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	<title>Toronto &#187; Rachael McDaniel</title>
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		<title>A Farewell to J.A. Happ</title>
		<link>http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2018/07/12/a-farewell-to-j-a-happ/</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 12 Jul 2018 11:50:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rachael McDaniel]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/?p=16337</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This Blue Jays season has been, in many ways, reminiscent of the last. Mostly in that there’s been a lot of bad baseball played. While the Jays started out in the absolute worst way possible last April before crawling back to the low-end mediocrity in which they would reside for the entirety of the season, [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="font-weight: 400">This Blue Jays season has been, in many ways, reminiscent of the last. Mostly in that there’s been a lot of bad baseball played. While the Jays started out in the absolute worst way possible last April before crawling back to the low-end mediocrity in which they would reside for the entirety of the season, this year’s Jays gave us all some amount of false hope with a great April. They knocked that false hope over the head with a lead pipe and lowered it into a grave with shockingly little ceremony in May. </span></p>
<p>This is not to say that there hasn’t been a lot of fun to be had — I was in town to see that sweep of the Nationals, after all. The team, when they manage to pull out wins, typically does so in an entertaining way. I’ve enjoyed the resurgence of Randal Grichuk since his DL stint, and the few weeks where it seemed like Luke Maile had become a good hitter. Yangervis Solarte is a joy. The impressive debut Ryan Borucki has put together has been particularly fun to watch, because that, more than anything, gives us a glimpse of what the next good Jays team might look like.</p>
<p>But it hasn&#8217;t been great. There&#8217;s been a lot of games that I&#8217;ve only half-watched, whose scores I&#8217;ve checked and then abandoned altogether. I was looking forward to the resurgence of Aaron Sanchez, to another great season from Marcus Stroman, for Josh Donaldson to keep on being Josh Donaldson, and maybe — just maybe — for Tulo to play even just one game. Just one! Like last year, though, the Jays have been waylaid by injuries and inconsistency. And there has been no stunning breakout along the lines of the Justin Smoak All-Star first half of yesteryear. The Jays are sending but one player to DC as their representative this year. And he’s going to be gone soon, anyway.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">I wasn’t around for J.A. Happ’s first stint with the Jays. It fell right in the middle of the period of time where I didn’t watch baseball. When they signed him as a free agent after the 2015 season, I had no memories to measure him up against. I looked at the pictures: he seemed profoundly nondescript. I looked at the list of teams he had pitched for, his stats with each of them, and apart from his stellar rookie season, and maybe his half-season with the Pirates in late 2015, nothing jumped out at me other than the mundane consistency of it all. He’d been good, but never </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">that</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> good; he’d been bad, but never </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">that </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">bad. I found no reports of Happ being an notably good teammate, nor any that suggested he was notably bad; there was no interpersonal drama to speak of, nor any spicy quotes given to the press. He didn’t have any particularly exciting secondary pitch, no wipeout slider, no changeup that froze batters — he mostly just threw a lot of fastballs. It seemed like the most neutral signing possible. </span></p>
<p>When I searched Happ’s name on Youtube, all I found were variations on the same video.</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/g1fZXmVr_oA" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" ></iframe></p>
<p>This is J.A. Happ’s tenth season in the major leagues. During that time, he’s been the subject of previous few interviews or profiles. When he was unable to repeat his rookie success with the Phillies, he was quickly overshadowed by other members of those perennial playoff teams. His time in Houston was both brief and unremarkable; he spent a lot of his time with the Jays stuck in Triple A because he still had options, or was injured, and then he got traded away.  With the Mariners, he was okay; with the Pirates, he was exceptional. But he only stayed for that half a season, not long enough to build up any attachment. And that Pirates team more generally was extremely disappointing.</p>
<p>In 2016, Happ’s return to the Jays, when he finished sixth in Cy Young voting and anchored the best rotation in the American League, he was outshone in the rotation by Aaron Sanchez. 2017 was bad for the Jays. Happ has been one of the better starting pitchers in baseball over the last few seasons. He has managed to do so in such a way that has rendered him almost invisible to anyone not paying close attention. A Happ start has never been an event, just a quiet expectation of quality. I never remember that his name is all one syllable, that the J blends together with the A. I always have to catch myself.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p>It was outsized personalities that made this successful Jays team notorious. The next successful Jays team will probably be built on similarly outsized personalities. Vlad and Bo are already larger than life in Double A; one can only imagine what they’ll be like as full-fledged major leaguers, playing on the biggest stages possible. We got a taste of it in Montreal, in that pre-season series, with the unforgettable walk-off and the moments afterward — soaring into the air, victory written all over everyone’s faces. Big and loud, just like the fanbase when there’s a team worth cheering for.</p>
<p>The 2016 team, with all the swagger carried over from the year before, with the homers and the fighting and the attitude, would not have made it to the postseason if not for J.A. Happ. I can’t remember a single Happ start from that season, except the one where he threw at Chase Headley. I remembered it because Joaquin Benoit injured himself running out from the bullpen, and because of how unexpected the retaliatory pitch was coming from Happ. It was almost shocking.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p>Happ has never pitched 200 innings in a season. Apart from 2016, he’s never even really come close to that number. He is injured more often than I think of him being. He always seems to enter absences and return from them with extraordinarily little ceremony.</p>
<p>I haven’t watched those videos of him getting hit in the head with a line drive. I don’t need to see that. There is nothing worse than that sound, than the possibility of a simple game having such horrific consequences. I have, however, read the articles about it. I’ve read the articles from the day after, when Happ, with a fractured skull, was back at Tropicana Field talking to reporters, because he was still fine. How is that possible? How could anyone go back to the place where they easily could have died so soon after almost dying, still with the break in their skull? The quotes Happ gave to the reporters that day were the same as always: boring, almost boilerplate. I could never imagine possessing that kind of steadiness.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p>Judging by the frequency of search results, it seems like the line drive incident is the most remembered moment of Happ’s career. I hope that doesn’t end up being the case forever, but I can easily see how it would be. We are easily distracted by the morbid and obscene; we would rather engage with something distinctly terrible than something indistinctly good. Happ has been a good pitcher, if an indistinct one. He’s never been the most interesting player, nor the most interesting to watch work. He has been good — for teams that have often been bad, or often been riddled with dramatics. There’s a value in that lull. It’s the calmness that’s embedded in baseball. The silent space where you know what’s going to happen. Sometimes the excitement isn’t what you need out of a baseball game. Sometimes you just want to feel reassured.</p>
<p>Happ is almost certainly going to get traded before this month is over. He’ll be a free agent in the winter, and he’s returned to the Blue Jays once already. It’s certainly not unlikely that he’ll return again, after he goes and pitches for the Yankees in the playoffs, or for whatever team ends up enlisting his services. If he comes back, I imagine he’ll settle right back into the rotation, no matter how different the rest of the roster might end up looking by next season. I imagine it’ll feel like he never left.</p>
<p><em><strong><span style="font-weight: 400">Lead Photo © John E. Sokolowski-USA TODAY Sports</span></strong></em></p>
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		<title>September 10th, 1977: A Good Day for the Blue Jays</title>
		<link>http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2018/05/14/september-10th-1977-a-good-day-for-the-blue-jays/</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 14 May 2018 14:06:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rachael McDaniel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Articles]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/?p=15866</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Blue Jays have been struggling lately. You don’t need me to remind you of that. Let us instead turn our thoughts back to a brighter time. A better time. The year was 1977. The Jays were brand new, and they were god-awful.  Like most expansion teams, the Jays put up an extraordinarily bad debut [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The Blue Jays have been struggling lately. You don’t need me to remind you of that. Let us instead turn our thoughts back to a brighter time. A better time. The year was 1977. The Jays were brand new, and they were god-awful. </span></p>
<p>Like most expansion teams, the Jays put up an extraordinarily bad debut season. They went 54-107 — the worst record in baseball, and a full 45 ½ games back of the division lead. That division lead was held by none other than the New York Yankees, who with their 100-62 record went on to win both the pennant and the World Series.</p>
<p>The Jays, unsurprisingly, had a losing record against the Yankees that season, though six wins in 15 games could be considered a success given the massive gulf in talent level that separated the two teams. Still, the wins were mostly narrow, and the losses mostly enormous. In their final three-game series of the season, for example, the Jays were swept by the Yankees, scoring a meager three runs to New York’s 22. These were not evenly matched competitors. This was a 100-win powerhouse playing a roster that was, at best, marginal.</p>
<p>But if you scroll through the 1977 Blue Jays game logs, there is one strange line that sticks out. It is September 10th, 1977, a game played at Yankee stadium. The score, 19-3, makes sense if you assume that the Jays were on the losing end — the 1977 Jays gave up double-digit run totals 11 times over the course of the season. But it wasn’t the Yankees who scored 19 runs that day. No, it was the lowly Blue Jays who laid such an epic beating down. And not only did they beat the best team in the league, but they beat a future Hall of Famer in starting pitcher Catfish Hunter.</p>
<p>Big upsets happen in baseball, of course. Already this season we’ve seen the Miami Marlins beat Clayton Kershaw, which almost nobody would have predicted. But it is still fascinating that the worst team in the league could not only trounce the impending World Series champions so thoroughly, but hand them by far their worst loss of the season — their worst home loss, in fact, since 1923. I wanted to know just how that great Yankees team managed to put together such a spectacular display of ineptitude, and how that Jays team, who managed so little success in general that season, managed to appear, for that one afternoon, to be a heavy-hitting, complete-game-pitching juggernaut. There had to be reasons for this. There had to be people to hold responsible. A lot of things had to break the Jays’ way. Or maybe just three things.</p>
<h4><b>JIM CLANCY</b><strong><strong><br />
</strong></strong></h4>
<p>Nobody really thought Jim Clancy would make much of a mark with the Blue Jays in 1977. He was a 21-year-old with two full seasons in the minors under his belt, only one of which had been very good. He had control issues that needed to be worked out before he could become a viable major-league starter, even for an expansion team with little intention or hope of contending. He didn’t make the team out of spring training.</p>
<p>But veteran starter Bill Singer, having the worst season of his career, left his start on July 16th after two innings with a back injury. He would not return to the rotation that season, or indeed any other season: that start would end up being the last of his career. And to fill his spot in the rotation, the Jays decided to call upon the rookie Clancy. His first start would be at home against the Texas Rangers on July 26th. Going into the game, the Rangers were one of the hottest teams in baseball, having won 14 of their last 17 games. The Jays, meanwhile, had lost 16 out of their last 20. They hoped that the new face would perhaps provide some relief to their woes.</p>
<p>It was an unmitigated disaster. The Rangers won 14-0, setting a new franchise record for extra-base hits in a game with nine. Clancy pitched just two innings, allowing five earned runs on five hits and three walks, striking out just one. A flock of birds settled in the field, attempting to find food in the artificial grass, and were dispersed by a Texas double lined straight into their midst. “I haven’t seen anything like that in a long time,” Texas manager Bill Horton said of his team’s one-sided offensive performance.</p>
<p>This kind of welcome to the major leagues would typically bode poorly for a rookie, but the Jays, for lack of any better option, stuck with Clancy. In the long run, this turned out to be an okay move for the Jays: Clancy would go on to stay with the team for 11 more decent seasons. The rest of his 1977 season, though, would be characterized by wildly inconsistent performances. In his second start, the one immediately following his debut catastrophe, he pitched a complete game, allowing only two runs, one earned, on seven hits and just one walk; in his third start, he allowed five earned runs and walked five in under five innings. Clancy made 13 starts for the Jays in 1977 and recorded a decision in all of them, with a win-loss record of 4-9. All four wins were complete games.</p>
<p>So it went with Clancy in 1977: When he had it, he really had it, and when he didn’t, he really, really didn’t. The trick was that you never knew which Clancy you were going to get. And on September 10th, the Jays got the Clancy who had it. He pitched a complete game, allowing three runs on eight hits. He had a lot of bad days that season. This was a good one.</p>
<h4><b>CATFISH HUNTER</b><strong><strong><br />
</strong></strong></h4>
<p>Catfish Hunter started Opening Day for the Yankees in 1977. It was an obvious choice. Hunter was coming off five consecutive All-Star seasons, one of which featured a Cy Young Award. He was coming off ten consecutive seasons of 234 or more innings in a season. And, of course, he was the youngest pitcher in the modern era to throw a perfect game. Still relatively young at age 31, Hunter was the presumed staff ace for years to come.</p>
<p>Hunter won his Opening Day start, throwing seven shutout innings against the Milwaukee Brewers. But his 1977 season unfolded in a way that was far from the dominance that had long been expected of him. After that start on Opening Day, Hunter would not pitch again until May 5th; he pitched a complete game, but allowed five runs. His next start was even worse, with his defense stumbling behind him en route to a seven-run, 2 ⅓-inning catastrophe against the humble expansion Mariners. In his worst start of the season on June 17th, Hunter recorded only two outs while allowing four runs on four home runs to the Red Sox — an unthinkable outcome for a pitcher of his caliber and consistency.</p>
<p>The following season, Hunter would be diagnosed with diabetes during spring training, and arm issues began to plague him in earnest. But the evidence of his premature decline was already there in 1977. His 143 ⅓ innings pitched were his fewest since his rookie season, and his strikeout rate was the lowest of his career. The writing was on the wall.</p>
<p>And the decline was on full display on September 10th. After recording an out to start the game, Hunter gave up three consecutive hits — two doubles and a single — to put the Jays on top 2-0; after pitching around a single in the second, he gave up consecutive solo homers in the third to extend the Jays’ lead to 4-0. After opening the fourth with a walk, a groundout and an RBI single, Hunter was out of the game. His final line: 3 ⅓ innings pitched, seven hits, six earned runs — all allowed to an offense that averaged only 3.75 runs per game.</p>
<p>Hunter’s start accounted for just six of the 19 runs the Jays would eventually score, due to a combination of bad relief pitching and shaky defense on the Yankees’ part. If the Jays had faced Hunter perhaps even a season previous, this result would have been unconscionable.</p>
<h4><b>ROY HOWELL</b></h4>
<p>Roy Howell, though only 22 years old, was a disappointment to the Texas Rangers. Drafted fourth overall in 1972, he had yet to prove himself to be much more than an average hitter through two full seasons in the majors as the Rangers’ everyday third baseman. After starting the 1977 season 0-for-17, the Rangers felt that they’d seen enough. They traded him to the Jays in mid-May for Jim Mason and Steve Hargan — neither of whom were playing particularly well — in a deal that seemed very low-stakes for both parties involved. The change of scenery apparently did Howell a surprising amount of good: By the end of the month, his batting line had gone from .000/.105/.000 to .304/.378/.405.</p>
<p>Howell maintained a decent line through the rest of the season, hovering around the .280 mark for most of the summer. He was one of the Jays’ best hitters, certainly, but wouldn’t rank among the league’s best. His average began to climb back up towards .300 as September began, but the Jays simultaneously began one of the many headfirst slides that characterize a 54-win season. Going into the September 10th game, they had lost 12 out of their last 13, having scored only 14 runs in the entire month of September. It was not the optimal environment for any single player to have a breakout offensive performance.</p>
<p>But Howell, on that day, somehow put together one of the best single-game offensive performances in club history. After the game, he told reporters that the lingering hand injury had been bothering him so much that he had to make a conscious effort not to have an uppercut swing, for fear of causing himself even more pain. This makes his effort even more astonishing. In six plate appearances, Howell had two doubles, two home runs, and a single. He drove in nine of the Jays’ 19 runs and scored four, essentially forming a single-man wrecking crew. The combined efforts of five Yankee pitchers could only retire him once.</p>
