Today is Opening Day.
The world is green and warm and bustling with new life. Even in those places where it’s not.
That is the essence of Opening Day, which forever for baseball fans has marked the true beginning of the year. New Year’s Day? Piffle. First day of spring? Piffle. Easter Sunday? With no religious disrespect intended, piffle.
No, friends and neighbours, with my annual nod to the great Tom Boswell, yet again life begins on Opening Day. It was ever thus, and will ever be thus, even if the pitcher no longer has to throw four pitches for an intentional walk. Whether the technical details of the game might change from year to year, one thing is immutable: There is no day in the year like Opening Day.
Every team starts at zero, each with the same chances, the opportunity to dream, and to win, or, sadly, to dream, and to lose. Last year is erased from the record. Every pitcher has an era of 0.00. Every hitter who gets a hit on his first at-bat is batting 1.000. Every fielder has a perfect record. And there are no blown saves in the bullpen.
Let us put last October completely out of our thoughts, when the season of our belovedly unpredictable Torontos fizzled to an end under the roof. Instead, let us look at the strange path the 2016 Blue Jays have taken to morph into this new, superficially different, 2017 version.
Different indeed, but strikingly the same under the skin.
No longer with us are significant contributors such as Brett Cecil, Joaquin Benoit, R.A. Dickey, whose service to the Jays over four seasons I saluted in a piece posted last fall, Melvin Upton Jr., who had his moments, though few, Dioner Navarro, whose second stint with Toronto was not marked with the same success as his first, and Josh Thole, he of the unenviable task of trying to catch R.A. Dickey’s butterflies, to which he gave his all.
Then there is Edwin. Far too many words have been devoted to the mess of his loss. In the immortal words of I-don’t-know-who, what we had there was a failure to communicate. Edwin’s agent has to take his share of the blame for not realizing that the market this past off-season for big sluggers was changing drastically. It’s understandable that he wouldn’t have Encarnacion take the first offer that came his way, but will we ever accept the fact that he signed with Cleveland (Cleveland!) for less than the Jays’ initial offer? And then there’s the role played by the shrewd Shap-kins duo, who unemotionally turned away from Edwin in unseemly haste. Sure, they were justified in not wanting to let Kendrys Morales slip away, and in their defence, who knew that the bottom was going to fall out of the market for aging, one-dimensional bashers?
Regardless, it’s farewell, sweet teddy-bear prince, and may flights of parrots squawk thee to thy base. One last word: there’s nothing sadder than seeing how awkward and out-of-place EE looks in a Cleveland jersey! Even the Ed-Wing doesn’t look right.
New to the scene are the afore-mentioned Morales, who is a welcome addition in light of Edwin’s departure, and the lunch-bucket, versatile Steve Pearce. The positive side of Morales is that early evidence suggests that he’s a pretty disciplined hitter, and not just another homer-or-take-your-seat guy. He might as well put his glove away, though. Anybody who thinks he’s going to play a single inning at first outside of some of the inter-league games is dreaming My Little Pony dreams. With the arrival of Pearce, the continued presence of Justin Smoak, and the availability of the versatile Ryan Goins, we will be spared the agony of watching Morales try to play in the field.
Pearce is a guy who undeservedly flew under the radar in Tampa Bay and Baltimore, and whose signing wasn’t much noted here. But he’s a good add, a guy who hits line drives, with a flare for the dramatic, and a big glove bag, ready to do a decent job at first, second, or in left.
Navarro and Thole have been replaced for the moment by Jarrod Saltalamacchia, who had to suffer the embarrassment of waiting until the last minute before being added to the roster, despite his impressive resume. Maybe the team’s hesitation to commit to him had something to do with the fact that it went down to the wire this spring as to whether he would hit more extra-base hits or make more bad throws to second during the grapefruit season.
Finally, we have the surprising, gratifying, but somehow bittersweet return of Joey Bats, who had the misfortune of playing hurt in his walk year of 2016, and decided in the end that a do-over was in everyone’s best interest. On the evidence of his Florida performance and his contribution to the Dominican’s World Baseball Classic run, he looks to be heading for a better year, and is certainly in fine fettle, which should lead to a more successful run at free agency next winter. A perfect outcome would be the complete meshing of Bautista’s personal goals and the team’s post-season aspirations.
