For the last two seasons in Toronto, most Jays fans seem to have fallen into one of three camps when it comes to Brandon Morrow:

1. Dude is AMAZING!!1
2. He’s got great stuff, but what the hell? Why is he so frustrating?
3. Morrow’s pitching? UGH. WHY BOTHER WATCHING? He SUCKS.

While I think hope nobody reading this falls into that third group, the second group is, rightfully, highly populated. In fact, I find myself in that second group most times, but Morrow’s got something that makes me and a lot of other people believe that he could make the leap into the AMAZING!!1 category — and he could do it as soon as this season.

Even the experts at Fangraphs think highly enough of Morrow to draw some comparisons between him and Justin Verlander. That’s some pretty high praise for Morrow and if the comparison turns out to even be fractionally valid, Toronto’s in a good place for at least the next four years.

Why four years? Because the Blue Jays just signed Morrow to a three-year extension worth $20 million. The deal also includes a $10-million option for the 2015 season.

At just under $7 million a season, Morrow’s a steal — even if he doesn’t improve all that much.

Poor Alexei Ogando. He’s been demoted to an actual bullpen.

To be fair, the posting system which allows Japanese players who are still controlled by their Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) team is a murky, complicated and secretive process. It is easy to get confused about these things if you don’t know how the process works. It’s especially easy to get confused when rumour mongers can’t help themselves from tweeting and reporting every utterance they hear (whether it’s actually heard or just in their head).

Now, as the deadline for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters (Darvish’s Japanese team) to  either accept or reject the highest bid to come from MLB teams, let’s take a look at what we actually know about the situation:

Is Darvish coming to Toronto?

As of right now, anybody speaking in certainties about which team Darvish is going to play for next year is talking out of their ass. The fact of the matter is that, until a bid is accepted, NOBODY knows. Not even Darvish himself (OK, maybe he’s been told, but he doesn’t officially know). I know that sounds a little crazy, but it’s a function of the posting process. Read on and it will, I hope, become clear.

How does posting work?

Once a player is posted by his NPB team, there are three steps to the process:

1. MLB teams have a 4-day window to submit sealed bids to MLB Commissioner Bud Selig. When that 4-day window closes, Selig goes over the bids and notifies his Japanese counterpart of the high bid. At this point the only people who know what the high bid is and which team it came from are the two commissioners and whatever trusted henchman they may have had in the room with them.
2. NPB Commissioner Ryozo Kato notifies the posted player’s team of the high bid. The Japanese team has a 4-day window to decide whether to accept the bid.
3. If the NPB team accepts the bid, the MLB team which offered the bid has a 30-day window to negotiate a contract with the posted player. If a contract is reached, the NPB team keeps the posting fee*. If the team and player are not able to reach an agreement, the posting fee is refunded to the MLB team that failed to sign the player.

* It’s important to note that the posting fee is completely separate from the player contract. A posting fee of, say, $50 million is completely separate from a $50-million contract awarded to the player. Those two examples would result in the MLB team spending $100 million on the player.

So where are we right now?

The process for Darvish is nearing the end of the second step. Any rumours you’ve heard to date about where Darvish is going and for how much, well, those are just rumours.

Would it be cool if the Blue Jays land Darvish? Hell yes. But, if even the Jays win the bidding process, there’s no guarantee the Japanese star will land in Canada.

Looky there! A new-fangled slideshow thingy!

And looky here! A review of the new Blue Jays uniforms from a a bonafide fashion expert!

Toronto-based fashion writer and friend of the blog Emma Yardley has helped us out in the past. What makes her qualified to give a professional review of the new uniforms? Lots of things! Not the least of which is the fact she is the Associate Editor of sweetspot.ca. She has been featured in too many magazines and newspapers for me to list here. AND she’s on twitter and blogs about fashion.

So what does Emma have to say about the new uniforms?

Obviously, the Blue Jay’s design team took what I said the last time I weighed in on the uniforms to heart. (Glad to know they’re fans of Infield Fly.) Gone is the Angry Bird blue-jay head, the black is back to the blue and the weird grey J-swoosh is history.

Speaking of history, that’s where they’ve gone and, in my opinion, that’s where they should stay. Play on our nostalgia, people. That’s how it works in fashion, that’s how it should work in sports, too.

Each (fashion) season, designers pull ideas from the history archives and create collections of clothes that evoke a certain time that they feel with resonate with the modern customer. It may be the entrepreneurial spirit of the Wild West, it could be the opulence of the 80s, but these cultural curators know how to fill a hole we feel we’re collectively missing…with clothes.

That is what the Blue Jays are doing with these uniforms. They’re taking us back to our childhood rec rooms, shag carpet and all, and reminding us of the Jays’ glory days. It’s a smart move. It’s an obvious move. I usually am all for surprises, but for once I was glad I wasn’t shocked when they revealed these new/old uniforms. Instead, I felt comforted. In these unstable times, that is exactly what we need.