<p>Howell himself seemed tickled by the absurdity of his good day. “Nine ribbies, that’s a month!” he said to reporters. In a single game, he had raised his batting average ten points.</p>
<p>1977 would end up being the best season of Howell’s career; though he was selected as an All-Star for a strong first half in 1978, he would never again put together such a solid performance and lost his everyday role in 1980. But his nine RBIs still stand as the Jays’ single-game franchise record — a memorable achievement in an otherwise unmemorable stretch of baseball.</p>
<hr />
<p>So what is the moral of this story? There isn’t one, really. It was just an odd confluence of variables , a strange blip in an otherwise predictably unpleasant season for the Jays. That’s the thing about baseball, even when you’re watching a bad team. You never know how they might surprise you.</p>
<p><strong>References</strong></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">“Jays drop Ken Reynolds, 3 pitchers still to go.” </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400">The Globe and Mail</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400">, April 1, 1977.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">“Mason, Hargan bring Jays Howell.” </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400">The Globe and Mail</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400">, May 10, 1977.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">“Mets Get 5 in Ninth To Win, 7-2.” </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400">New York Times</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400">, September 11, 1977</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Patton, Paul</span><span style="font-weight: 400">. “Rangers trouncing Jays&#8217; worst, for now.” </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400">The Globe and Mail</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400">, July 27, 1977.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">“Singer ponders surgery as Clancy makes debut.” </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400">The Globe and Mai</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400"><em>l</em>, July 27, 1977.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">“Yankees lose ground: Howell the hit man in Blue Jays&#8217; assault.” </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400">The Globe and Mail</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400">, September 12, 1977.</span></p>
<p>Game logs from <a href="retrosheet.org">Retrosheet</a>; player information from <a href="baseball-reference.com">Baseball Reference</a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>The Curious Case of Omar Linares</title>
		<link>http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2018/03/05/the-curious-case-of-omar-linares/</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 05 Mar 2018 14:10:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rachael McDaniel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Articles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/?p=15330</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The offseason of 1992-93 was a weird time for the Blue Jays. They had, obviously, just won a World Series, so things were on the whole looking pretty sunny. At the same time, they were losing many of the players who had made that World Series victory possible: Gone were Jimmy Key, Dave Winfield, Tom [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The offseason of 1992-93 was a weird time for the Blue Jays. They had, obviously, just won a World Series, so things were on the whole looking pretty sunny. At the same time, they were losing many of the players who had made that World Series victory possible: Gone were Jimmy Key, Dave Winfield, Tom Henke, and David Cone. For the Jays to repeat as World Series champions, they needed to add impact players to fill those newly-created gaps in their roster.</span></p>
<p>We all know about the notable players they did end up signing that offseason en route to their second victory in a row, namely Paul Molitor and Dave Stewart, both highly-regarded veterans by that point. But the Jays were also looking to make a different kind of splash in their lineup by signing the top amateur player in the world, Omar Linares—a 25-year-old Cuban third baseman, a perennial champion in international competition, heralded as a sure-fire major-league star if only he would defect.</p>
<p>The Jays, like most other teams, had been eyeing Omar Linares for a long time. The son of a notable Cuban ballplayer, Linares began playing for Cuba’s junior national team at the tender age of 14, advancing to the senior team at 17 after batting .511 with eight homers at the Junior World Cup. He proceeded to light up international competition every time he took the field: .467 in his senior debut at the Intercontinental Cup, .457 in his first World Cup, .520 at the Pan-Am Games in 1987. His defense at third was strong enough that pro scouts considered him capable of being a plus defender at shortstop. Articles from the time describe scouts “drooling” over Linares and his Cuban teammates, in the midst of an era of near-total Cuban domination in international baseball competition. One article claims that “at least half a dozen” teams had already tried to entice Linares into signing, despite the fact that he was only 19 years old and despite the embargo.</p>
<p>Linares wouldn’t bite, not even at the urging of the Cuban-American National Foundation, who appeared at the Pan-Am Games to pass out leaflets encouraging defection and at one point got into a “scuffle” with Cuban team officials in an attempt to come into closer contact with the players. “I have no interest in playing in the major leagues or for any team in the United States,” Linares told reporters at the Games.</p>
<p>For the Jays, this statement left enough ambiguity—they are, after all, not a team in the United States—that they continued to keep serious tabs on Linares. And after Kelly Gruber, their incumbent third baseman, was traded to the Angels for Luis Sojo in December of 1992, they began to think more seriously about scenarios in which they could lure Linares to Canada. Linares was perhaps even more impressive in 1992 than he had been in 1987: That season he had been the batting champion in both the Cuban National Series and the Selective Series, posting a cumulative .393 average with a .764 slugging percentage, and had led the Cuban team to an Olympic gold medal in Barcelona. Linares’ stock was as high as it had ever been, and the Jays now had third base conveniently empty.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">MLB, in accordance with American policy, strictly forbade teams having any contact whatsoever with individual Cuban players or with Cuban teams more generally. The Blue Jays felt they might have a loophole to exploit: the fact that they were a team located in Canada, owned by a Canadian company. Canada’s relationship with Cuba was a friendly one. There was nothing in Canadian law that would prevent the Jays from interacting with Linares, dealing with Cuban teams, or hypothetically signing him. The Jays front office, with these considerations in mind, began to formulate a plan: If they could convince Linares to play for the Jays, they could find their way around United States law by having him play </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">only </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">at the SkyDome. He would not be with the team during spring training; he would not go with the team on any road trips. Linares would be a legally bound Toronto-only player—an unprecedented circumstance in modern baseball history, if not in baseball history as a whole.  </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Reading about this now, the whole plan seems a little crazy. How valuable did the Jays think Linares was for them to go to all this trouble, just for the </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">possibility</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> that he would play for them only half the time? How would this plan work if the Jays were to play in the postseason against anyone other than the Expos? Would Linares simply have to sit and wait in Toronto while the Jays played in Game 7 of the World Series if that game were played in the United States? How could one player possibly be worth that much?</span></p>
<p>The consensus on Linares, though, was that he was indeed that valuable—that he would easily be the best player on any major league team. Orrin Freeman, the Marlins’ director of international scouting, said in 1993 that Linares “could hit 30 homers, steal 50 bases and be a Gold Glover,” and that he could do the same playing shortstop. “He could be the MVP here,” Freeman said. “There just aren’t players like that.” In another article, anonymous sources within the Jays organization are quoted as saying that Kelly Gruber “couldn’t hold Linares’s jockstrap,” and that Linares would be the Jays’ best player immediately if they were to sign him. “Not even Roberto Alomar is in his class,” the source said. If the Jays’ gambit were to pay off, then—and it was a big “if,” given Linares’ avowed intention not to play in the major leagues—they could potentially have the best player in baseball not only playing for their team, but legally unable to play for any other team. They would have no risk of losing him to free agency; no team would ever ask for him as part of a trade package.</p>
<p>Predictably, when the Jays brought this plan to MLB, it was immediately shot down. Both Jays management and the office of the Commissioner placed a ban on any discussion of the finer details of the Jays’ proposal and the specific reasons that it was denied. But one can assume two major rationales for the failure of the Jays’ plan. There was no way that the powers that be in baseball would allow the Jays to have such a competitive advantage over the 28 American teams—if this situation was permitted, the door would conceivably be open for other Cuban players with major-league aspirations to become Canada-only players, not just in Toronto but in Montreal. More importantly, one can’t imagine MLB risking any legal repercussions—or even just the slightest hint of legal tension—with the American government. While the Jays’ plan wasn’t illegal, it definitely wasn’t in the spirit of the American trade embargo.</p>
<p>And so the Jays’ creative ploy came to a fairly predictable conclusion. Not only were they disallowed from signing Linares to a Toronto-only deal, they had to provide MLB with assurances that they were not sending scouts to Cuba to evaluate Linares, or contacting him in any way. (I don’t think anyone really believed this—all the media reports at the time suggest that Linares was consistently being scouted by a number of teams.) The outcome might have been disappointing for the Jays, but the idea of signing a player who is legally obligated to only play in home games was always far-fetched.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">But there was yet another complicating factor in this situation—not a complicating factor that ended up impacting the Jays directly, but one that certainly affected the public discourse surrounding their attempts to sign Linares. In complying with MLB’s injunction not to engage with Cuban teams and not actively try to sign Linares, the Jays were technically acting contrary to </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Canadian </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">law. Federal legislation introduced in 1991 forbade Canadian businesses and American branch-plants in Canada from complying with American laws limiting their operations.</span></p>
<p>At the time news broke of the Jays’ failed designs on Linares, this legislation was recent enough to be fresh in people’s minds, and Canadians are always particularly sensitive to anything that suggests the encroachment of American interests in Canadian affairs. Editorials from the time, then, took perceived threat to Canadian sovereignty that the Jays’ acquiescence posed very seriously. “To Labatt Breweries, owners of the Toronto Blue Jays, the SkyDome is American soil where U.S. law overrides Canadian law,” one editorial says, before accusing the Jays of being traitors to Canada in some way: “A real Canadian baseball team, of course, would be more interested in getting the best players than in toadying to America’s Cold War paranoia.”The piece closes with a warning to consider “where the team’s loyalties truly lie” before choosing to root for them in the upcoming season. Another editorial calls MLB’s opposition to the Jays’ plan “offensive to Canadian sovereignty,” and yet another notes that “the fact the Blue Jays acquiesced to MLB’s decision means the team’s directors could be liable to up to five years in prison.” The small drama playing out between a Canadian baseball team trying to exploit the laws of their home country for competitive advantage became a venue for the ongoing, larger drama of Canadian sovereignty and American influence.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, obviously, nothing came of any of this. Linares continued to be legendarily great in Cuba for another decade before closing out his playing career in Japan. He was always openly devoted to the Cuban national baseball program, and it seems highly unlikely that he would have agreed to the deal the Jays wanted to make with him. The Jays’ top brass didn’t go to prison for their apparent violation of Canadian economic policy, and the team went on to win the 1993 World Series without Linares’ help. I don’t think this incident is widely remembered, and if it is, I doubt it is remembered as an important moment in the history of Canadian sovereignty. It’s more of an oddity, one of the many instances of baseball teams trying their level best to exploit whatever they can to get an edge on the competition, and a reminder of the still-contentious relationship between the United States and Cuba—one that often requires Cuban baseball players to risk their lives in order to play in the major leagues.</p>
<p><em>Lead Photo © Jonathan Dyer-USA TODAY Sports</em></p>
<hr />
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>References</strong></p>
<p>Bjarkman, Peter C. &#8220;Omar Linares.&#8221; <em>Society for American Baseball Research, </em>sabr.org/bioprojec/person/ab3866fa (accessed March 4, 2018).</p>
<p>&#8220;Cuban Player Ban: Jays watch White House signals.&#8221; <i>Ottawa Citizen</i>, February 5, 1993.</p>
<p>Davidson, James. &#8220;Pro scouts drooling at Cubans.&#8221; <em>Globe and Mail</em>, August 12, 1987.</p>
<p>Hayes, Sean. &#8220;Canada becoming U.S. branch-plant.&#8221; <em>Toronto Star</em>, July 5, 1993.</p>
<p>Kernaghan, John. &#8220;Time for an end to baseball&#8217;s Cold War.&#8221; <em>Hamilton Spectator</em>, July 12, 1993.</p>
<p>Le Batard, Dan. &#8220;Blue Jays would be happy with part-time Cuban star.&#8221; <em>Edmonton Journal</em>, January 25, 1993.</p>
<p>McAuley, Tony, and Jack Spearman. &#8220;INVITE CUBANS TO PLAY IN CANADA.&#8221; <em>Calgary Herald, </em>February 7, 1993.</p>
<p>Todd, Dave. &#8220;Are the Toronto Blue Jays, last year&#8217;s&#8230;&#8221; <em>CanWest News</em>, February 3, 1993.</p>
<p>York, Marty. &#8220;Jays try to acquire Cuban third baseman.&#8221; <em>Globe and Mail</em>, January 27, 1993.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>An Offseason in Alienation (or, Memories of September 12)</title>
		<link>http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2018/01/31/an-offseason-in-alienation-or-memories-of-september-12/</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 01 Feb 2018 03:54:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rachael McDaniel]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/?p=15044</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Right before the winter began, my brother bought one of those big rubber tees to practice with. You know the ones: black, with a plate-shaped stand at the bottom and an adjustable pole sticking upwards. I think he’s probably used it once since then. The weather, as one could have expected, has not really been [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Right before the winter began, my brother bought one of those big rubber tees to practice with. You know the ones: black, with a plate-shaped stand at the bottom and an adjustable pole sticking upwards. I think he’s probably used it once since then. The weather, as one could have expected, has not really been conducive to going out and taking swings and our local diamonds are in pretty bad condition. My brother’s been more occupied with cross country season and basketball season and the lead-up to the Super Bowl than with thoughts of what baseball lies ahead. So the tee has remained sitting on our balcony, tucked into a corner, collecting various water-related stains, far removed from the purpose for which it was created. </span></p>
<p>I see that tee every day, and every day I decide that I’m going to use it. It was expensive, for what it is, and it seems such a waste to let it go untouched for so long. I envision myself hauling it, a bat in my other hand and a bag of baseballs over my shoulder, down to one of the parks against whose fences I used to pretend I could pitch. I can see myself standing out there in the rain with muddy feet and cold hands and just swinging for the pure satisfaction of it. I can’t even remember the last time I hit off a tee. It must have been ten years ago, at least.</p>
<p>Every day I decide that I’m going to do this—that this is what I need to do. Every day I don’t do it. Because the longer I look at the tee, the more my mundane batting-practice fantasy strikes me as ridiculous. I picture myself, an absurd and obviously unathletic 20-year-old, standing alone at a park meant for children, using a bat belonging to a child, in the rain, in January, with no possible justification for being there outside a vague aching desire for a long-distant feeling of wholeness. Stinging arms, stinging hands. Bat on ball. What would the people walking by think of me? The parents with their kids, the passing dog-walkers? What if someone who actually knew what they were doing were to see me?</p>
<p>So I stay inside, reading the news on Twitter. The tee remains in the same place.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p>This is the first offseason I’ve ever really been engaged in. By “engaged” I mean paying devoted attention to market and transaction news outside of what is immediately relevant to my rooting interests. That the great hot-stove freezing of 2017—18 is my first real experience with this side of baseball strikes me as profoundly unlucky. I was already prone to feeling depressed and listless; I can’t think of much worse for those tendencies than subjecting myself, day in and day out, to the sadness of fans whose teams are paring themselves down beyond nothing, to the anger of those railing against the injustice of the system, to the endless nebulous speculation, to everyone having a strong opinion on everything, all the time. I read it all out of some feeling of professional obligation, in case I have to write about any of it at some point. All the information bounces around the walls of my skull uselessly.</p>
<p>I know I’m never going to write about any of this. I am not particularly suited to analyzing the great business of baseball. I am interested in very narrow, particular stories, the baseball equivalent of Jane Austen’s two inches of ivory. That two inches has seemed awfully thin lately. I feel like I’m running out of space.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p>Back in the middle of September, the Jays played a game against the Orioles at home. Both teams were pretty squarely out of contention at that point, and it was a weeknight, and the seats were noticeably empty at the Rogers Centre.</p>
