Tag Archives: Alex Anthopoulos

Colby Rasmus

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The above tweet? Truth.

There’s a lot of talk about how Alex Anthopoulos is a ninja. I don’t like it. Why apply an overused term to a man of his genius, especially when there’s a much easier explanation for how he does what he does?

Watch Betty the crow:

Betty accomplishes her goal by using a spare part and fashioning it into a useful tool to get what she really wants: The food in the damn tube.

Anthopoulos accomplishes his goal by using spare parts and fashioning them into a useful tool (trade bait) to get what he really wants: Colby Rasmus from the damn Cardinals.

Betty is a crow. Crows are corvids. Blue jays are corvids.

Alex Anthopoulos is not a ninja.

Alex Anthopoulos is a Blue Jay.

.500 at the quarter

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Here we are, 40 games done, a full quarter (or close enough, anyway) of the way through the season. While there are a few things that deserve to be talked about if we’re going to look at how the team’s performed so far, one thing, er… person, stands above all.

Holy hell, Jose Bautista is a goddamn monster. For real! The season he’s been putting together is without a doubt THE story of the year so far. It was going to be even if he hadn’t gone out today and hit 3 home runs against the Minnesota Twins.

You’ll probably see and/or hear a lot of people saying that Joey Bats is on pace right now to hit 65 home runs this year. What you won’t (or I haven’t anyway) hear is that he’s also on pace to play only 130 games.

You’re reading that right: Bautista is averaging a home run every two games. That’s unreal. I laughed when, during Saturday’s broadcast, the Sportsnet crew showed a graphic comparing what Bautista’s done this season to the best 3 full seasons Babe Ruth put together during his career. Really, at this point, it is still laughable but today I do feel differently. After watching what he did today, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Bautista top 60 home runs this year.

Record

I probably should’ve mentioned this up top, but the Jays currently sit at 20-20, good for third place in the AL East at the time of this writing. The actual win-loss record doesn’t seem all that surprising to me, until injuries are taken into consideration, but more on that later.

Management

Some days, John Farrell looks like a fool out there. He really, really does. But not everything he catches crap for is something he deserves to catch crap for. Letting Rajai Davis run? Good management. Letting Corey Patterson run? Questionable. Pulling pitchers when they’re one out from a complete game shutout? Not so bad. Using Octavio Dotel against left-handed batters on a regular basis? HORRIBLE — and getting worse.

But the thing Farrell seems to get the most heat for is his lineup construction. Yes, the lineups sometimes look like a dog’s lunch, but what do you expect him to do? The injuries this team have suffered have been so ridiculous that they recently played a game with only ONE guy on the bench.

As for the other management figure worth noting, I’m still a big supporter of Alex Anthopoulos. And his decision to lock up Joey Bats is really making him look like a genius. But I don’t care how much he might say about Travis Snider and his swing issues — I still don’t understand the speed with which the Lunchbox Hero was demoted.

Speed

The Jays are fast. Like second-in-the-AL-in-stolen-bases fast. Sure only two teams have been caught stealing more than Toronto and I understand it can be frustrating to watch the team “run into outs,” but I enjoy the running game. Speed kills!

Injuries

So here’s the thing — the Jays are 20-20 despite having seen the following players spend time on the DL miss time for various reasons: Octavio Dotel; Frank Francisco; Brandon Morrow; Corey Patterson; Rajai Davis (twice); Jose Bautista (twice); Yunel Escobar (twice); Aaron Hill; Edwin Encarnacion; and Jayson Nix. (ed: How did I forget to include Adam Lind? That’s a hashtag fail.)

That’s 10 guys. Add that to Jesse Carlson hanging out on the 60-day DL for the whole season so far and Travis Snider raking in the Pacific Coast League for some reason and you’ve got to pretty impressed with the Jays and their .500 record. Get everybody healthy and getting Snider going to the potential we all know he has and there’s no telling what this team can do

Conclusion

This team’s still pretty unlikely to make the playoffs. They’re better, so far, than most expected, but they still play in the AL East. They do though have Joey Bats and he’s got pretty broad shoulders…

10 bold predictions

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We interrupt your regularly scheduled postings from Chris to bring you a post from me, Cole, formerly a member of the yearly roundtable, now a contributing member of the blog.

Throughout the time that Infield Fly has been around, Chris has periodically asked me if I would write for it. After all, I have been called by many people the biggest Jays’ fan they know, and considering Chris and I met at journalism school, he knows I’m a writer.

I’ve always thought there was nothing I could really add to the blogosphere that isn’t already out there in other Jays blogs I love.

However, at about this same time last year I recall trying to motivate myself to write a blog post and the idea I came up with was to make a prediction/observation that the Jays squad was going to hit a lot of home runs in the 2010 season. Of course we all know that in fact turned out to the truth, but it’s also a fact that the aforementioned blog post never made it out of my brain and into words.

