Saturday, February 5, 2011

Oh, Canada...

So I was enjoying a fine cigar and sipping brandy from my crystal snifter last night in front of the fireplace when I began thinking about the coming season. I thought about all the potential we have in the farm system - which is ranked 4th this year behind the Royals, Rays, and Braves according to Keith Law - and where we might end up in the AL East Beast come September. This got me comparing the futures of all the other Toronto teams.

A year ago, I wrote that the Jays might have ranked last without the talent infusion from the Scott Rolen and Roy Halladay trades. In the past 12 months, they saw a few in-house guys take steps forward, traded for another impact prospect in Brett Lawrie and had another solid draft, to the point that I left some likely big leaguers off their Top 10 for lack of room. The organizational turnaround in the year-plus since Alex Anthopoulos took over as GM has been impressive.
- Keith Law

Its actually quite funny when you think about how badly analysts and media suck on the collective dick of the Maple Leafs every pre-season only to find them mathematically eliminated from playoff contention by mid-February. .When it's time to look at the upcoming baseball season (which is rare) and talk about the upcoming Blue Jays campaign, its like pulling teeth in the sense that I'm watching such a shallow and vague presentation which no one producing it really gave half a fuck about.  I find that I'm having some deja vu right now as I hear bullshit about how the Jays will have a difficult time cracking the 75-win plateau. This is the same thing I heard last pre-season and we ended up with 85 notches on our belt.

But enough of my verbal diarrhea. The point I am trying to make here is that too many Canadians ( read: Torontonians) shit on the Jays. Far too often I hear people making absolutely horrible metaphors trying to tie the Blue Jays in with something shitty. So I put on my trench coat and grabbed my magnifying glass and started digging into the skidmarked records of the other Toronto teams to find out who the real retarded cousin of the family is.




Although some of the data is incomplete because both the Raptors and Leafs are still in the middle of their split-year season, we can just extrapolate the data simply by looking at how pathetic they have been in the first half of their respective campaigns.

I think I've made a solid case to take the "shittiest Toronto franchise" tags off of the Skydome and hang it up on the ACC. Then people will start hating the Leafs and come back to the awesomeness of baseball. Followed by hell freezing over and Megan Fox propositioning me for a blow job.

Some people are going to argue with this graph and claim that I didn't figure in the factors of injury, scheduling, etc., but I really don't feel like splitting hairs here. Plus we have the Yanks and Red Sox, so fuck off.

Friday, February 4, 2011

Popping the Proverbial Cherry


I imagine if you're reading this, then you were searching "fucking awesome" in Google. Either that or you're really desperate for some baseball- much like myself.
As of this post, we have at least another 9 days until we get any kind of action. And by action I mean Rick-Ro and Arencibia playing catch. At the very most, we have another full 3 weeks before the rest of the boys show up for some serious Spring Training shit.

But until then, let's check out some of the fresh meat:
Octavio Dotel
Jon Rauch
Frank Francisco
Carlos Villanueva
Rajai Davis
and
Juan Rivera

Really, I'm pretty stoked about this whole "closer race" between Frasor, Rauch,Francisco and Dotel. To think that last off-season we were shit outta luck with options for the role, and now we're overflowing like Christina Hendricks' tits in a low-cut tank top.

We'll get more into the other positions some other time. I just wanted to get this first post out of the way.