<p>I watched, intermittently looking up from my knitting, as Joe Biagini spun an excellent, remarkably efficient start. I was pleased to see him bounce back from an absolute meltdown in his previous outing in Boston, and I was pleased that the game was moving along at a brisk pace. It was just a lovely kind of game to watch in September when your team is out of it: solid, unremarkable, easing one into the inevitable upcoming stress of following the postseason.</p>
<p>The Jays had a 1—0  lead for most of the proceedings, until Biagini gave up two quick runs—one in the seventh, one in the eighth—leaving the Jays down by one with Zach Britton coming in to close. At that point I had to leave my post in front of the screen and head out to a volunteer orientation session at the local seniors’ activity center. I wasn’t overly disappointed to leave the game behind. The outcome seemed pretty much a done deal, especially since the Jays had the bottom of their batting order coming up in the ninth. It had been a good game. That was enough for me.</p>
<p>I walked over to the seniors’ center, filled out all the forms, and as I stood in the atrium absently listening to the coordinator talk about the various responsibilities you could take on as a volunteer, I heard, faintly, the familiar dulcet tones of Buck Martinez. I looked over to my left. Sure enough, over in the TV area, an elderly man was watching the game I had recently left behind. It was now the bottom of the ninth. The man was watching intently, completely alone in the arrangement of chairs; at this hour in the evening, when there were no events happening, the seniors’ center was usually not very busy. The Jays, somehow, had men on base, were threatening to pull off a comeback.</p>
<p>I watched, in the corner of my eye, both the game on the screen and the elderly man’s engrossed expression. He had his hands folded under his face. I hoped that the volunteer coordinator wouldn’t lead me to some other part of the building before the game ended.</p>
<p>When Richard Ureña hit a single to drive in the winning run for the Jays, his first career walk-off, the man beamed. He clapped his hands softly and laughed to himself. He glanced over in my direction. He saw my expression, a mirror of his, and the Jays hat on my head, and his smile got even bigger.</p>
<p>The other day, amid my feelings of baseball alienation, I decided to rewatch that game. It felt just as refreshing, just as comforting, watching it in January as it did back in September. I thought it might be a nice game to write about, to warm the winter up a bit. I got as far as the top of the ninth before my dad walked into the room, picked up the remote and switched it off. I said that there was only one inning left. He got mad and told me I was a headcase. I couldn&#8217;t argue that. I wrote about something else.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p>I am thinking of going to a Blue Jays home game sometime soon. At the end of April, maybe, or in May. I have attended two professional baseball venues in my life: Nat Bailey Stadium, the home of the short season Vancouver Canadians, and Safeco Field, the only major-league stadium nearby enough that I have been able to afford a visit. I have been saving money for as long as I have been able to, hoping to go to Toronto and see my team as a member of the home crowd, and I finally have enough.</p>
<p>I am afraid that this might seem foolish. Not just to others, but to myself. After spending so long living so frugally, there is a part of me that believes using money to do something so purely for my own entertainment and enjoyment will come back to bite me. I have apocalyptic visions of myself a year from now, penniless, cursing my own reckless spending. I reconsider the whole idea.</p>
<p>Then I think about how nice it would be to see some small, relatively commonplace moment, like that Ureña walk-off single, and to look around, and share that understanding with a whole stadium full of people. To share any baseball with anyone at all, really. Sounds and smells and feelings. I keep reading the news, rootless, and it keeps hurting my head. I think I might go after all. I think I might need to.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p>I checked the weather forecast for this week. Rain every day. The week after that, too, apparently. And then—baseball. It’ll still be raining, obviously. But pitchers and catchers will report, and then spring training will start, and then the regular season. The municipality will send out grounds crews and clean up the diamonds at the parks, and then there’ll be kids out there playing Little League. My brother will finally use his tee.</p>
<p>I look at it, standing out there on the balcony. It’s dark and cold. Maybe I should go take some hacks while I still can.</p>
<p><em>Lead Photo © Kevin Sousa-USA TODAY Sports</em></p>
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		<title>Doug Ault and the Triumph of Joy</title>
		<link>http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2018/01/11/doug-ault-and-the-triumph-of-joy/</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Jan 2018 11:08:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rachael McDaniel]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/?p=14859</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[One of my favorite parts of being a baseball fan is the sheer breadth of the history that can be learned, the staggering number of huge immortal moments and small, glittering fun facts that come with being a fan of any team. Even a relatively young team like the Jays has magic waiting to be [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="font-weight: 400">One of my favorite parts of being a baseball fan is the sheer breadth of the history that can be learned, the staggering number of huge immortal moments and small, glittering fun facts that come with being a fan of any team. Even a relatively young team like the Jays has magic waiting to be discovered in its four-decade history, and it is a source of seemingly inexhaustible joy to burrow into this magic, reliving it through the pieces of it that remain—the fondly-recalled stories, the grainy video clips, the breathless newspaper headlines. </span></p>
<p>I realized recently that the very beginnings of the Blue Jays as a franchise were a significant gap in my knowledge.When I’ve looked into the team’s past it was usually into more successful years: the dominant teams of the 80s, the World Series champions of the 90s. The predictable but still-depressing struggles of an expansion team—carving out a space and an identity for itself, establishing a presence in a league, a sport, a city—were less interesting to me. I am not particularly disposed, I guess, to read about my team being terrible, especially when they aren’t any good right now.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">But it didn’t take much digging for me to find out that my neglect of the Jays’ earliest games had caused me to completely overlook one of the team’s greatest moments. I had never heard about that first game in April 1977, the Zamboni on the field, the epic traffic jam, the crowds screaming because they wanted beer, screaming because it was snowing like hell and they were freezing out there in the bleachers, and then screaming because they won, their team had won, the team that hadn’t </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">really </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">been theirs before but was now. I had never heard about the two home runs in two at bats. I had never heard about Doug Ault.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p>Doug Ault loved baseball. This is the main thing I want you to know about him. He loved baseball first because it was the favorite sport of his older sister Brenda, the eldest child and primary caretaker in their troubled household. Seven years his senior, Brenda would spirit Doug away from their house to a local park, toting him on the back of her bike. They just played catch in the early days; as Doug got older and as his love of baseball grew, Brenda challenged him. She caught his pitching, shagged his fly balls, hit grounders at him to keep his glove sharp. When he began to play, she came to all his games; when he got down on himself, she encouraged him, reminded him of how talented he was.</p>
<p>Ault was talented. He was the star pitcher at his high school. He led his community college team from both sides of the ball, sending them to the National Junior College World Series. When he transferred to Texas Tech, he set a career batting record with a .418 average; in his senior year, his average was an absurd .475. For two summers in a row, he went straight from Texas to Alaska when the season ended, playing collegiate ball in Anchorage. He won a championship there, too.</p>
<p>He was undrafted out of college, though, which was perhaps surprising given all the success he’d had in his collegiate career. Maybe it was his limited defensive ability that made him an unattractive pick; maybe it was something about his swing that gave scouts pause, despite the gaudy numbers. He had, after all, displayed limited power up until his senior season.</p>
<p>Ault eventually signed as a free agent with the Texas Rangers. He spent four seasons in their system, his numbers getting better and better; in 1976 he played in nine games with the major league team in September, finishing with a .300 average in 21 plate appearances. The Rangers decided that they had better options at first base, leaving him unprotected in the upcoming expansion draft; the nascent Toronto Blue Jays selected him with the 32nd pick, far from guaranteeing him a spot in starting lineup.</p>
<p>Instead of being discouraged, Ault relished the opportunity to forge a new identity with this new team. “The odds are against me. I love it,” he said to a reporter at spring training. “To me it’s better if you have to compete and win the job.” Ault, at the time, had six other players competing for the starting role at first base. His odds weren’t very good. But he ended up on that brand-new team—batting third, no less. And in his very first at-bat, in the freezing snow on April 7, 1977, he became a legend.</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JwT2PsvNmqQ" width="500" height="286" frameborder="0" ></iframe></p>
<p><strong><strong> </strong></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center"><span style="font-weight: 400">***</span></p>
<p>Here is how my mind works when I do something good—when I achieve something that I am proud of. There is a brief rush of elation. I accept praise. I feel happy. Then I begin to search for reasons not to be happy, because if my performance was imperfect I am not allowed to feel good about it. (My performance is always imperfect. I am a human being.) From there, the self-hatred spirals. I am repulsed by my own pride, daring to feel good about an effort so flawed. It is clear, I reason, that I am some kind of horrible narcissist, inflating my own abilities in order to feel better about myself. I am a bad person. The voices of others telling me that I’ve done well become reminders that I don’t deserve any of it, that I am a charlatan fooling people into caring about me. And then, finally, a realization: this is the best thing I have ever done, the best thing that I will ever be able to do, and it is not nearly enough. It will never be enough.</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><strong><strong> </strong></strong>***</p>
<p>Doug Ault was charismatic and cheerful. He was handsome, and he spoke well, and he had a nice voice. He was always smiling. Within weeks of that momentous first game he had an unofficial and unauthorized fan club out in the bleachers at Exhibition Stadium, a group consisting mostly of teenage girls, and when games were delayed due to weather (as they often were in those days) he would cross over from his position on the infield, stand by the fence and sign autographs. They loved him. They thought he was the best. But Ault was less taken in by his own good qualities. His propensity to get down on himself was exaggerated by the fame he was suddenly surrounded by, the expectations of greatness.</p>
<p>Ault batted .342 in April. The rest of the season was less forgiving. His poor defense at first base turned him into a liability, as he committed 16 errors over the course of the season; he finished with a slash line of .245/.310/.382. In the context of a 54-win expansion team in its first season, these numbers are far from unforgivable, but Ault wasn’t disposed to think of the context of the team. He thought of his failure to measure up to his own standards. For an entire decade, he’d been fantastic at baseball, if sometimes reluctant to believe it; he had worked hard, battled the doubt, found a place for himself on a new team in a new country, and immediately inscribed himself in that team’s history books. He had given thousands of fans the best day of their lives. But it wasn’t nearly enough. It could never be enough.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The ever-insightful Alison Gordon, in the chapter of her book </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Foul Balls! </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">entitled “The Players,” had this to say about how baseball players react to failure: &#8220;For men not encouraged to define themselves by anything but their talents, failure can be emotionally devastating.&#8221; </span>Ault was no exception to this. Every small mistake, every error or strikeout, weighed on his mind; the heavier he felt, the worse he performed, and thus the cycle continued. He lost his starting job in spring training of 1978. By the end of the season he was a third-stringer, on the bench most of the time, unable to even redeem himself on the field. “It’s been a tough year for me,” he told reporters. “I’d never been on the bench before and I let it bother me. It took me a long time to adjust.”</p>
<p>Others seemed to find his profession of internal hardship difficult to believe. After all, he was always so affable, so quick to smile. He was only two years removed from being Toronto’s golden hero, driving around town in a car with his name written on it. He had no right to be depressed. “Doug Ault is such a cheerful, easy-going guy,” reads the lede to the interview where he discusses his feelings of depression and inadequacy, “it&#8217;s hard to imagine him letting anything get him down.”</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><strong><strong> </strong></strong>***</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Here is another thing I want you to know about Doug Ault. In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that MLB had to allow women reporters into the clubhouse. It was an earth-shaking move as far as the rights of women in sports journalism went. It was also, by and large, rather unpopular with the players. They were men, raised in the macho culture of athletics, and it was the 70s. So the misogyny that saturated the reporting and interviewing surrounding this event was unsurprising. A September 1978 </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Globe and Mail</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> article about the first day women were allowed into the Yankees clubhouse opens with this line: “Women invaded the New York Yankee clubhouse last night but found no naked athletes.”</span></p>
<p>By my count, there are 11 players, managers and coaches interviewed in the piece, and almost every single one of them—even the ones who weren’t opposed to the opening of the clubhouse doors—had something demeaning to say. Yankees manager Bob Lemon said that “there were females in here, and I hope they were ladies.” Pitcher Ron Guidry, whose long-suffering shrug one can only imagine, said with an air of resignation: “They’re into everything else, they might as well come here.” Blue Jay Joe Coleman claimed that the only players who were in favor of opening the clubhouse to women were “the single guys on the team.”</p>
<p>There was only one solitary player who didn’t have any snide comments to make. When asked for his opinion, Doug Ault said this: “I met a few women sports writers in my time, and they were damn good.”</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><strong><strong> </strong></strong>***</p>
<p>The Jays sent Ault down to triple-A Syracuse just after the end of the 1978 season. It was massive blow to him. He did his best to recover over the offseason. He played winter league ball in Venezuela, batting over .300 and leading the team to their first playoff appearance since 1968. Three weeks before the season was to start, he got married, too, hoping to bring the happy honeymoon vibes into spring training with the Chiefs. He was certain that he would be able to make the major league team again. He just had to stop pressing. He just had to stop letting the disappointment get to him.</p>
<p>But triple-A was even more of a struggle for Ault than being the forgotten man on the bench. He batted only .200 through the first three months of the season. His defensive waywardness led the Chiefs to move him out to a corner outfield position.</p>
<p>In  June, Ault spoke to reporters candidly about how hard it was for him to be in the minors, how hard he was trying not to fail anymore, to live up to what he believed himself capable of. He was always brutally aware of what he was doing wrong, but the awareness of it seemed only to make the problem harder to fix. “My average stinks,” he said. “The worst thing you can do is press. That’s what I started doing here. I got to the point where I couldn’t have hit myself with the bat, much less a baseball.” It is a terrible feeling when the thing you love most in the world becomes your greatest source of anguish.</p>
<p>“We’re trying for a baby,” Ault told reporters when asked about his still-recent marriage. “But I’m finding that’s harder than I thought it would be, too.”</p>
<p>At an Italian restaurant far away from the Jays in Toronto or Ault in Syracuse, all the way down in Dunedin, they still had a poster up: a signed picture of Ault hitting that home run in 1977, framed in a place of honor.</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><strong><strong> </strong></strong>***</p>
<p>I am about to say something that will sound extremely foolish to many of you, but here is my embarrassing truth: baseball is the best antidote to suicidal thoughts that I’ve ever had. I’ve been on ten different kinds of medications; I’ve worked out, relaxed, meditated, made music, done writing, talked to people, not talked to people, closed myself off from love and opened myself up to it. I’ve gone to work and I’ve gone to school and I’ve stopped going to work and I’ve stopped going to school. Nothing helped. Working out made me manic; relaxing made me bored and agitated. School and work felt pointless and draining; not being at school and work made me feel like a failure. Art hurts, and isolation is torturous. And when you connect with people, when you form mutually caring relationships, it is shockingly easy to believe that the right thing to do if you really love them is to rid them of the burden that you are and always will be. When you feel yourself to be nothing but a dark pit into which good things fall, it seems not just the right choice, but the morally imperative choice. The only choice. The only way to redeem yourself.</p>
<p>Baseball helps. I can’t articulate exactly why. It’s just always there when I need it. I don’t know what I would do if I felt like I didn’t have baseball anymore.</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><strong><strong> </strong></strong>***</p>