As a final note on the changes to the lineup, who could have predicted that not only Jose Bautista, but Mark Trumbo and Chris Carter, the two 2016 home run champs, would remain unsigned until so late in the game? There is clearly a sea change going on out there in terms of the valuation of various types of players, to the disadvantage of the one-base-at-a-time slugger.
Nothing much was needed to address the starting pitching rotation, obviously. A healthy Francisco Liriano represents a significant upgrade over R.A. Dickey, as much as I like Dickey, and what MLB team wouldn’t want two premier lefties in a five-man rotation? Marcus Stroman’s lights-out domination of the WBC this month suggests that this may finally be the year that he takes the place among the league’s elite that has been predicted for him since his debut in 2014. With such an array of starters, it’s not hard to see why Manager John Gibbons’ choice of an Opening Day starter ended up resting on tactical and strategic factors, and was not dictated by the obvious preeminence of one starter over the others.
As noted, the bullpen has been diminished by the loss of Cecil and Benoit, and it remains to be seen whether righty Joe Smith and lefty J.P. Howell will be suitable replacements. Even without the last-minute announcement that Roberto Osuna would start the season on the disabled list, it’s clear that, as usual for the Jays, the bullpen is the biggest question mark going into the season.
The stated objectives of Jays’ management for the offseason were to address the obvious imbalance toward right-handed power and to add speed and improved on-base capability. They added a switch-hitting DH, a switch-hitting backup catcher (no change from Navarro here), neither of whom will ever go first-to-third, and a good right-handed bat. All three should show some improvement in the matter of getting on base, and with the apparent improvement of Kevin Pillar in that area, the team’s overall OBP should improve somewhat. But was this a significant makeover of the Jays’ traditional look? A Kansas-City style redesign? Not so much.
I would like to close with a word or two about the prevailing tendency of baseball pundits to opine that somehow the first month of the season doesn’t really count. It is often suggested that it takes a while for teams to sort themselves out, and that no one should panic if things start out badly. But sometimes the impression is created that the early games hardly even count.
For example, my esteemed counterparts at Baseball Prospectus Toronto published a group piece the other day (“Three Things for Blue Jays Fans to Think About on Opening Day”) which contained an awkward internal contradiction. Having posited as thing one that the first two games in Baltimore “still matter”, they go on in thing three to dismiss the significance of the first games out of hand. “In the grand scheme of things,” they write, “the opening series against the Orioles means very little. There are 160 games that will occur after this opening series—games which will (obviously) have much more bearing on the Blue Jays season than the first two.”
Wait—what? How is any game that is one out of 162 less important than any other? Does a loss on Opening Day count less than a loss on the last day of the season? Folks, MLB used to refer to its season as the “Championship Season”. Everything counts towards success, from first game to last. Every win is golden, ever loss is a lost win.
In this day of minute analysis of numerical baseball detail, such an obvious logical fallacy can’t go unchallenged.
Similarly, the equally esteemed and perspicacious Shi Davidi, on today’s pre-game radio coverage, was discussing his concerns over the state of the team’s bullpen. He rather vulgarly referred to Toronto’s 2016 standing as the team with the most games “pissed away” by the bullpen in the first couple of months of the season. Luckily, he concluded, those lost opportunities ended up not hurting the team in terms of the season’s outcomes. Hmm. So, for example, in game three last April in Tampa, Manager Gibbons yanked Aaron Sanchez an inning too early and Brett Cecil coughed up a lead in the game that ended with the Rays benefitting from a call on the Headley rule, leading to a double-play ruling from New York. Is it not true that if the Jays had held the lead in that game, and in four other early-season losses that could be attributable in large part to the bullpen, they would have won the division, and avoided the perilous status of wild card team?
Again, and finally, it’s a season of 162 games. The goal is to win as many as possible. Period.
And with that, it’s on to Baltimore for Opening Day 2017.
The TV people are cueing up the Jays’ game-day opening anthem.
Let’s play ball!
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