(p.s I still think they should drop the red maple leaf from the jay head, though, and relegate it to the back of the uniform. Let the jay speak for itself. Sorry, boys.)

Emma’s right, times are unstable and, while it may be a trivial matter overall, it is a bit comforting to see the Jays embracing the past that we (mostly) all remember so fondly.

Also: That maple leaf is a little whacky.

Big thanks to Emma for helping us out yet again, and please do check out her other work.

The new Toronto Blue Jays logo

I’ve done a lot of griping about the Blue Jays logo and uniforms on the site. But no more.

The Blue Jays have unveiled a new logo and new uniforms for the 2012 season. There’s a quickly thrown together gallery for those few who haven’t seen it yet.

The new design, while not perfect, is roughly a trillion times better than the angry bird it’s succeeding.

Alternate jersey

Maybe not surprising, since one of my chief criticisms of the previous uniforms is the lack of the colour blue, but my favourite of the new jerseys is the alternate, what with it being blue and all.

Stay tuned, as a friend of the blog and real-life fashion expert will provide us with a review the new uniforms.

But in the meantime, what do you think? Is the new design an improvement? Which jersey is your favourite? Let us know in the comments.

Am I late? Darn tootin’. But I got a request, and I’m not about to let my readers down like that. In any other number of ways, sure, but not like that.

The request was to share my thoughts on Yu Darvish who, for those few who don’t already know, is a Japanese pitching sensation that’s poised to make the move to MLB next year. Because of the way player transfers from Japan work, every MLB has a theoretical shot at landing Darvish, as long as it’s willing to spend the money.

My thoughts on Darvish can be boiled down to one: Toronto should make every attempt to sign the man.

But why? Make the jump and I’ll give my reasons!

Darvish has great stuff

You can go read all the scouting reports on the guy you want, but this graph (taken from the wonderful NPB Tracker) should tell you all you really need to know:

Follow the NPB Tracker link above for a fancy interactive version of this chart!

Not only does Darvish throw hard, not only does he have a curveball that comes in roughly 30 m.p.h. slower than his fastball and not only does Darvish throw seven (!) pitches, but one of them is the fabled shuuto!

With Bruce Walton’s knack for turning people like Jesse Litsch into OKish starters, it’d be damn scary to see what he could do with someone of Darvish’s obvious talents.

Oh, the marketing opportunities

Despite many reports to the contrary, Toronto is one of the largest markets in MLB and the stadium really can be filled on a regular basis. But how to get the people out?

Spending big on a free agent on Darvish’s calibre would surely appease a lot of the Maple Leafs fans who are more than happy to call into the Fan and say they won’t support the team until they “spend, spend, spend.” But signing Darvish could bring in even more people than that…

According to Statistics Canada, of the roughly 5.5 million in the Greater Toronto Area in 2006, a full 1,132,215 of them were from Asia and the Middle East. Now surely some of that group are already Jays fans and some never will be. But there’s got to be a chunk that could be won over by bringing in a half-Japanese, half-Iranian pitcher who’s widely regarded as the best player outside of MLB.

Bandwagoners and new fans won over all at once? What’s not to like?

Signing Darvish won’t break the bank

Yes, it’ll be expensive. There will be a lot of millions of dollars going to the Nippon Ham Fighters as a posting fee (the New York Times has a great explanation of the posting fee system, if you’re interested) but that won’t affect the team’s ability to sign anybody else. Not if team president Paul Beeston is to be believed anyway.

And to prove it, I’m going to show how behind the 8 Ball I am in getting this post up.

Going way back, check out these snippets from an interview Beeston gave to the Toronto Star’s Richard Griffin:

RG: You’re not a guy who shoots from the hip in terms of saying something that’s not well thought out. At the fan get-together in February tou talked on the mic about the possibility that this organization could spend up to $120 million on payroll. Obviously that was well thought out and that you weren’t just off-the-cuff. But you weren’t talking about direct, major league team payroll? I mean you included draft bonuses, international free agency. Is that how you approached it at that time or is it…

 

PB: No, we’re talking salaries. We’re talking salaries. I was talking about the 40-man roster.

 

…

 

RG: Alex at his end of season get-together with media stated the obvious in certain areas, that you need a frontline pitcher, a guy at the back-end of the bullpen, a hitter, the usual stuff, but in terms of Rogers, is there any feeling that this Japanese kid (Yu Darvish) could open a new market for them. I don’t want you to go out and alert every other team that you’re going to be posting very high for this guy, but it’s an opportunity in an Asian-heavy GTA…

 

PB: I can answer it this way. I think those people at Rogers who never heard of him before, now know this player is in existence.