<p>By the beginning of the 1980 season, Doug Ault was leaving his baseball fate in the hands of God. If God was willing, he told reporters, he would play for the Blue Jays again. If God was willing, it would surely happen. It was far from the confidence he had expressed in 1977, when all he had experienced was success, when baseball seemed fresh and exciting and full of possibilities.</p>
<p>Ault had once again gone to Venezuela over the winter, had once again put up fantastic numbers. While there, though, he had received some terrible news in quick succession. His wife’s grandmother was sick and was on the point of death. And his sister Brenda, who had given baseball to him, and who had recently been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis around when he had been sent down to Syracuse, was also gravely ill.</p>
<p>He left Venezuela. He went back to Texas, took a job at a construction site, and looked after his family. &#8221;With God&#8217;s help, I&#8217;ll get back up there,&#8221; Ault said of his major-league aspirations. He had no such faith in himself.</p>
<p>“I really blew it mentally,” he told the reporters. This is something I noticed about Ault: he rarely spoke about his accomplishments, but talked at length and openly about his failures. “But I’ll be there. I’ll come as many years as they bring me.”</p>
<p>Ault played his last games in the major leagues in 1980. A spate of injuries led to his callup midseason; he played in 64 games, ten more than he had in 1978, but his performance was even worse than in that disappointing year. He slashed .194/.273/.306 in 161 plate appearances. The Jays released him at the end of the season.</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><strong><strong> </strong></strong>***</p>
<p>Despite all of this, Ault was still at his happiest when he was on a diamond. He still wanted nothing more than to play and be successful. After the Jays released him, he took a contract in Japan, hoping to achieve some of the success that he’d experienced the first time he’d moved to a different country. He had a great season there, posting an average over .300. But he returned to North America after the season was over. There was something about the way his team in Japan was run that grated on him—that he felt was morally opposed to the spirit of baseball.</p>
<p>“It was the way they acted if somebody made an error,” he said. “The manager would come running out and pull the player off the field right there and then. They never did it to me, but I could see what it did to the morale of the team.”</p>
<p>His principles held, too, when he began the next season playing in Mexico. Ault led a large group of players on his team, the Tigers of Mexico City, in a mutiny against their manager, whose negative attitude Ault found repulsive. “He just couldn’t get along with anybody.”</p>
<p>A few weeks later, Ault had to leave Mexico, too: he got very sick, losing too much weight to continue playing. He returned to North America and decided to try his hand at managing. The Jays offered him a job as a playing coach in Syracuse. He expressed gratitude to the organization for extending him another opportunity, and he was particularly excited to work with a young shortstop named Tony Fernandez. “He’s the best prospect I’ve seen in ages.”</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><strong><strong> </strong></strong>***</p>
<p>Ault had a gift for coaching and managing, for working with the insecurities of young players. He was given the job of managing the Jays’ high-A team in Kinston for two seasons before he was promoted to be the manager of Syracuse, the team on which he had spent such miserable years. The negative feelings didn’t seem to carry over. He led the team to a championship in his first season in 1985, winning a Manager of the Year award.</p>
<p>In an article from the middle of that championship season, Ault talks about the difficulties in motivating players at the triple-A level—both the ones on their way down, bitter and trying desperately to remain in professional baseball, and the ones on their way up, who find themselves blocked from the major-league team despite exceptional performances. “You just hope they have respect for you that they’ll play hard just the same.” It was what Ault expected of himself, too: he found himself “in the same boat,” blocked from a major-league managing position by the utterly immovable Bobby Cox. The players Ault worked with on that team included a frustrated, incredibly talented young reliever by the name of Tom Henke, who was almost ready to leave the Jays organization entirely.</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><strong><strong> </strong></strong>***</p>
<p>Ault never realized his dream of managing the big-league Jays. After his second season with Syracuse, in which the team finished below .500, he was reassigned to manage the Dunedin Jays. The front office said that they believed he worked better with younger players; Ault viewed it as a demotion, another frustrating step backwards. Still, he stayed with the organization. He stayed through yet another demotion, down to low-A St. Catharines, where he worked with the only all-women front office in baseball history. He even accepted an assignment to manage the Jays’ affiliate team in Australia in 1992.</p>
<p>By this point, Ault’s frustration with his situation was becoming more pronounced. Before going to Australia, he went through a painful divorce; while in Australia, he was fined $6,000 for refusing to take the field one day. The field conditions, he said, muddied and slippery, were too dangerous. He could not allow his players, in good conscience, to take the field and risk injury.</p>
<p>The Jays did not take such a noble view of the situation. Upon Ault’s return to North America, he was demoted yet again, this time to the GCL. And at the end of the 1994 season, he was fired. It was the last job he would ever hold in the organization. “I wouldn&#8217;t call it mutual but he understood what we were doing,&#8221; said then-GM Gord Ash.</p>
<p>Ault, for his part, said this of the Jays: &#8220;I don&#8217;t care if they came in and beat me with a club. I&#8217;d never say anything bad about them.”</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><strong><strong> </strong></strong>***</p>
<p>Doug Ault, for all the sorrow that he’d experienced during his tenure with the Jays, loved the team, the fans, the organization. He became a fixture at alumni events. He threw out first pitches, appeared at fundraisers, showed up in Dunedin to watch spring training games, all decked out in Jays gear. He was still charming, still had the easy smile. He got married again. He went into car sales. The legend of April 7, 1977 became ever more distant, until there were adult Jays fans who hadn’t been alive to witness it.</p>
<p>Doug Ault loved the Jays because the Jays had loved him. Whenever he was interviewed, so much less frequently than he once was, it was the love he would talk about, the happiness he’d had in those good years, the sound of cheers shaking Exhibition Stadium, the clapping from a million numbing fingers, the snow falling on 44,000 heads. “Standing in the outfield, in a blizzard, amid 46,000 freezing fans,&#8221; he said in 2001, in that warm, engaging voice of his, &#8220;I thought, these have to be the best fans in baseball.&#8221;</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><strong><strong> </strong></strong>***</p>
<p>Doug Ault committed suicide in 2004. This is the first thing you will find out about him if you search his name on Google. You will find countless obituaries and post-mortems, documenting his “rise and fall.” That was the narrative that circulated in 2004. I am not going to write about any of that. I think they are wrong. I think they are missing the point.</p>
<p>There is a really strange thing that the public does when they think about suicide victims. I think it’s a kind of lack of understanding of what life is like when you feel like the only right choice is to stop being alive. People act like there was a time when it was easy, and then, all of a sudden, it was hard, too hard to handle. Sliding from the top of the mountain to the bottom until you hit the ground. Thud. The end. How tragic.</p>
<p>People don’t realize that the tragedy of suicide is not a tragedy of descent. The ending is tragic, but the life is not: the life, however long it was, is a shining document of victory. Every day lived a marvelous, impossible transcendence of hope over despair. I read Doug Ault’s interviews, every single one of them that I could find, dozens upon dozens, and every word he said about how he felt like a failure, how he got down on himself, was achingly familiar. I marveled at how he was able to achieve all that he did. Because I put myself into a coma at 17, having done absolutely nothing, and I only survived due to sheer luck. Doug Ault knew the darkness, and he lived to age 54. He had become one of the best people in the world at his chosen skill. He had helped hundreds of others master it. He was a kind, easy-going person. He loved his family, and he loved baseball.</p>
<p>Doug Ault’s life was not a tragedy. It was not a rise and fall. It was a life in which joy triumphed, day after day after day, until the one day that it didn&#8217;t.</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><strong><strong> </strong></strong>***</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fiKkrlTYwQM" width="500" height="286" frameborder="0" ></iframe></p>
<p>Even though this first game and the legends that surround it are familiar to me by now, I still can’t believe how wonderful it all is, how utterly perfect. Perfect that a baseball team based in Toronto would play its first game in a snowstorm. That the bleachers at Exhibition Stadium were packed with people shouting for beer, who mistook tape rolls in pockets for hockey pucks. That the first two Jays batters ever struck out, barely able to grip their bats with cold, and that with two out and nobody on, boos raining down from the disappointed and cold-fingered masses, with the tension rising and the pillars of the stadium shaking with the noise of expectation, a 26-year-old rookie, a no-name nobody, sent a pitch into the left-field seats. The Blue Jays had their first hit, their first home run, their first hero. He homered again, in his second at-bat, and the Jays won 9-5. The fans went home happy, already bonded to the team by this shared unforgettable experience. When they thought about the Blue Jays, no matter how many years in the future, they would eventually come back to this.</p>
<p>Ault beams as he narrates the story of that day, and though he remembers the fame that came after with some smiling self-deprecation, you can see the pride and elation that still came with the remembrance of that day when everything just worked out so beautifully.</p>
<p>I watched this video on a dull, ugly, baseball-less January day over forty years after the fact, a day where I once again became overwhelmed by that pull toward nothingness. It made me happy, too.  Even though I wasn’t even close to being there. Even though I’ve never been to Toronto, even though the only connection between those Jays and the ones I have loved is a name, a logo, a mirage of continuity. It’s that magical quality of loving baseball—the nonsensical immediacy of a joy shared long ago, by a baseball player you never knew.</p>
<p><strong><strong> </strong></strong>I am grateful. I am so grateful that Doug Ault shared this joy with me.</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><strong><strong> </strong></strong>***</p>
<p><strong><strong> </strong></strong>There is a comment on the video from a user named Josh Ault, left in 2013, nine years after Doug Ault’s death.</p>
<p><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/01/Screenshot-2018-01-07-at-22.42.37.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-14862" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/01/Screenshot-2018-01-07-at-22.42.37.png" alt="Screenshot 2018-01-07 at 22.42.37" width="845" height="157" /></a></p>
<p><em>Lead Photo: Jason Getz-USA TODAY Sports</em></p>
<hr />
<p><strong>References</strong></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small">Abel, Allen. “Jays&#8217; first hero hopes to return.” <i><span style="font-weight: 400">Globe and Mail (Toronto)</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">, March 21, 1980.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-weight: 400">Aitken, Kathi. “Blue Jays caravan pulls into town.” </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Spectator (Hamilton</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">), February 17th, 2001.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-weight: 400">Byers, Jim. “Ault, Jays part on friendly terms.”  </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">The Record (Kitchener)</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">, September 28, 1994.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-weight: 400">Campbell, Neil. “Slugger&#8217;s friends say he wants to come back: Jays block A&#8217;s bid to sell Carty.” </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Globe and Mail</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">, September 1, 1978.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-weight: 400">Davidson, James. “Jay hopefuls losing patience.” </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Globe and Mail</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">, June 8, 1985.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-weight: 400">“Doug Ault.” Baseball Reference. </span><a href="https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/a/aultdo01.shtml"><span style="font-weight: 400">https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/a/aultdo01.shtml</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400"> (accessed January 8, 2018)</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-weight: 400">Elderkin, Phil. “Land of the Rising Sun — and rising baseball ability.” </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Christian Science Monitor (Boston)</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">, March 23, 1981.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-weight: 400">Gordon, Alison. </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Foul Balls: Five Years in the American League. </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">Toronto: Mclelland and Stewart, 1984.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-weight: 400">Hickey, Trisha. “25th Blue Jays luncheon: Carlos and the boys boost annual Variety fundraiser.” </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">National Post (Don Mills), </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">June 16, 2001.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-weight: 400">“Jays assign Ault, Iorg to Syracuse.”</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Globe and Mail, </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">November 16, 1978.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-weight: 400">“Jays&#8217; opening day hero fined $6,000 in Aussie league.”</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Kitchener-Waterloo Record</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">, December 9, 1992.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-weight: 400">“My average stinks, says .200 Ault.” </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Globe and Mail</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">, June 30, 1979.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-weight: 400">Patton, Paul. “Ault is happiest when playing ball.” </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Globe and Mail, </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">June 29, 1982.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-weight: 400">Patton, Paul. “Chiefs await the call of Blue Jay big time.”</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Globe and Mail</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">, August 10, 1983.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-weight: 400">Patton, Paul. “The insider’s baseball: Tribe&#8217;s Cruz has hefty problem.” </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Globe and Mail, </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">March 17, 1979.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-weight: 400">Patton, Paul. “Minors no fun for star of &#8217;77 opener.” </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Globe and Mail</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">, March 29, 1979.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-weight: 400">“Players make best of it: Women in Yank clubhouse but only Yogi fled for safety.” </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Globe and Mail, </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">September 27, 1978.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><span style="font-weight: 400">Skelton, David E. “Doug Ault.” Society for American Baseball Research. </span><a href="http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/9e0451ed"><span style="font-weight: 400">http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/9e0451ed</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400"> (accessed January 8, 2017)</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><strong><span style="font-weight: 400">Smith, Veranda. “Doug Ault is enthusiastic about fighting for a job on the Blue Jays.” </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">St. Petersburg Times, </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">March 15, 1977.</span></strong></span></p>
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		<title>Josephang Bernhardt: The Prospect who Changed International Free Agency</title>
		<link>http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2017/12/22/josephang-bernhardt-the-prospect-who-changed-international-free-agency/</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Dec 2017 10:25:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rachael McDaniel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Articles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/?p=14709</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As the Jays continue to do a whole lot of nothing this offseason, seemingly content to watch the Angels add difference-making players every two days, I’ve found myself looking in my idleness at previous Jays seasons. I was, after all, not around for most of them. Lately, I’ve been considering the 1997 Blue Jays season [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="font-weight: 400">As the Jays continue to do a whole lot of nothing this offseason, seemingly content to watch the Angels add difference-making players every two days, I’ve found myself looking in my idleness at previous Jays seasons. I was, after all, not around for most of them. Lately, I’ve been considering the 1997 Blue Jays season quite closely.</span></p>
<p>There are a few things that interest me about 1997. For starters, it was the year I was born, but it was also a season that in many respects was quite similar to the year the Blue Jays just had in 2017. Both teams finished 76-86, well out of division contention; both had a disproportionate amount of their value come from aging players while being simultaneously burdened by the underperformance of former stars. Both teams were also immensely disappointing—and therein lies the difference between the two. The 2017 Jays were underwhelming, sure, but they had nowhere near the kind of offseason hype that the 1997 Jays had. The 2017 Jays didn’t sign Roger Clemens while he was at his superhuman peak. They didn’t trade for two All-Star position players. And they certainly didn’t sign a contract that was, to that point, several orders of magnitude larger than the previous largest contract given to a Dominican prospect.</p>
