Off-Season News, Notes and Thoughts III

Contrary to Parkes's assertion, we may very well be as lazy as we seem. Or at least as drunk-- or maybe that's just me. At any rate, I figured it was about time I checked back in with some off-season stuff, because there are more than a few things going on.

For starters (and any of you MLB executives hiding out there better cover your eyes for this) there's the Mitchell Report. Oooohhh! Scawwwwy!!!

OK, OK. So maybe my sarcasm is as subtle as me when I'm trying to casually dismount from my bike after downing most of a 26er of rye that was never mine in the first place (FYI, the ankle's not broken... though, for my own safety, it probably should have been). The fact of the matter is, I guess we didn't rush to write about the supposed revelations the forthcoming final report of the drug investigation by former US Senator George Mitchell because... well.... who gives a shit?

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem getting high and mighty about steroids. It's just, it doesn't take a BALCO lab technician to figure out that a whole fucking fuckload of ballplayers were on the juice. All you have to do is take a quick look at Todd Helton. Or at the epic 26 home run gulf between Luis Gonzalez's career high (57) and his second best year (31).

But for fuck sakes, people still believe Barry Bonds never touched the stuff despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Unless he can produce positive tests, all Mitchell is doing is pissing into the wind.

Dredging up more alleged users only allows the steroid "issue" to continue to be framed as one of who did what and how do we fix the past. Why go backwards? The effect of baseball's non-existent drug policy at the time is that we'll never really know what was going on, so I say fuck it. There aren't going to be any answers, only ways to trudge forward out of this muck. And this Mitchell Report isn't one of those.

Problem? Solution
Lately I've been looking back through our archives as I put together our first season retrospective, which you'll start to see in the coming days, and I'm not going to lie to you: nine times out of ten I pretty much fucking nail it. What I'm about to propose, though, might be one of those rare tenth times. I half expect to look back on this in April and find the JP came up with something a whole lot more creative, and since he's the GM and I'm just a drunk, that would probably make sense.

Anyway, I've decided what I think the Jays need to do with their left field situation-- and yes, there is a situation there. To pointlessly recap: You've got the incumbent Reed Johnson, who is an expensive right-handed hitter in a lineup with too many of those-- but by far best suited of anyone to leadoff-- but probably not capable of his '06 production and maybe a little too costly to be a platoon guy. There's Matty Stairs, the hard-as-fuck Canuck who's a lefty, due for a big raise and at least the same number of at-bats as this year, but unlikely to be as productive, unable to platoon with the lefty at first base, or to take away at-bats from the Hall-of-Famer at DH. He would also block the third option, Adam Lind-- unproven, but also a lefty, much cheaper and with little left to prove in the minors.

There has been talk of non-tendering Johnson, whose $3m contract is hardly an albatross, but which doesn't make a lot of sense if he goes back to being a platoon guy and a defensive replacement. Perhaps with the recent gains made by the Canadian dollar, that's less of an issue than it seems, but keeping him just to play part time wouldn't sit very well with the player, or with some of the other veterans on the team. In my world, you dump him, and you don't sign Stairs just to keep blocking Lind, either.

This is probably too much of a sink or swim proposition for a front office whose jobs depend on what happens next season, but if it were me I'd tell Curtis Thigpen to get to work on shagging some flies, and along with Lind there's your lefty-righty platoon.

Forgive me for not dreaming of a Canadian-dollar-influenced budget windfall, but I just don't think it's going to happen. The huge investments Uncle Ted has made in the team have yet to really kick in-- take a look at how the Wells contract is structured, for example-- and there's nothing that would make me think that Rogers is about to up the ante, unless ol' Teeder wants to make the Jays a winner much more desperately than I've ever understood.

I just think that, considering that there's a promising, and dirt cheap left field platoon just sitting there waiting for a chance in the organization, it makes much more sense to use money that might be earmarked for Johnson and Stairs in the minds of most fans to address other issues-- like a veteran catcher to platoon with Zaun, the difference on the contract of a shortstop who might be brought in for some cheaper young pitching, and perhaps a third baseman who can play... oh at least fifty games or so.

Good Evening, Robert...
Kudos to Bob Elliott fo the Sun, one of the most drunk and least hack-ish of the drunken local media hacks who cover the Jays, for squeezing in a nice little feature on Orlando Hudson before we forget all about the D-Back after they got steamrolled by the suddenly unstoppable Colorado Rockies.

Not only is it great to see that the much-loved former Jays is having success over in the National League, and that he remains upbeat despite having to miss the most important series he's ever had the chance to be a part of, but it's fantastic that he's gone out of his way to dispell some common myths about the Jays.

For starters, he goes to bat for John Gibbons, saying "I'd go into a foxhole with Gibbons any day." Presumably he's not referring to a den of interracial man-love. Although. . .

He also cites a couple examples of Vernon Wells being outspoken in the dugout, getting in the face of veteran players. ""Usually it was to young guys when things weren't going well, but it happened a few times [to others]," Hudson said. "Vernon would say in the dugout 'There's no way they are better than us -- let's play some damn baseball.'

"I remember which player he was yelling at but I'm not going to drop names." Pure class, that O-Dog.

FYI, I threw in the "[to others]" part because, despite my earlier assertion, Elliott actually is just as hackish as most of the other writers in town. Without the benefit of my little insertion, the quote doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me. It could very well be that Hudson was actually talking about the "young guns" in both halves of that sentence, in which case a) I could think of about sixty more sensible ways to integrate that quote, and b) I've taken his comments completely out of context, and it sounds like Vernon is a pussy who only picks on rookies. Meh.