I’m not sure what to make of the 2011 Toronto Blue Jays. I had tempered expectations going into the season as I was firmly in the camp of those who believed the successes of last year were an aberration and not indicative of the team’s true talents.
Truthfully, there’s no way last year’s squad should have even been within spitting distance of a .500 record, let alone finishing with 85 wins. However, the majority of those games were won with a reliance on the home run not seen since Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig occupied the middle of the Yankees lineup in the 1920s. There was no way in hell this team, or Jose Bautista, was going to replicate the prodigious power it showed last season.
And to those fans who thought the home run was Toronto’s ticket to possibly 90 wins in 2011, obviously you’ve never seen a game of baseball before in your sheltered lives, outside of playing MLB’s The Show for hours on end while neglecting all human contact.
The time for talk was over as the calendar turned to April and players who will be bagging groceries and collecting shopping carts at Wal Mart by Memorial Day were sent back down to the minors, leaving the professionals to head north to start the season in Toronto.
The Jays had a terrific opening homestand, complete with a 13-3 drubbing of the Minnesota Twins on Opening Night. They followed that up with a dramatic come from behind win a few games later—ordinarily such a contest would usually cause this team to shrivel up and die—to build on their very early season momentum.
As the team headed West, I have to admit, I started believing that maybe this year was going to be different and all the stars would align. Then the Jays got the holy hell beaten out of them by the Los Angeles Angels, Oakland Athletics, and Seattle Mariners in quick succession. The team went into Boston to visit the league’s bottom dwellers in the Red Sox. Surely the Jays would be able to take advantage of a team playing so bad that historians had to look back to the early part of the twentieth century to find Boston teams of such comparable futility.
It worked for Toronto in the first game of the series, but then the team didn’t bother showing up for the next three games and apparently took an early flight back to Canada. I mean they didn’t even give an effort against the Red Sox and handed Beantown a series victory that very well might turn around their season.
The Jays returned for a homestand against the Yankees and Rays and I could just see this season slipping away already. Then a funny thing happened on Tuesday night. AJ Burnett was his usual terrible self. The fact he gets hit around so much and walks so many batters is so embarrassing considering how good his stuff is. He’s terrible, yet so much better than the majority of pitchers in the league. It’s an intriguing paradox.
Toronto showed some gumption. They showed some fight. Truthfully, they looked poised to go quietly into the night, but then the entire roster picked up their bootstraps and mounted a surprising comeback against the greatest closer in the history of the game, Mo Rivera.
The most unlikely of heroes, Travis Snider, snapped an 0 for 14 slide with a thundering game-winning double into the right centerfield gap. I started believing again. The Jays never win those types of games. Would it continue in the final game of the short series?
Nope. Not when the Jays hope rested on the shoulders of Brett Cecil. I don’t know what happened to him in the offseason, but the guy has basically forgotten how to pitch. Everything he throws in the zone is too high, right in the wheelhouse for most batters, or way too low where even a five year old could recognize it as a ball. I’m getting fed up with having to watch Cecil and Jojo Reyes get lit up and walk everyone start after start; it’s pathetic. Now, I know I’m nowhere as good as either lefthander, but I’m confident I could pitch just as bad as both guys for a fraction of the cost. Sign me up, Alex Anthopolous.
The Jays split their miniseries with the Yankees after being flummoxed by Bartolo “Show me where the buffet is” Colon. He looks like he can barely get up and down a flight of stairs, yet the offense could do nothing against him.
This team never ceases to amaze or vex me so far this season. Who knows what will happen when the Rays come into town over the weekend?
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