<p>The beneficiary of this contract was 16-year-old Josephang Bernhardt, a Dominican Scott Boras client with a family baseball pedigree, and a name I had never heard before I started researching the 1997 Jays. The more I read, the more I was baffled as to how he could have flown so far under my radar. He was a record-breaker, the setter of a new precedent, a stunning talent who at 16 had already been the subject of contractual controversy. Bernhardt drew serious—even favorable—comparisons to Alex Rodriguez, and his signing was seen as not only a massive coup for the Jays, but a watershed moment in the always-contentious business of international prospect signings.</p>
<p>And yet, in 2017, I had never heard of him. He doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. He hadn’t been mentioned in a North American news publication since the year 2000. I set out to discover how that was possible.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p>Josephang Bernhardt was first the subject of media coverage at the age of 15, though for less than celebratory reasons: the nascent Tampa Bay Devil Rays organization, yet to play their inaugural season, were found to have signed the six-foot-one teenager from San Pedro de Macoris illegally—before he had reached the league-mandated signing-age cutoff of 16. By the time the league ruled on his case, Bernhardt had even attended the Devil Rays’ instructional camp; after the ruse had been discovered, he was once again available for signing, sparking a multiple-team bidding war that would last for months.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Such incidences as this were hardly anomalous in Major League Baseball’s contentious history of dealing with teenage prospects in the Caribbean and in South and Central America. In his essay “‘Latin Players on the Cheap’: Professional Baseball Recruitment in Latin America and the Neocolonialist Tradition,” Samuel O. Regalado outlines the history of professional baseball’s often very shady Latin American talent evaluation and procurement practices, which began as early as the 1910s and persisted essentially unregulated for more than a half-century. He opens with a quote from sports journalist Ray Fitzgerald about the recruitment practices of influential mid-20th century scout Joe Cambria: “Bonuses? Big-money promises? Uh-uh. Cambria’s carrot was the fame and glory that would come from playing </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">beisbol</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> in the big leagues” (9).  </span></p>
<p>While we now conceive of contracts signed by top international prospects as being a big money game, with packages often ranging into the tens of millions of dollars, the reality for most of the history of Latin American scouting is that it wasn’t a money game at all—it was, in fact, a game of handing over as little money as possible. Regalado writes that most of the players approached by scouts—players who were inexperienced, young and largely very poor—were “no match for the shrewd and experienced MLB scouts, whose affiliations with major league clubs gave them the leverage they needed to attract young Latin American players for little or no cost” (11). With little leverage to speak of, being unfamiliar with the English language, and easily won over by promises of guaranteed fame, comfort and financial stability, these players were ideal signees for teams looking for cheap talent. And given that all of this business was undertaken far away from teams’ headquarters in the US, any rules that did exist were hardly well-enforced.</p>
<p>Once a player was signed under this system, they were lucky if they saw the money that they were promised, because paying the player was never the object: Cambria bragged that he could sign a Latin American player for less “than you would pay for a hat” (Kerrane 30). And, of course, the promises of certain success that took the place of monetary compensation almost never came to fruition. That is simply not the lot of a minor leaguer, particularly not a minor leaguer who is signed, as many Latin American players were, with absolutely no hope on the scout’s part that they would ever make the major leagues.</p>
<p>We know the stories of the ones who succeeded. Adrian Beltre, discovered and illegally signed as a slight 15-year-old; Mariano Rivera, whose home was so isolated that they didn’t have phone lines, whose signing bonus was a mere $2,500. Many of the players who make it profess gratitude to the scouts who discovered them and signed them, giving them a chance to achieve their dreams. Once you have major-league status and wealth, it all becomes part of the legend.</p>
<p>But there is no way to quantify the effects that this system had on all of the players who never made it: uneducated teenagers, with no grasp of English and given no resources to learn the language, with little to no money even if they were promised thousands, dropped into an entirely unfamiliar country and culture. What happened to them once their baseball dreams were inevitably dashed?</p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Until 1984, there was no regulation pertaining to minimum signing age of Latin American prospects. It was the Blue Jays who precipitated that particular change: their signing of a 13-year-old was considered a bridge too far, at which point the age-16 benchmark was established. But the creation of a rule, once again, didn’t translate to the enforcement of said rule. As t</span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/23/sports/baseball-baseball-s-game-of-deception-in-the-search-for-latin-talent.html"><span style="font-weight: 400">his New York </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Times </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">piece</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400"> details, there was incentive both for players to lie about their ages and for scouts not to notice. It was only when other teams raised a ruckus, feeling hard done by a particular signing, that such cases were exposed.</span></p>
<p>And so it was with Josephang Bernhardt, who had signed with the Devil Rays using a falsified birth certificate. He was a highly-touted prospect, and several teams who had lost out to the Devil Rays in their pursuit of him raised the alarm. When the dust settled, the now-16-year-old Bernhardt, whom the Devil Rays had signed for $30,000—in those days, a fairly steep price for a Dominican prospect—was once again available for signing.</p>
<p>He was a perfect target for the Blue Jays, who were looking to have an impactful offseason. The team was still only three seasons removed from the back-to-back championships, still drawing above-average attendance, but three consecutive losing seasons was beginning to test the patience of the fanbase—and, to make matters worse, the Yankee dynasty was on the ascent. They wanted to show fans that the team could still be a legitimate contender, both in the immediate and more distant future.</p>
<p>And they certainly made a splash in the offseason market. At the time when the Jays were finalizing their deal with Bernhardt, a Canadian Press article had them as having already spent $67.5 million on free agent contracts, which translates to around $106 million in present-day currency. The most important of these signings was, of course, the signing of Roger Clemens to a four-year contract. But Clemens was in his mid-thirties, and the Jays wanted to show that they had an eye towards championships through the next decade as well. And given his quality, Bernhardt was the hottest young prospect available.</p>
<p>The consensus was that Bernhardt, a shortstop, was only an average defender and had only average speed. It was the bat that had teams clamoring to sign him, a bat that the Jays’ then-director of Latin American scouting Herb Rivera described as “the best [he’d] ever seen at his age.” Scouts saw fearsome power in Bernhardt, who was 6’1” at 16 and who was expected to grow another four inches, and his bat was said to rival that of Alex Rodriguez, who had become a full-time player in 1996 and finished second in MVP voting. With that kind of potential, whether or not he could stick at shortstop was seen as almost immaterial. In the end, the pursuit of Bernhardt came down to three teams: the White Sox, the Orioles and the Jays. The Jays ultimately outbid Pat Gillick mere hours after he’d gone to the Bernhardts’ house to plead his case.</p>
<p>Bernhardt, as I mentioned before, had a family baseball pedigree: his father had been a minor leaguer in the Jays system, his uncle a major-league outfielder, and both now worked as scouts in the White Sox organization. It was thanks to their careers—the experience they had in the system, and the financial stability afforded by their jobs—that he got paid as much as he did, because his family was able to hire Scott Boras to represent him in free agency.</p>
<p>After the Devil Rays fiasco, Boras, Bernhardt and his family developed a clear, specific, uncompromising set of signing demands. And under Boras’s oversight, Bernhardt landed a dream package from the Jays. It was not only the amount of money in play—a full 20 times larger than the previous high for a Dominican player—that swayed Boras and the Bernhardts, that had the market in an uproar. In addition to the million dollars, the Jays promised English lessons, $100,000 for a college education, and funding for family visits from the Dominican four times a year. The social and cultural transition, the homesickness and isolation from family and friends, are often the hardest things for recently-signed Latin American prospects to handle, and the Blue Jays were acknowledging that difficulty. “We are not in exploitation mode,” said Jays GM Gord Ash. “We&#8217;re paying top international talent their equivalent on the current North American market.”</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The deal was seen by everyone in baseball as something that could forever change the standard of scouting and signing in the Caribbean. And in his column in the Toronto </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Star</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">, Richard Griffin wondered if baseball wouldn’t react against this change by absorbing it into the status quo. “Within two years, look for Dominicans to be included in the June draft,” he wrote. “They&#8217;ll call it the ‘Bernhardt Rule.’”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p>For his part, Bernhardt responded to the hubbub surrounding his signing with something resembling quiet resignation. Despite the fact that he was 16, a prime age for recklessness, he seemed remarkably disinclined to do anything reckless with his money. When a Canadian reporter asked him whether he was going to buy a car, he shrugged off the suggestion— he hadn’t even thought about it. “I don’t have my driver’s license,” he said by way of explanation.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">This attitude gained Bernhardt favor with the media and with the coaching staff at Jays camp. In a </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Star </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">report from spring 1997— “Phenom impresses at camp,” the title reads—minor league hitting instructor Larry Hisle and assistant general manager Bob Engle sang Bernhardt’s praises. He looked good in the field, he had the good face, he had all the tools to be a great major-league hitter.  The Jays now not only had a major-league roster packed with top-end stars: they had what they believed to be a franchise player developing in the minor leagues.</span></p>
<p>And while Bernhardt, by all accounts, was a quiet, unassuming young man, he was in his quiet way just as confident as everyone else was. “I think I can be a power hitter in the majors,” he said. “I think maybe I can be ready in four years.”</p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p>The Blue Jays weren’t good in 1997. They were fine in 1998, but not nearly good enough to pose a threat to the historic Yankees. They did a little bit worse in 1999, and a little bit worse than that in 2000. It was a decline that wouldn’t end for a very long time.</p>
<p>The new millennium was supposed to mark the beginning of Bernhardt’s time as the Jays’ franchise player; instead, he was starting the season in Dunedin, yet to post a slugging percentage above .345. Dunedin was where he would end his career, too, after batting .118/.167/.147 through nine games. Through seven seasons as a professional baseball player, Bernhardt never reached double-A. He was the signing that was going to change the market, that was going to set the future of the Blue Jays, the guy everyone was talking about; by the time he finally faded out, no one was talking about him at all. Bernhardt&#8217;s quiet disposition and even quieter bat rendered him irrelevant to the point of oblivion, to the point where even the memory of his genuinely important signing was obscured by the fog of failure. Perhaps Blue Jays fans didn&#8217;t want to remember that their team had made a career .221 hitter the first Dominican prospect millionaire. Perhaps the media didn&#8217;t want to remember just how much they had hyped a prospect who never set foot on a major-league diamond. Today, Bernhardt isn’t even listed on Wikipedia as one of Boras’s clients.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p>I have a fascination with <a title="Justin Smoak Is Finally Having Fun Playing Baseball" href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2017/06/08/justin-smoak-is-finally-having-fun-playing-baseball/" target="_blank">failed top prospects</a>. I think it’s because I’m at a similar stage in my life as many of them are: on the early borderline of adulthood, trying to navigate the gap between the possibility of what I may someday be able to achieve and the reality of how limited my capabilities are now. These prospects, who had their greatness acclaimed by countless people and backed up by large amounts of money, reckon with failure of much higher stakes than I do as a random, average person. There is something to be learned, I think, from these experiences. Bernhardt’s signing was historic, the object of hot pursuit from multiple major-league teams, the name on the tongues of executives and super-agents and journalists and hopeful fans; nowadays, it takes a lot of research to find pretty much any of this information.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">I could find only <a href="https://www.diariolibre.com/deportes/primer-prospecto-millonario-de-rd-fall-como-pelotero-pero-aspira-llegar-a-las-gl-del-derecho-DLDL218586">one article</a> about Josephang Bernhardt post-playing career. It ran in the Dominican </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Diario Libre </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">in 2016. The title, for those who don&#8217;t speak Spanish, reads: &#8220;First millionaire prospect from the DR failed as a baseball player, but aspires to the big leagues of the law.&#8221; </span></p>
<p>The interviewer met Bernhardt at his two-level house in his Dominican hometown, purchased with his signing money—he had, after all, told Canadian media back when he signed that his family wouldn&#8217;t let him touch the money until he turned 20, and his career ended at 22. He also had, as the article notes, &#8220;a disposition to relaunch his life&#8221; post-baseball. After being released by the Blue Jays (with whom he apparently didn&#8217;t have an entirely positive relationship—the article notes that a series of hand and thigh injuries were exacerbated by &#8220;various incidents with trainers&#8221;), Bernhardt&#8217;s uncle, working with the Orioles, had him come to a few practices, but Bernhardt quickly decided he was done. He left baseball and never came back: &#8220;so as not to embarrass myself.&#8221;</p>
<p>It was hard, Bernhardt says, to accept that he wasn’t going to make it as a baseball player. It was harder still to return to school, having spent so many of his formative years thinking of baseball and baseball only. Bernhardt began attending night school in 2004, and university the following year; he graduated with a degree in law in 2016, no small feat for someone who left high school at 15. At the time of the article&#8217;s writing, he was beginning at a law firm, with hopes of someday starting his own. The Jays&#8217; investment in his college education went to good use.</p>
<p>Bernhardt had no further contact with baseball. &#8220;I don&#8217;t regret anything,&#8221; he said.</p>
<p>But though he may have left it behind entirely, Bernhardt did leave a mark on baseball, unremembered though it may be, and I think it deserves to be recognized. Twenty years after his signing, multi-million dollar contracts for top young Dominican prospects are commonplace, and though it may not be known as such, though there may be no “Bernhardt precedent” or “Bernhardt rule,” his signing changed the way scouts and teams approached and valued top Latin American prospects forever. While the recent case of John Coppollella demonstrated that teams still don&#8217;t always follow the letter of the law in their dealings with young Latin American players, the days of players given absolutely no assistance with the English language, given only enough money for bus fare and left to fend for themselves, are largely over. Our own Vladimir Guerrero Jr., a Dominican teenager like Bernhardt, signed for $3.9 million, a number that would have been utterly inconceivable before the Bernhardt signing broke the million-dollar mark.</p>
<p>There are other ways to make an impact in baseball, it would seem, than becoming a legend.</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline"><strong>References</strong></span></p>
<p>&#8211; Byers, Jim. &#8220;Only 16 &#8211; but a Superstar in the Making: How Jays Signed Big-Hitting Dominican Teen to $1.1 Million Contract.&#8221; <i>Toronto Star</i>, Jan 18 1997.</p>
<p>&#8211; Griffin, Richard. &#8220;Jays&#8217; Signing of Dominican One really Big Deal.&#8221; <i>Toronto Star</i>, Jan 18 1997.</p>
<p>&#8211; Kerrane, Kevin. <em>Dollar Sign on the Muscle: The World of Baseball Scouting. </em>Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.</p>
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<p>&#8211; &#8220;Phenom impresses at camp.&#8221; <i>Toronto Star, </i>March 20 1997.</p>
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<p>&#8211; Regalado, Samuel O. &#8220;&#8216;Latin Players on the Cheap'&#8221;: Professional Baseball Recruitment in Latin America and the Neocolonialist Tradition.&#8221; <em>Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies </em>8, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 9-20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20644754.</p>
<p><em>Lead Photo: Gregory J. Fisher-USA TODAY Sports</em></p>
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		<title>Totally Not the Jays Shop: The Incessant Wonder of Blue Jays Memorabilia</title>
		<link>http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2017/11/29/totally-not-the-jays-shop-the-incessant-wonder-of-blue-jays-memorabilia/</link>