Too bad, I could have been a prognosticating genius (just like seemingly every major media outlet last year that predicted the Jays would be in the cellar and likely lose 100 games, *ahem*)

At any rate, I figured this year, I won’t let my predictions go undocumented. I will put them here and when October rolls around and the Jays are getting ready for their ALDS matchup (Let’s hear it for optimism???) I can look back and see how accurate I was.

I should also note that I’m by nature an optimist when it comes to the Jays, especially in the spring. Not all of my predictions are cheery and rosy, but for the most part you’ll notice I’m not hoping for the train to fall off the tracks here.  Continue reading →

JoBau breaks my brain

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Word on the street is that the Blue Jays and Jose Bautista are close to a deal — a 5-year, $65-million deal. The word in my head is that this is a bad idea.

I’d been waiting all offseason for this signing to happen. Planned to lead the post with a song. The Pixies. Bone Machine.

“You’re so pretty when you’re faithful to me.”

Would’ve been great, in my head anyway. But, as I’ve already said, this deal, it doesn’t please my head so much.

Why? Because Bautista really just doesn’t have a very good track record. Yeah, his 2010 was off the charts, but everything else he’s done has been, well, less than impressive.

(If you want numbers on this, there are plenty of blogs that will give you that. Might I suggest Getting Blanked or Ghostrunner on First — assuming Drew tackles this subject — as a good starting point?)

So, assuming the report is correct, why would the Jays sign a deal like this one? I’ve got two theories. Maybe one’s correct, maybe there’s a third option that escapes me:

1. Blue Jays brass truly believes Bautista’s the real deal. Locking him up now may be more expensive in the short-term than going to arbitration and letting him mash his way through 2011, pushing his value even higher and potentially losing him to an outrageous bid from the Red Sox or Yankees.

2. Just as the Vernon Wells deal before it, the word came from on high: “I don’t care what you want to do, you’re going to sign this player.” From a marketing standpoint, this makes sense. Alex Anthopoulos has already built up a huge amount of credit with the “knowledgable” fans, but there are a lot of Maple Leafs fans in this city who aren’t happy with prospects and building the right way. Remember when VW was traded and the immediate calls to spend that $25 million elsewhere? This deal should go a long way toward keeping those people happy and, if you’re worried about ticket sales, that’s something you might want to take into consideration.

If the team made its move based on Theory 1 as listed above, and the gamble pays off, this is a great move. But I don’t see it working out quite that way.

That’s not to say I see Bautista completely falling off a cliff. No, I see him regressing to be a good, but not great, player. The kind of player you can likely get for less than $13 million per.

But you know what? Even if this deal is real and even if Bautista completely falls off a cliff, it’s not the worst thing in the world. It does give younger players something to look forward to (play well and be rewarded for it) and it should go a long way toward building up the reputation the team’s working toward (we take care of our own and we’re a great place to be).

So maybe it’s not the best thing, and I definitely don’t like it right now, but it’s not a horrible, stupid thing either.

And who knows, the reports of this deal may be false anyway.

I believe in bravado

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The Blue Jays’ state of the franchise meeting was held last week. I was not in attendance and this post is not timely, but here it is anyway — and I’ll keep it short. Two things short, even.

Thing the first

According to Gregor Chisholm of bluejays.com (and everybody else who was in attendance and wrote anything about the meeting), Toronto general manager Alex Anthopoulos said some pretty good things, not the least of which was the following:

“We want to get [to the playoffs] as fast as we can. What we won’t do is shortcut it. When we do get there, it’s not going to stop. It’s going to be a freight train that’s going to keep going.”

This is definitely in line with how he’s expressed his vision for the team before, but it’s a more forceful, focused approach than I’m used to hearing from the general manager. Is he getting more comfortable in his role and more willing to voice his true feelings? Maybe he just felt emboldened by sitting in front of a few hundred true believers? Either way, hearing AA spout the tough talk like that — and I know it doesn’t mean anything if the team doesn’t deliver the results when the time comes — makes me happier with this team’s direction than anything else the team has done since ditching J.P. Ricciardi.

Baseball can be analyzed in many, many ways, but when it comes right down to it, the only thing that matters is winning. Winning is great, but winning with swagger is the funnest way to do it. AA seems to be getting himself some swagger. I like it.

Thing the second

This is minor, but it should give the phone-in-show Leafs fans one less thing to whine about during the summer months and will help keep the media somewhat at bay if the team doesn’t perform as well as they think it should. It’s a throwaway part of a throwaway sentence located in a throwaway graph at the end of Chisholm’s above-linked story, but it’s important nonetheless:

For Farrell, it was his first opportunity to take part in the State of the Franchise event. The first-year manager, who said he was in the final stages of purchasing a condominium in downtown Toronto, came away impressed.

John Farrell is buying a condo in Toronto. Maybe he’s not moving his family here (or maybe he is, who knows) but he’s buying property in Toronto, dammit. He likes us! And that’s all that really matter, right?