If I’m reading that correctly, the posting fee wouldn’t be factored into any payroll limitations AND the team’s serious enough about Darvish that the idea’s been run up the flagpole. Good signs, people, good signs!

The best reason

Signing Darvish would keep him out of Boston and New York.

Looking back, it’s pretty easy to see that I missed the mark. As blog commenter JC put it, most of my predictions were an “epic fail.” That being said, no harm in going through them for everyone’s amusement about how one fan in rose coloured glasses can be so wrong.

So, here, in order, are the predictions I made and my own thoughts on how they turned out (for complete details on what my predictions were in April, click the link above).

1. The Jays will once again exceed expectations and win more games than last year

Simple enough, I missed the mark on this one, as I would say the Jays planted themselves firmly in the camp of “meeting expectations” or coming in under them, depending how optimistic your outlook was.

While I typically always try to take an optimistic outlook with the team, perhaps anyone who was being realistic about 2011 would have said the team’s finish - 82-82, three fewer wins than 2010 - was about what was expected.

2. Jose Bautista will regress towards the mean

I thought this was easily the safest of all my predictions, but apparently the verdict is still out there on where exactly the mean is for the man known as Joey Bats.

I was quite happy to be proven wrong on this one, as it was enjoyable watching Bautista turn in an even better season, by almost all objective measures aside from homeruns, than the breakout campaign he had in 2010.

Jose Bautista continues to turn heads and raise his level of performance.

3. Travis Snider will be the team’s MVP

Although I could have easily seen this prediction not coming to fruition, there wasn’t much chance I saw Snider’s season turning out as poorly as it did.

A .616 OPS, 56 K’s in 202 PA’s and an extended tour of duty down at AAA does not an MVP make.

I want to believe, Travis, I really do. But each and every year you get older and the prospect shimmer turns to veteran underperformance, it’s getting harder to do so.

4. Toronto’s bullpen will return to being one of the AL’s best

Orrrr it will be about as bad as it has been in years. Alright. I was close on this one.

5. The Jays will actually be sellers at the trade deadline

This is one of the only predictions I somewhat hit on the head, as rather than sitting pat and trying to delude the fanbase that the Jays could contend in 2011, AA dealt the likes of R-Zep, Dotel, MacDonald and Hill towards the latter half of the season, in efforts to shore up the franchise’s future. 

It was tough to see some of those guys go, but refreshing to see a new attitude in the front office.

6. Roy Halladay will return to pitch at the SkyDome, will flirt with a no hitter. Thankfully won’t get treated like garbage, I hope

No no-hit bid, but very very thankfully Doc was treated very well in his return to the Dome. For once I was proud of Blue Jays fans.

7. J.P. Arencibia’s transition to the major league starter won’t be seamless

There's still more work to do for Mr. Arencibia

The afforementioned commenter JC grouped this prediction under my “epic fail” category, but I’m still going to claim that this is a correct prediction.

I predicted he’d hit .230 with 12 homeruns. He ended up hitting .219 with 23 homeruns. So, does that qualify as a seamless transition to the major leagues? In my opinion, no.

He still struck out 144 times this past season and posted an ugly OBP of only .275. He’s still got some growing pains to go through both offensively and defensively, but his rookie campaign was definitely a positive step forward.

In 2012, hopefully more walks and fewer strikeouts.

8. Brett Lawrie is not nearly as good as you think he is. Calm down

While Lawrie did everything that could have reasonably be asked of him in his rookie campaign, and posted an impressive .293/.373/.580 with 9 homeruns, I’m still standing by the original sentiment of this prediction.

He hasn’t even yet played a full season in the major leagues, he hasn’t even yet gone through any extended period of struggle, which is something that will happen without a doubt. How will he handle a long major league slump? Nobody knows, but he obviously still has more to prove at the major league level. 

Is he dynamic, exciting and an amazing talent that should be a keystone for the Jays for years to come? Without a doubt.

Is he a surefire first-ballot Hall of Famer that his first half season in the bigs might suggest? That remains to be seen.

I will no longer tell people to calm down about it, because I now see that Lawrie is in fact worth getting excited about. However, I’m still of the mind that expectations need to be tempered slightly, as by coming in right off the bat and meeting and perhaps exceeding each and every expectation, he has perhaps set his stock at an even higher and perhaps unsustainable level.

9. One of Ricky Romero/Brett Cecil and/or Kyle Drabek will put up a serious Cy Young-esque or ROY (Drabek) season

Drabek and Cecil were obviously awful, but while Romero’s campaign wasn’t nearly good enough to warrant Cy Young consideration amongst seasons like that of Justin Verlander, I’m still saying I’m at least partially right, as Romero threw down an ace-quality season.