		<comments>http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2017/11/29/totally-not-the-jays-shop-the-incessant-wonder-of-blue-jays-memorabilia/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 29 Nov 2017 12:47:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rachael McDaniel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Articles]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/?p=14360</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[We now find ourselves almost a month into the offseason. The mood is dim. The skies are rainy. Worst of all, the Jays have given us little concrete to work with by way of offseason plans or substantiated trade rumors, and as a result, those among us who are responsible for creating Jays-related content are [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="font-weight: 400">We now find ourselves almost a month into the offseason. The mood is dim. The skies are rainy. Worst of all, the Jays have given us little concrete to work with by way of offseason plans or substantiated trade rumors, and as a result, those among us who are responsible for creating Jays-related content are left scrambling for topical tidbits to write about. This has given everyone the distinct pleasure of reading six different articles on six different blogs about the same maybe-it-is-maybe-it-isn’t rumor every week. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">I, for my part, have found myself <a title="Short Relief: I Stare Out the Window and Play Pokemon" href="https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/35242/short-relief/" target="_blank">particularly susceptible</a> to that sweet, sweet offseason malaise this year. The absence of baseball’s regulatory presence has rendered my existence a minor shambles, and I have been searching for something—</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">anything</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">—to make me forget the baseball-shaped hole in my heart. And while the echo chamber of Shohei Ohtani speculation posts and front-office hot takes doesn’t seem to be capable of giving my life renewed meaning and purpose, nor would I be particularly good at writing about such things, I realized recently that there is at least one thing in this universe that will always give me a reprieve from the void, if only for a moment:</span></p>
<p>Merchandise.</p>
<p><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-26-at-13.33.41-e1511869656866.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-14370" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-26-at-13.33.41-e1511869656866.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-11-26 at 13.33.41" width="500" height="254" /></a></p>
<p>That’s right. In the chill of winter, I have found that there is no more soothing balm for the soul of the baseball-bereft than hunting down weird Blue Jays shit on Ebay which, should you so choose, you could easily acquire in exchange for a sum of your hard-earned money. And while there are hundreds of thousands of possible purchases to choose from, there are certain types of objects which I have found inspire more desire and fill the emptiness better than others.</p>
<p><strong><strong><br />
</strong></strong><b>Unspeakably, Unironically Ugly World Series Merchandise</b><strong><strong><br />
</strong></strong></p>
<p><strong><strong><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-27-at-15.01.13-e1511869682745.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-14368" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-27-at-15.01.13-e1511869682745.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-11-27 at 15.01.13" width="500" height="252" /></a></strong></strong></p>
<p>I don’t know much about what life in the early 90s was like, but based on the graphics on the vintage World Series garments that people are selling online, I can only imagine that it was a hell of a lot better than life is now. All of these garments exude a carefree yet passionate joie de vivre that I, drowning in my 21st-century dullness and cynicism, can only dream of.</p>
<p><strong><strong><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-27-at-15.27.39-e1511869710529.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-14365" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-27-at-15.27.39-e1511869710529.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-11-27 at 15.27.39" width="500" height="247" /></a></strong></strong></p>
<p>The one uniting feature of all of these fabric miracles is a flagrant disdain for any principles of graphic design. Various shapes and logos and texts and symbols are thrown on seemingly at random, with no discernible schema or relationship to each other. The text on these shirts, too, is often mystifying. I have no idea why the shirt pictured below feels the need to include a paragraph explaining the history of the Blue Jays and their cap design, nor why the sweater above included a box listing the previous 10 World Series champions under the heading of “WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS &#8211; 10 YEARS STATS.”</p>
<p><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-27-at-15.19.54-e1511869763921.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-14367" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-27-at-15.19.54-e1511869763921.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-11-27 at 15.19.54" width="500" height="257" /></a></p>
<p>One gets the impression that whoever designed these shirts was — like a kid affixing all of their favorite stickers to a single sheet of paper— just really, really excited about the Blue Jays. And for just a taste of that sincere and unabashed zest for life, $99.99 seems like a small price to pay.</p>
<p><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-27-at-15.22.42-e1511869788491.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-14366" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-27-at-15.22.42-e1511869788491.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-11-27 at 15.22.42" width="500" height="249" /></a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><b>Disturbing Humanoid Merchandise</b></p>
<p>A new friend invites you over to their place to hang out and have drinks for the first time. You feel like you know this person fairly well: you’ve been talking for a while, you vibe with their sense of humor, and you have various mutual interests—the most significant of which is, of course, Blue Jays baseball. It’s the offseason right now, but you’re looking forward to catching a game with them once baseball starts again. And as you make your way to their place of residence, you begin wonder about the “rare Jays memorabilia” they have often boasted to you about having. An autographed bat? A ball from a historic game? The possibilities are endless.</p>
<p>You ring the doorbell. Your friend opens the door, and you greet each other warmly. When they close the door your heart almost stops in fright— there’s someone standing in the doorway behind you!</p>
<p>“What?” Your friend looks concerned for a moment, then they laugh. “Oh! That’s just—Don’t worry about that. It’s just Carlos.”</p>
<p><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-27-at-21.59.24.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-14364" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-27-at-21.59.24.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-11-27 at 21.59.24" width="498" height="499" /></a></p>
<p>You can’t manage any response, but really, what is there to say? It’s just Carlos. A life-size cardboard cutout of a one-time Blue Jays star, smiling a wide two-dimensional smile and holding a Coke, staring at you blankly from the back of your friend’s door. There is nothing weird about this. There is nothing sinister occurring here whatsoever.</p>
<p>It’s just Carlos.</p>
<p>You try to shake your feeling of unease, and follow your friend down the hallway towards the kitchen, where they tell you they have snacks and drinks waiting. You are looking forward to this— you are starving, and you would love a drink to take the edge off your encounter with Carlos. Your friend disappears around a corner, and as you make the turn, you almost trip on something soft on the ground. You pick it up.</p>
<p><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-28-at-01.36.57.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-14363" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-28-at-01.36.57.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-11-28 at 01.36.57" width="500" height="501" /></a></p>
<p>You drop it. You wish you could run to the bathroom and wash the feel of it out of your fingers.</p>
<p>“Hey, uh.”</p>
<p>Your friend is busy at the kitchen counter, pouring out bowls of different dips and slicing cheeses. They don’t look up. “Yeah, what?”</p>
<p>You point at the doll. “What… what is this?”</p>
<p>They glance down briefly, then return to their task. “That’s just Josh, dude! Man, you really don’t know your Jays.”</p>
<p>You stare at the doll in disbelief. It stares back at you, tired eyes unmoving, beard no closer to being a shade that even vaguely resembles blond.</p>
<p>“Josh who?” you ask nervously. Perhaps your friend didn’t mean who you thought they meant. “Josh, like… Donaldson?”</p>
<p>“Obviously.”</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">“That looks </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">nothing </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">like Josh Donaldson.”</span></p>
<p>Your friend sighs. “It has #20 on the back. The box said Josh Donaldson. It’s Josh Donaldson. End of discussion. Now get over here and dig into these snacks.”</p>
<p>You walk over to the kitchen table, carefully sidestepping “Josh,” though you can’t help but feel his hollow gaze burning into the back of your neck. Your friend is beaming, as though they are proud of the spread that they’ve created, and as you take a seat you are inclined to agree with them. Everything looks mouth-watering, and your stomach grumbles with anticipation. But before you can take a bite of any charcuterie or smoked gouda, you catch a glimpse of an ominous, spindly shape, looming over you from the top of the refrigerator. You think you see the gleam of a pair of eyes.</p>
<p>Your friend sees your horrified expression and sighs again. “Come on, man. What is it this time?”</p>
<p>You point at the shadow. Your friend grins.</p>
<p>“Oh, right! I gotta get him out here. It’s not fair to leave him up there in the dark.”</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Him</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">“Hold on.” Your friend, with some effort, reaches to the top of the refrigerator and, with a flourish, sets </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">him </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">on the chair beside you. Like </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">he</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> is just another guest at the table. Like </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">he</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> is going to be your friend, too.</span></p>
<p><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-26-at-19.56.46.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-14369" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-26-at-19.56.46.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-11-26 at 19.56.46" width="494" height="493" /></a></p>
<p>You’ve lost your appetite.</p>
<p>“I &#8211; I have to go. I, uh. I feel really sick.” You stand up and try to move as swiftly as you can toward the exit. Your friend blocks the hallway.</p>
<p>“Wait, what?” They sound hurt. “But you haven’t even had any food! We haven’t even—”</p>
<p>&#8220;Seriously,” you say, desperation in your voice. “Seriously, I’m sorry, thanks for your hospitality, but I’m going to vomit if I stay here any longer.”</p>
<p>Your friend, though sad, seems convinced. “That sucks, dude! We’ll have to do this again some other time.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, yeah, totally,” you say, your heart pounding. “Can you please let me go now?&#8221;</p>
<p>“Alright, fine,” they say. “But before you go—”</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">This is too much. You start trying to shove past them. “Please, let me—”</span></p>
<p>Your friend presses something cold and foreign into your hand. “I wanted you to have this.”</p>
<p><strong><strong><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-28-at-02.07.10.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-14362" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-28-at-02.07.10.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-11-28 at 02.07.10" width="499" height="494" /></a></strong></strong></p>
<p>You run as fast as you can, out the door, down the street, until your lungs are sore and your heart feels like it could break through your ribcage. You keep running, and running, and running.</p>
<p>It is not until you get home, slamming the door behind you, that you realize you are still holding the Carlos Delgaduck. You try to let go of it, but you can’t.</p>
<p>You collapse to the floor and cry.</p>
<h4></h4>
<h4><b>Pieces of Paper</b></h4>
<p>There is something melancholy to me about people selling their old ticket stubs online. I understand why people sell off their old sentimental <em>objects</em>—objects take up space, and people are always finding themselves in need of more space. But a piece of paper is one of the more unobtrusive ways to store a physical memory. A piece of paper can be easily slipped between the pages a book, tucked into a shoebox. It is a distinct pleasure to open a book and find some long-forgotten ticket, or photograph, or note from an old friend.</p>
<p>So when I see people trying to flip their old tickets and vintage scoresheets online, I am struck by a whole mess of sad surmises. I wonder if this person has fallen upon such hard times that they are trying to earn money whatever way they can, even whatever small amount might be gotten by selling a ticket stub. I wonder if, perhaps, this piece of paper never really belonged to them—if they merely stumbled across it by accident, and decided to employ the serendipity in the service of their bank account, leaving the paper&#8217;s original owner bereft.</p>
<p><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-28-at-03.25.16-e1511869912868.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-14361" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/11/Screenshot-2017-11-28-at-03.25.16-e1511869912868.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-11-28 at 03.25.16" width="500" height="239" /></a></p>
<p>Or perhaps they just decided that this baseball game hadn&#8217;t actually meant that much to them after all. At one point they cared enough to attend to this game, and not only to attend the game, but to save the ticket stub which they could easily have tossed aside. They cared enough to save it, and they cared enough to keep it in good condition for several decades.</p>
<p>But something changed, somewhere along the line. They looked at this ticket stub and it didn&#8217;t inspire the happiness it once did. The ticket—and the memories of their own life that it had been kept to preserve—had lost their meaning. The 1994 season was shortened by the strike, and the Blue Jays didn&#8217;t make the playoffs for over two decades after that. Life went on. Baseball was temporary.</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><span style="font-weight: 400">***</span></p>
<p>It is not in the actual buying of these Blue Jays things that I have recently taken so much solace. In all the time I’ve spent browsing Ebay this fall, I haven’t actually bought anything. It’s the observation of them. Scrolling through the approximately 19,000 artifacts of fandom that people are trying to flip on Ebay is a strange, profound experience, something like visiting a museum full 0f heretofore undiscovered ancient relics — if, for each one of these relics, the museum featured two hundred BRAND NEW!!! RUSSELL MARTIN REPLICA JERSEYS.</p>
<p>But it is nevertheless an addictive process, and I think this is why. When one does stumble across these artifacts, though they be few and far between, there is a fleeting, small recreation of the sensations one experiences when watching baseball. It’s the moment during which you forget that the object you are observing was meant to exploit you, was placed in front of you to tempt you to hand over your money. There is a moment where, for a fraction of a second, before you look at the price, the auction, the search-optimized all-caps titling, the description full of glowing yet cliche keywords which cannot possibly be true, before you remember that Statcast is powered by Amazon Web Services and the ball is juiced, your heart clenches with some rich emotion—sometimes joy, sometimes melancholy, sometimes confusion, sometimes abject horror. You forget that something is being sold to you.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">And after a few seconds, the moment is gone. It never, ever lasts. But the longing remains. That’s how they get you. That’s how they keep roping you in, time after time, year after year. You yourself don’t quite know how it keeps happening; after all this time, you should know better. Yet you keep coming back. You just keep chasing that feeling— that moment where you believe that if only you could have this </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">thing </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">you would be whole.</span></p>
<p>Pitchers and catchers report in 75 days. Maybe we’ll get what we wanted this time.</p>
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		<title>The Ghosts of Blue Jays Octobers Past</title>
		<link>http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2017/10/10/the-ghosts-of-blue-jays-octobers-past/</link>
		<comments>http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2017/10/10/the-ghosts-of-blue-jays-octobers-past/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 10 Oct 2017 11:13:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rachael McDaniel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Articles]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/?p=13854</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The 2017 postseason has been going for a week now, and I’ve got to be honest with you all: it’s been a doozy. A real barn-burner. A raucous, rousing good time. Baseball’s best starters have been lit the hell up; there have been pitchers’ duels and crazy comebacks and unforgivable managerial blunders. It’s been pretty [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The 2017 postseason has been going for a week now, and I’ve got to be honest with you all: it’s been a doozy. A real barn-burner. A raucous, rousing good time. Baseball’s best starters have been lit the hell up; there have been pitchers’ duels and crazy comebacks and unforgivable managerial blunders. It’s been pretty much everything you could want out of October baseball. </span></p>
<p>Except, of course, that the Jays aren’t there.</p>
<p>Given that their season essentially ended sometime during the seven-game losing streak in April, I thought by now I’d be numb to any regret about this year’s failure. Even though I know a postseason appearance from this year’s Jays would have been greeted with nothing more than a swift and humiliating exit, I still find myself missing them — wishing they were here in October with me. The postseason remains thrilling, but the season-long storylines that I&#8217;m watching come to fruition are never going to mean as much to me as they will for people who have been part of the story since the beginning of the season. Those who’ve devoted years and lifetimes of energy and thought to these teams. My team, on the other hand, the team I spent all year watching, fretting over, and writing about, is gone. They played their allotted 162 games, and then they went gently into that good night.</p>
