-bat. Don't talk over the play by doing an interview with ex-Leafs goalie Curtis Joseph, which is what happened.

Granted, the broadcasters might not have even noticed Snider was up to bat. As Mike Wilner pointed out on the radio and on his blog, he got roughly, oh, three-one thousandths of the reaction elicited when the "gameday crew" at the world's largest Rogers Video store brings out the T-shirt shooter. It was pathetic.

Perhaps the ignorance and indifference is no surprise, when you consider how little evident fanfare the Rogers-owned network dedicated to the up-and-coming star of the Rogers-owned baseball team.

As someone whom, admittedly, can zone out on baseball for hours on end, it's hard to get wrapped around what is so hard to understand. What are sports consumers in the Centre of the Universe apparently incapable of seeing with their own eyes?

Any 20-year-old who smokes a line-drive single off a 3-and-2 slider from Joe Nathan, Minnesota's lights-out closer, with two out in the ninth inning when it's his first week in the majors pretty much has the baseball world by the tail. Typically, in that situation, most hitters expect a fastball, and if they get anything else, they need a miracle in a worse way than Ricky did in that Trailer Park Boys episode when he couldn't smoke or swear in a courtroom. Experienced major-league hitters, including a few on the Jays, will swing and miss or produce a weak groundball out if Joe Nathan throws them a slider in that two-strike situation. (Not that anyone is naming names, Vernon Wells.)

That's what makes the indifference so galling, as Wilner articulated on air:

I have to say, (I'm) very disappointed in the crowd of 21 and a half thousand people that when Travis Snider came to the plate for his major-league at-bat at home -- nothing. Quiet, polite applause, no different than the applause for Lyle Overbay or Marco Scutaro ... you know what? And I mentioned to somebody before off the air and they said, 'That's what you get in this city. People just don't understand.' And I try my best not to give in to the people who say Toronto's not a baseball-savvy town and the fans don't understand baseball and you know, whatever. But that showed me something. And that was just terrible -- terrible! Everyone who was at the ballpark tonight should be ashamed of themselves for not giving Travis Snider a better welcome to the big leagues."

I can see where it's possible Wilner laid it on a bit thick. It was the Wednesday after Labour Day. The tourist crowd who make a point to come see a game or two each season are gone. Everyone there was probably on freebie tickets.

The newspaper reporters got it right and made Snider the focus of their game stories (although saying that Snider and John McDonald are in any kind of "similar situation" as hitters is more than a stretch. The only similarity between Snider and the .540-OPSin' McGlovin as hitters as that they each use a bat).

Ultimately, though, this is what you get in a market where how baseball is presented and absorbed is affected by Rogers' uninterested ownership (hat tip to Dan Rowe). When you have big corporations that don't care about the stuff they own, is it really any shocker people don't show any love to God's Gift of Sunshine?

Anywho, it's dumbfounding that Sportsnet couldn't save the softball questions for CuJo for the next half-inning. Meantime, for fans, start getting to know Travis Snider, AKA God's Gift of Sunshine. Not next summer, after he does a six-week or so turn at Syracuse Buffalo just to fine-tune his swing and cut down on his strikeouts, but now.

Going to a Jays game and not clueing in about Travis Snider is like going to a hockey game and not knowing it's played on ice. Sorry for the rant, but someone had to say it.