10. Adam Lind/Aaron Hill return to being good major leaguers

Adam Lind was hot for a stretch and although he ended up having better overall numbers, it assuredly wasn’t the bounce back that was expected.

Although he was pretty putrid offensively in Toronto, a solid late-season push by Hill in Arizona returned his overall numbers to relative respectability. While his almost complete lack of power is still mystifying,  here’s to hoping he can continue to turn things around wherever he ends up next year.

So there you have it, I was about 1-for-10 with a couple half points sprinkled in? Much like the Jays, maybe I’ll do better this year.

Now let’s say you’ve managed to hire someone from a rival. This someone is a little lacking in experience at the position you hire him for, but there’s a consensus in the industry that he’s going to be great once he gets some practice.

A year passes. The guy you’ve hired has made some questionable moves, but damn it, he’s showing the potential everybody knows he has.

Meanwhile, the rival from which you hired the employee suddenly has an opening and they want your man. They’ve got a chance to conquer the industry as early as next year and they want him to help lead them to the top.

If he wants to leave, do you stop him?

Keep in mind that if he wants to go, and you don’t let him, the atmosphere in your workplace is going to take a dive. The guy doesn’t want to be there — and everybody knows it.

What do you do?

***********************************

Is John Farrell going to leave the Blue Jays to manage the Red Sox? Only John Farrell knows.

If I’m Alex Anthopoulos, and if Farrell wants to go, I absolutely let him. Why poison the clubhouse like that? Why risk a big, big dent in the reputation of being a great place to work?

It’d definitely be tempting to prevent Boston from poaching the manager, if the Red Sox do indeed want to do that, but that’s an urge that’s got to be resisted.

Maybe offering Farrell some more money would get him to stay if he’s considering leaving. Maybe improving the team would get him to stay if he’s considering leaving. Those moves would be fine. Simply saying “you can’t go because I say so”? That’s not good enough. Not if you’re trying to build something real.

Now all that stands in the Cardinals’ way is the Texas Rangers, a team which has no trouble defeating destiny. In the ALDS, they dispatched the Tampa Bay Rays rather handily. Not enough proof? Why, just last year, they won the World Series when they beat a team that made it that far despite not knowing how to score runs! (What? They didn’t beat the Giants? Oh…)

Anyway, look. The Rangers are pretty huge favourites to win the whole thing this year. I believe the odds are such that if you bet on the Rangers in Vegas, you’ve got to put down about $1.50 to win a dollar.

But you, dear Jays fan, should be cheering for the Cardinals to overcome the odds again. Not only because it’s more fun to cheer for an underdog, but because the better the Cardinals do, the better off our real favourite team is.

Tony La Russa is a Questionable Man who thinks Questionable Things

You know how so many Blue Jays fans go around calling Alex Anthopoulos a “silent assassin”? Maybe a ninja? I don’t like it, but the sentiment is justified. Anthopoulos earns the title because he does things like trade (essentially) Marc Rzepcynski, Octavio Dotel and Corey Patterson for Colby Rasmus.

(I know the deal was more complicated than that, but come on.)

Judging by the reactions of most Jays fans, Anthopoulos had reached the Billy-Beane-in-Moneyball level of trading. That is to say that other GMs should be afraid when Anthopoulos gives them a call. That reaction is and was justified. And it’s exactly why we should all be cheering for the Cardinals right now.

For all the fleecing of St. Louis that took place back in July, the Cardinals still made it to the World Series. On top of that, Tony La Russa is saying that his team getting ripped off in the deal is the REASON the Cardinals are in the World Series. Seriously. I’m not making this up.

“I’ll tell you if that trade had not been made, I believe we probably would have been an under .500 club. That’s how important it was to us.” —Tony La Russa, genius

The more the Cards win, and the more the more their people make Toronto’s front office sound stupid for trading with them, the better is for Toronto.

If you’re a competing GM and Anthopoulos gives you a call, would you rather be afraid that he’s going to rip you off or would you like to think that “hey, maybe he’ll help me win the World Series, too!”

If the Cardinals win, it will make Anthopoulos look, in the eyes of many people, a little bit dumb. We know that’s not true in the least, but it’s a damn good thing for other teams to think.

So, Go Cards. Win it for the good people of Toronto.

So yeah, here’s my ballot followed by a picture and then a video. They may be related, they may not. I haven’t decided yet. Feel free to rip my ballot in the comments!

5. Jered Weaver, California Angels of a parking lot in Los Angeles

4. James Shields, Tampa Bay Rays

3. Dan Haren, Anaheim Angels of Los Angeles, California, United States of America

2. C.C. Sabathia, New York Yankees

1. Justin Verlander, Detroit Tigers

I used to work at a paper where the agate guy would always delete the first two letters of DeJesus in the boxscores. Nobody ever complained.

P.S. Better things are coming.