<p>So I watch October baseball. I delight in the moments of magic. And when the games are over, I slip into reveries of my now-absent team: of what could have been had things broken better this season, of what could be in the Octobers of the future, and, mostly, of Octobers past &#8211; when everything went right, and the moments of magic were ours.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p style="text-align: left">Here’s one of those moments. Let me take you back. It’s 1992, and it’s the second  Sunday in October — Thanksgiving Sunday, for those watching at home.</p>
<p>It’s not Thanksgiving where the Jays are, though. It is a crisp, clear autumn afternoon at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. It&#8217;s the top of the ninth, and the crowd that fills the stadium to bursting is readying for Dennis Eckersley to close out the Jays.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">It&#8217;s surprising that Eckersley is in this game at all. The A’s led 6-1 after seven — a comfortable enough lead, one would think, to avoid using their closer. But the Jays came storming back with three runs in the eighth, cutting the lead to two. Eckersley, a future Hall of Famer playing in what might have been his finest season, recorded the last two outs of the eighth, though not before giving up two RBI singles. Still, those hadn’t been </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">his</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> baserunners. Starting a clean inning with a two-run cushion, the A’s and their fans had to figure this one wasn’t going to get away from them. Down 2-1 in the series, they </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">needed </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">it not to get away from them.</span></p>
<p>Devon White leads off the inning with a single, bringing up Roberto Alomar. Alomar had started the rally in the eighth with a double; now, an inning later, he represents the tying run.</p>
<p>Eckersley goes into his distinct, elaborate windup. The huge leg kick, the arm dropping down. The fans wave their towels, urging him on, as the ball leaves his hand, sails toward the plate over which Alomar is leaned.</p>
<p>The pitch hangs. Alomar doesn’t flinch. He waits. And at the last possible moment&#8230;</p>
<p><strong><strong><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/10/Screenshot-2017-10-08-at-10.30.55.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-13856" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/10/Screenshot-2017-10-08-at-10.30.55.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-10-08 at 10.30.55" width="640" height="469" /></a><br />
</strong></strong></p>
<p>I know this moment. I know the timbre of the call, the visual unfolding of events, Ruben Sierra watching the ball sail just high enough over the right-field fence. I know what this moment leads to — the first pennant, the first World Series win. It is part of the legacy inherited by anyone who calls themselves a Blue Jays fan, and though it took place a quarter-century ago, the elation still feels immediate to me. The joy contained in the memories of Octobers past is a joy, unlike many, that is replicable, that can be revisited with the merest suggestion.<strong><strong><br />
</strong></strong></p>
<p>But these memories of Octobers past are not my memories. They’re not my memories at all. Because this all happened over five years before I was born.</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><strong><strong> </strong></strong>***</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Baseball has a real fetish for its own past. This often manifests itself in pernicious ways — in the sport’s well-known conservative streak, in tiresome “playing the game the right way” hand-wringing. But baseball’s connection to the past is also an essential component of the experience of baseball fandom. We spend hours digging through the Play Index for tasty bits of history. We hunt down century-old newspaper clippings, collect cards, read memoirs and recountings and recaps. More than anything, we love to reminisce about days gone by &#8211; those golden days, always fleeting but infinitely tangible, when our team won and it mattered. When we find ourselves in quiet Octobers like this one, we conjure up the ghosts of Octobers past, recreating entire scenes from our lives: who we were with when it happened, what we were doing, the people we were back then. Human connection is the greatest reward of being a fan, and the exchange of these treasured memories is one of the ways in which such connections are formed and strengthened. </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">Do you remember…? Where were when you when…?</span></i></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">It is strange, then, to be someone for whom these Octobers past never existed. The Jays are not a franchise like, say, the Mariners, where there have been no golden Octobers, and fans can connect through a shared sense of overwhelming, eternal futility. No, the Jays </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">have </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400">such moments and what’s more is that they are a franchise young enough that the majority of Jays fans remember them.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The Jays, as a franchise, are more than twice my age. They have been in only two postseasons in my lifetime, and both have ended in disappointment: the feeling that they </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400">should</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400"> have won in 2015, the sad-trombone non-performance against Cleveland in 2016. The bat flip and the Donaldson dash that preceded these disappointments are the most direct experiences of baseball transcendence that I have.</span></p>
<p>So my connections with the most important history of this team, with the pennants and the World Series victories of yore, are mediated — conducted to me through Retrosheet box scores, 240p Youtube videos, and written reminisces, a series of electronic imprints long detached from reality. And somehow, though I never watched these Blue Jays teams, I feel connected to them. To the players who won the banners I can still see hanging when I watch today’s Jays, and to the fans, past and present, who watched and loved them. Like their joy, though distant, is also mine.</p>
<p><strong><strong> </strong></strong>It is a strange kind of magic: conjuring memories of things I never witnessed.</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><strong><strong> </strong></strong>***</p>
<p style="text-align: left">Do you remember this? It is October 24th, 1993. It is game six of the World Series, being played at a packed, raucous SkyDome. In a game which they once led 5-1, the Jays are down by a run.</p>
<p>It is the bottom of the ninth.</p>
<p><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/10/Screenshot-2017-10-02-at-18.06.25.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-13862" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/10/Screenshot-2017-10-02-at-18.06.25.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-10-02 at 18.06.25" width="638" height="477" /></a></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">While the Jays are at a disadvantage in the game, they have the advantage in the series. Losing this game and forcing a game seven is not an ideal outcome, but it also isn’t a death sentence — and these Jays are confident, loud, powerful. They are last season’s champions, and they have the 50,000-strong crowd on their side. The Dome is pulsing with energy. It is nerve-wracking, yes, as is any bottom of the ninth, as is any game this late in October. And these Jays have never faced elimination in a World Series game before. But you have to like their chances, no matter how this last inning goes down. This is their series to lose.</span></p>
<p>For the Phillies, though, this half-inning, executed poorly, could end their season. This is do or die. This is the intersection of rock and hard place, the three outs that an entire season has come down to, and you can see the magnitude of the moment embodied in Philly closer Mitch Williams. His curly mullet flying dramatically behind him, a look of dark intensity in his eyes, he stalks off the mound after each warmup pitch, pacing in agitated circles before he again receives the ball, again throws it with furious, desperate energy.</p>
<p>Williams is a top-end reliever who recorded 43 saves during the 1992 regular season with a 3.34 ERA, but he has always had a concerning propensity for wildness, and his last outing in the World Series was disastrous. He gave up three runs in two thirds of an inning and took the loss in game three’s 15-14 slugfest. This is the first time he’s stepped onto the field since then; this is his chance to rewrite his World Series legacy, to transform himself from goat to hero&#8230;at least until tomorrow.</p>
<p>His first assignment is Rickey Henderson. A July acquisition from the A’s, Henderson’s production fell off a cliff post-trade, and the postseason has been no different. Still, though he poses little threat as a hitter, he is still the greatest base-stealer of all time. If he gets on base, the Blue Jays could be in business.</p>
<p>Right as Williams is about to throw his first pitch, Henderson calls time. Time is granted. But Williams, focused on himself and the pitch he is about to throw, doesn’t notice until it’s too late. He tries to abort his delivery and tumbles off the mound, doing a strange half-somersault on the turf. It is remarkably inelegant, a gauche physical act entirely out of place in the bottom of the ninth in game six of the World Series. The crowd is delighted.</p>
<p><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/10/Screenshot-2017-10-08-at-20.39.15.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-13861" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/10/Screenshot-2017-10-08-at-20.39.15.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-10-08 at 20.39.15" width="638" height="475" /></a></p>
<p>Williams’ first pitch to Henderson flies in high. His second is in the other batters’ box. The crowd, already loud, is now sounding at full tilt, a cacophony of whistles and screams and shouts and claps reverberating off the walls of the Dome as Williams’ third pitch crosses the plate: ball three, high.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The Blue Jay dugout is on its feet. Henderson squares to bunt, and Williams throws his pitch. It is high and outside. Ball four. </span></p>
<p><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/10/Screenshot-2017-10-08-at-20.47.18.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-13860" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/10/Screenshot-2017-10-08-at-20.47.18.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-10-08 at 20.47.18" width="633" height="472" /></a></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Here comes Devon White to the plate, now. You are expecting something to happen here. Not only does White not have a hit yet today, but he is 4-for-6 lifetime against Williams, including a triple in this series. Williams falls behind on him, perhaps distracted by the looming threat of Henderson dancing off first. White fouls off pitch after pitch, and, after running the count full&#8230;</span></p>
<p><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/10/Screenshot-2017-10-08-at-21.03.26.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-13859" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/10/Screenshot-2017-10-08-at-21.03.26.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-10-08 at 21.03.26" width="633" height="429" /></a></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">A fly ball to left. One out. </span></p>
<p>To the plate steps Paul Molitor. He has two doubles, two triples, and two home runs in this World Series &#8211; the first player ever to do so. If a hit was expected of White, it is a near certainty with Molitor. The crowd urges him on, and he obliges with his third hit of the night, a solid line drive into center. Williams is once again knocked over.</p>
<p><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/10/Screenshot-2017-10-08-at-21.08.41.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-13858" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/10/Screenshot-2017-10-08-at-21.08.41.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-10-08 at 21.08.41" width="637" height="478" /></a></p>
<p>Can you feel it coming now?</p>
<p>When it happened last season, you weren’t there. When it happened last season, it was in Atlanta, in extra innings, in an unfamiliar stadium full of disappointed people. This season, though — it’s happening <em>here</em>. There is one out in the bottom of the night. They are down by one, and there are runners on first and second, and this pitcher &#8211; this pitcher, he’s got nothing. It’s happening, here and now, at home, on the turf at the SkyDome in Toronto.</p>
<p>You will tell this story for years, and it will tide you through baseball going on strike, through two decades of futility, through postseason hope and postseason agony. This is an image that will be indelible on your memory, and, through your stories, on the memories of a generation that will come later. A generation that might, for all they know, never see anything like what you are seeing now. They will see in this not only a vision of hope, of pride, but a reminder: it happened here once. It can happen again.</p>
<p>It could be any year now.</p>
<p>Joe Carter steps into the box.</p>
<p>The Blue Jays are going to win the World Series.</p>
<p>The crowd is willing it into existence. Everyone is on their feet, hoping. Hoping that the next pitch is the one.</p>
<p>Carter turns on the 2-2 pitch from Williams, and everyone knows.</p>
<p><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/10/Screenshot-2017-10-08-at-21.26.27.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-13857" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/10/Screenshot-2017-10-08-at-21.26.27.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-10-08 at 21.26.27" width="629" height="478" /></a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><em>Lead Photo: Nick Turchiaro-USA TODAY Sports</em></p>
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		<title>The 2017 Toronto Blue Jays: A Drama In Five Acts</title>
		<link>http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2017/09/21/the-2017-toronto-blue-jays-a-drama-in-five-acts/</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 21 Sep 2017 13:17:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rachael McDaniel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Articles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/?p=13509</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[DENIAL Do you remember when you were excited for the baseball season to start? And, more importantly, do you remember the moment when you stopped being excited? For some of you, I’m sure, it was almost immediately &#8211; the first game of the season, when the Jays left 13 men on base, Jason Grilli gave [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<h3><strong>DENIAL</strong></h3>
<p>Do you remember when you were excited for the baseball season to start? And, more importantly, do you remember the moment when you stopped being excited?</p>
<p>For some of you, I’m sure, it was almost immediately &#8211; the first game of the season, when the Jays left 13 men on base, Jason Grilli gave up a walk-off homer, and all of a sudden you remembered how bad September and the ALCS had been. Maybe it was during Francisco Liriano’s botched first outing of the season when he recorded one out and gave up five runs. Or maybe it was some unmemorable game in the middle of the seven-game losing streak. You looked at the Jays’ record, and it said 1-6, 1-7, 1-8.</p>
<p>You said to yourself, I waited all winter for this?</p>
<p>It’s early, people kept saying. And it was indeed early. You had no reason to believe that this team could possibly be as bad as they appeared to be. They had injuries, and they had bad luck, and they had absurdly poor performances that couldn’t possibly be sustainable. Even when they sank to a miserable 11 games under .500, you had to believe that they would get better.</p>
<p>Because, as Buck and Pat so often intoned, it’s a long season. I’m sure they meant it as a comfort, but it was also a threat, an invocation of months of unpleasantness still to come. So although you acknowledged how deep the grave was that had been dug, even though you accepted the mathematical improbability of a return from such a bad beginning, there was some part of you that believed this season could be at least a little bit of a success. They would get back to .500, at least. They would finish above the Orioles &#8211; they had to be able to do that.</p>
<p>It’s a long season. You had to get through it somehow.</p>
<p><strong>ANGER</strong></p>
<p>By the end of May, the Jays had somehow clawed themselves back to one game below .500 &#8211; which, in this year’s astonishingly mediocre American League was well within the realm of contention. June, then, was all set up to be the month of the miraculous comeback, the vindication of all your internet outrage, the completion of a movie script-like run from worst to first.</p>
<p>Here’s how the story ended up unfolding:</p>
<ul>
<li>June 1st: The Jays entered play at 26-27, fresh off a five-game winning streak. The Yankees, sensing the growing joy from hundreds of miles away, rolled into town and crushed that joy, Marco Estrada, and your very soul itself. The Jays lost 12-2.</li>
<li>June 3rd: After bouncing back for a win, the Jays entered play at 27-28, and were ready to do it right this time. They did not do it right. The Yankees were all over Joe Biagini, while the Jays couldn’t do anything against rookie Jordan Montgomery. They lost 7-0.</li>
<li>June 5th: The Jays, again, bounced back from the dispiriting loss, managing a series split against the Yankees. They headed out west with a record of 28-29 to play the Oakland A’s, a team that is not good at all. The Jays failed to generate any offense against this not-good team, who scored all their runs on via homers from a guy named Ryon. Ryon with an O. The Jays lost 5-3.</li>
<li>June 13th: At 31-32, and coming home from a winning quasi-home series in Seattle, the Jays probably hoped that 13 would prove to be their lucky number as they sent Marco Estrada to the mound. This time, the killers of joy were the Tampa Bay Rays, who hit, just, like, <em>so</em> many home runs off Marco. It was terrible. The Jays lost 8-1.</li>
<li>June 16th: They entered this game at 32-33, and really? They lost to 11-4 to the goddamn White Sox? I don’t even remember this game, but I’m outraged on principle.</li>
<li>June 20th: It would have been perfect if the Jays could have reached .500 on the home turf of the Texas Rangers. They just needed Good Liriano to show up instead of Bad Liriano. But the coin flip landed tails, and they got Bad Liriano. The Jays lost 6-1, falling to 34-36.</li>
<li>June 22nd: All of the struggle, all of the one-step-forward-one-step-back &#8211; it had all lined up perfectly for this game, the final game of the series against the Rangers, a game started by the Jays de facto ace Marcus Stroman. This was the game where they were going to do it. And Stroman was out of the game by the fifth inning, having given up seven earned runs. The Jays lost 11-4.</li>
</ul>
<p>So, in a way, it was like a movie script. A really, really bad movie script where none of the plot points are resolved, the characterization is inconsistent, nothing makes sense, and you don’t stop fuming for a week after you watch it.</p>
<p>They never got back to a game under .500.</p>
<p><strong>BARGAINING</strong></p>
<p>Okay, so, maybe this isn’t their year. But at least Stroman is having a great season. Why don’t we trade Stroman? We could trade Donaldson, too. Imagine the return. Estrada’s not having a good year, but you could get a return for him. If anyone wants Liriano &#8211; I mean, I don’t know who would want him, but it’s possible! I mean, hey, at least we’re saving money on playoff tickets. At least we’re spending time with our families. At least we’re numb by now.</p>
<p>At least there’s only two months left of this.</p>
<p><strong>DEPRESSION</strong></p>
<p>It was August 20th, and it was a beautiful day for baseball at Wrigley Field. Perhaps it would have seemed even more beautiful had the Jays not lost their previous two games &#8211; but, even so, it’s hard to imagine a lovelier scene: the sun shining on the bricks and the ivy, the stands full of fans, and, best of all, the Jays carrying a two-run lead into the bottom of the 10th. It would be a sweet, well-played comeback victory, with the Cubs’ early lead finally erased in the 8th inning. The team was fired up. The fans who had made the trip to Wrigley were fired up. In a season that, day by day, inched closer to being undeniably lost, it was nice to be reminded that the baseball gods were capable of smiling on any team on a given day &#8211; even the Blue Jays.</p>
<p>Yes, it was only a two-run lead, and Roberto Osuna had been having a rough second half, but surely today &#8211;</p>
<p><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/09/Capture-_2017-09-18-22-48-32.png"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-13510" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/09/Capture-_2017-09-18-22-48-32-300x235.png" alt="Capture+_2017-09-18-22-48-32" width="300" height="235" /></a></p>
<p>&#8211; today &#8211;</p>
<p><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/09/Capture-_2017-09-18-22-49-13.png"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-13511" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/09/Capture-_2017-09-18-22-49-13-300x165.png" alt="Capture+_2017-09-18-22-49-13" width="300" height="165" /></a></p>
<p>&#8211; please, just let them win this time, just &#8211;</p>
<p><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/09/Capture-_2017-09-18-22-49-47.png"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-13512" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/09/Capture-_2017-09-18-22-49-47-300x219.png" alt="Capture+_2017-09-18-22-49-47" width="300" height="219" /></a></p>
<p>Oh, f*&amp;! it.</p>
<p><strong>ACCEPTANCE</strong></p>
<p>On Friday, it’ll be the first day of autumn. It’s starting to feel like it, too. After a summer of unreasonable heat and apocalyptically smoky air, Vancouver is back to being its temperate, rainy self. The conifers are looking greener, and the oaks and the maples have begun to grow crisp and orange.</p>
<p>Autumn comes for me as both a relief and a burden. It is a relief to be free of the sun, whose light and heat are inescapable; it is a relief to be able to hide, wrapped in winter clothes, covered by an umbrella. In the summer, the days, with their long hours of sunlight, stretch out dauntingly ahead of me; autumn and winter days are a far more manageable length.</p>
<p>But as comfortable and familiar as the dark, rainy days of autumn are, they are also heralds of the passage of time. My birthday is on October 31st, and from there, it’s only two months until a new calendar year begins. Markers of time are abstract and arbitrary, but they are how we make sense of the world, the lines by which we have all agreed that we can measure our lives. Every year, I am afraid that I will measure my life and discover that it has come up a bit short. I will look back over the previous twelve months trying desperately to find some reason for having lived them, and I am afraid that I will find nothing.</p>
<p>I am turning 20 this year. That’s three years older than I ever thought I’d be. And I’m afraid that the extra time has been for nothing.</p>
<p>So I don’t look forward to the months ahead. But right now, all that doesn’t matter. Right now, I am watching the irredeemably bad, endlessly frustrating, 100-percent non-contending 2017 Toronto Blue Jays play baseball. After this game ends, there are only ten games left for this team before they face their own autumn reckoning. They are losing 15-5 to the Royals, and Raffy Lopez just hit a home run off Kelvin Herrera in the bottom of the ninth.</p>
<p>I’m enjoying it.</p>
<p><em>Lead Photo © Caylor Arnold-USA TODAY Sports</em></p>
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		<title>Remembering A Meaningless Game In September</title>
		<link>http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2017/09/07/remembering-a-meaningless-game-in-september/</link>
		<comments>http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2017/09/07/remembering-a-meaningless-game-in-september/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 07 Sep 2017 10:00:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rachael McDaniel]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Articles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Roy Halladay]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Toronto Blue Jays]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/?p=13304</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[On September 25th, 2009, the Blue Jays took the field to face the Seattle Mariners. It wasn’t their last home game of the season, or their last game of the season overall. Neither was it a game that had much in the way playoff implications. The Blue Jays, at the start of play, were a [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="font-weight: 400">On September 25th, 2009, the Blue Jays took the field to face the Seattle Mariners. It wasn’t their last home game of the season, or their last game of the season overall. Neither was it a game that had much in the way playoff implications. The Blue Jays, at the start of play, were a not-so-nice 69-84; the Mariners, though well above .500 at 80-73, were three and a half games out of the wild card with two teams ahead of them and only a week left to go. It was, for all intents and purposes, just another meaningless game in late September.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The previous night’s game, a 5-4 loss to that season’s Cy Young runner-up Felix Hernandez, had drawn a sparse crowd of 15,306. On this Friday night, though, 20,668 were in attendance as the Jays took the field to start the bottom of the 1st. Maybe it was because it was because of Flashback Friday, a chance to see the Jays playing in their classic powder blues instead of the usual </span><a href="http://media.gettyimages.com/photos/jose-bautista-of-the-toronto-blue-jays-poses-during-photo-day-on-23-picture-id85405290" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400">abominations</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400">; maybe it was the beautiful night, the roof opened to a cool sky dappled with high clouds. But I would hazard a guess that the main draw was something else.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center"><strong><strong><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/09/Screenshot-2017-09-04-at-20.16.27.png"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-13305 alignnone" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/09/Screenshot-2017-09-04-at-20.16.27-300x161.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-09-04 at 20.16.27" width="640" height="361" /></a></strong></strong></p>
<p>Leading off for the Mariners was their franchise player, Ichiro Suzuki, an incredibly skilled hitter having one of his best years at the plate &#8211;  he finished that season with a .352/.386/.465 batting line and a minuscule 10-percent strikeout rate. Ichiro dug his spikes into the batter’s box and lifted his bat high behind his head: poised, ready to jump on anything. He was locked in that week, batting .396 with two homers.</p>
<p>Halladay started him off with a fastball down the middle at 90 miles per hour for strike one, followed by a cutter that Ichiro desperately fouled off for strike two. And then, to finish the job:</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><iframe src="https://gfycat.com/ifr/SaltyOblongCopepod" width="640" height="361" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" ></iframe></p>
<p>The sequence took all of 40 seconds.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p>At the start of 2009, the Jays had put together three consecutive winning seasons. Though they never finished better than second in the division, and wouldn’t have made the playoffs even under the current Wild Card rules, they were playing respectable, largely enjoyable baseball. In 2008, they won 86 games, and their rotation, led by Halladay, was the best in the American League. But over the offseason, they lost A.J. Burnett to free agency, and Shaun Marcum and Dustin McGowan to injury. There were questions, uncertainties.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">It started off well enough. The Jays raced out to the division lead, </span><a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2009/04/20/victorystarved_city_abuzz_over_jays.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400">sparking vaguely renewed interest</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400"> in a team that had been nowhere near a playoff berth for over a decade. They managed to hold on to that lead until the middle of May, just long enough for optimism to really sink its fingers in.</span></p>
<p>Then they lost nine games in a row. And just like that, the Jays were once again an irrelevant team, languishing in anonymity north of the border, going nowhere.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p>The Jays didn’t manage a hit off off Mariners starter Doug Fister until the bottom of the fifth inning: a ground ball into right field off of the bat of their third baseman, a poor defender and league-average hitter who had been acquired in a midseason trade with the Cincinnati Reds.</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><strong><strong><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/09/Screenshot-2017-09-06-at-01.05.42.png"><img class=" size-medium wp-image-13306 alignnone" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/09/Screenshot-2017-09-06-at-01.05.42-300x169.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-09-06 at 01.05.42" width="640" height="361" /></a></strong></strong></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The Jays would strand him at third.</span></p>
<p>Halladay, after allowing a single hit in each of the first four innings, had settled into a groove. He sent down eight consecutive batters. Mariners left fielder Michael Saunders, noted by Jamie Campbell in the pre-game broadcast for his Canadian roots, was caught looking &#8211;</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><iframe src="https://gfycat.com/ifr/EqualInsecureKid" width="640" height="361" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" ></iframe></p>
<p>&#8211; while Ken Griffey Jr., batting only .215, a shell of his former self and only 40 games away from announcing his retirement, went down swinging.</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><iframe src="https://gfycat.com/ifr/AnotherMarvelousAdouri" width="640" height="361" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" ></iframe></p>
<p>And after every scoreless inning, every out recorded with precise, measured efficiency, Halladay walked off the mound to the dugout in that familiar way: slowly, eyes lowered, head down, alone in his own quiet world.</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><strong><strong><a href="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/09/Screenshot-2017-09-06-at-01.25.32.png"><img class=" size-medium wp-image-13307 alignnone" src="http://toronto.locals.baseballprospectus.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/09/Screenshot-2017-09-06-at-01.25.32-300x161.png" alt="Screenshot 2017-09-06 at 01.25.32" width="640" height="361" /></a></strong></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center"><span style="font-weight: 400">***</span></p>
<p>Roy Halladay was the best choice the Blue Jays ever made. They drafted him, they developed him, and for almost a decade he was the best thing about that team. Over those years, the Jays never got anywhere close to the postseason, the Dome was sparsely attended, and the overarching narratives of baseball had bigger fish to fry than the stagnation of the Blue Jays. The Yankees and Red Sox struggled for dominance, ALCS history was made and historic droughts were erased, and the Jays passed every year hovering around .500 &#8211; not good enough or bad enough to be noticed, not good enough or bad enough to mean something.</p>
<p>But every fifth day, when Doc took the ball, it meant something. When Roy Halladay started, you were witnessing the pitch-by-pitch, inning-by-inning unfolding of a career destined for the Hall of Fame. Every fifth day, you were seeing singular, generational greatness. And though you wished that he would receive more recognition, that he could get the kind of coverage even a lesser Yankees pitcher would have gotten, you also felt special. Like you and every other Blue Jays fan was privy to a huge, wonderful secret. Because every fifth day, though they were mediocre, though they were disappointing, though they were little cared-for, Roy Halladay pitched for your Toronto Blue Jays.</p>
<p>That mattered.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p>In the bottom of the sixth, the deadlock was finally broken. Jose Bautista, sporting number 23 on his back, and in his first full season with the Jays, singled to right; Aaron Hill crushed Fister’s 2-1 pitch deep to left, and it was 2-0 Jays. They went on to score two more runs in the seventh (Bautista drove in two with another single), and one more in the eighth (an Encarnacion walk came around to score), giving them a comfortable lead.</p>
<p>Halladay, meanwhile, allowed a single hit through the seventh and eighth &#8211; a Kenji Johjima double. Johjima never got beyond second.</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><span style="font-weight: 400">***</span></p>
<p>September baseball doesn’t trigger the stomach-churning, bullet-sweating panic that comes of watching your team in a do-or-die postseason game. In the postseason, the fear is acute, played out over only a single game, or in series of 5 or 7. The band-aid of postseason loss is, at least, ripped off quickly. September, though, is emotionally taxing. The creeping tension of September is drawn out over a month, building heavier and heavier with every passing day, and no team is fully exempt from the weight of it.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">If your team is considered a sure thing for the the postseason, it’s an uneasy counting-down of days, the long uphill on the rollercoaster before the first big drop &#8211; and if your team starts to perform poorly, the waiting game becomes all the more fraught, as fans begin to worry about the team running out of gas. (</span><a href="http://www.latimes.com/sports/dodgers/la-sp-dodgers-padres-20170903-story.html#nt=oft01a-1la1" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400">Just ask Dodgers fans right now</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400">.) If your team is fighting for a spot in the postseason, September is crunch time, and the month is consumed by frantic activity: watching games on your phone at work, obsessive scoreboard-watching, magic-number calculating, bitterly cursing every run allowed, praying that no one gets injured. If your team is out of it, September draws out your disappointment, opening the door to the darkness of the offseason and the uncertainty it brings.</span></p>
<p>Over the past three seasons, the Jays have run the gamut of September baseball experiences. In 2015, they had a 75-57 record on September 1st and went a comfortable 18-12 the rest of the month, clinching a playoff spot with a week to spare and the division four days later. Last season they began the month at 76-57 &#8211; essentially the same position they’d been in the previous season &#8211; and promptly collapsed, not clinching a playoff spot until the final day of the season (and partially thanks to losses by the Mariners and Tigers).</p>
<p>This season, the Jays find themselves not only out of it, but having to reckon with the fact that they may never really have been in it at all. They began this month 62-73, in last place in the division, having never been over .500 at any point. The season is a wash; their wins and losses only have playoff implications for the teams that they are facing, not for them. Games like Tuesday night’s 19-inning losing slog are breeding grounds for cynicism. Even wins can feel pointless. Why run out the clock on a lost season? Why keep going if none of it matters, if it doesn’t mean anything?</p>
<p>Do you really have a choice?</p>
<p style="text-align: center">***</p>
<p>It was time for the top of the ninth. Out of the dugout came Halladay, making a bid for his league-leading eighth complete game and third shutout of the season. Coming up to bat was the middle of the Mariners order: Lopez, Griffey, Beltre.</p>
<p>As Lopez knocked Halladay’s first pitch foul, the crowd roared, booed the batter’s nerve at trying to ruin this moment, still fighting the inevitable. There were 20,668 of them, and they could all see the writing on the wall: Roy Halladay was an ace on a team that didn’t matter. It was September, and the Jays weren’t relevant. They became louder, more joyful and desperate, with each passing moment.</p>
<p>Lopez shot Halladay’s 1-2 pitch into center for a leadoff single. The crowd groaned.</p>
<p>Up came Griffey, 0 for 3 on the day. He popped out to Lyle Overbay for the first out. And after Aaron Hill snagged a sharp liner off Beltre’s bat for the second out, everyone rose to their feet. This was it.</p>
<p>The first pitch to Johjima came in outside for ball one. Boos rained down on the umpire. The next pitch came, and then &#8211;</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><iframe src="https://gfycat.com/ifr/VariableQuarterlyBantamrooster" width="640" height="361" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" ></iframe></p>
<p>&#8211; just like that, the game was over. The Jays won. It had taken only two hours and eleven minutes.</p>
<p>The horn of victory blared; the crowd whistled, clapped, and cheered their approval. Black-jacketed Jays players poured out of the dugout in celebration, as if something more important had been achieved than their 70th victory out of 154 chances.</p>
<p>In one week, the season would end with the Jays in fourth place. In one week, J.P. Ricciardi would be fired, giving way to Alex Anthopoulos. Two months later, in the dead of the winter, when there was no baseball being played by anyone, Roy Halladay would be traded to the Philadelphia Phillies. And a few months after that, another season of Blue Jays baseball would start: another season in which they failed to make the playoffs. That chance would come another five years down the line, brought about in large part by two of the players who had made this day’s victory possible. But no one knew about any of that yet. It was just September 25th, 2009, and Roy Halladay had just won another game.</p>
<p>Roy Halladay, Toronto Blue Jay, turned away from home plate and walked off the mound. He was smiling.</p>
<p><em>Lead Photo: Tom Szczerbowski-USA TODAY Sports</em></p>
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