2007 rambles, and another goodbye

Saturday, October 13 2007 @ 08:15 AM EDT

Here are some random thoughts about the 2007 season from a Blue Jays fan's perspective.

Warning: as is usual with anything I write, this article is remarkably analysis-free, owing to extreme laziness.

The 2007 season was strange. In the spring, everybody thought that the Jays would score a lot of runs, have trouble finding good non-Doc starting pitching, and be able to rely on Ryan and League to shut down close games. Instead, the offense bombed, the starting pitching was great, and Ryan and League went AWOL but the bullpen was awesome anyway. Clearly, we are now in UpsideDownLand.

And, back in March, everyone was worrying about the Jays having signed two 39-year-old guys to bolster their offense. This is usually risky, because old guys are more likely to get hurt. Instead, the old guys stayed healthy all year, and everybody else got hurt. Like I said, UpsideDownLand.

Here's a few random comments and/or opinions:

• Job One for the Jays' brand-new hitting coach is to determine whether Adam Lind can actually hit. (Job Two is to determine whether anybody else can hit.) If not, the Jays need a new left fielder. I love watching Reed Johnson play, but his 2006 was almost certainly a fluke. And he'll be 31 in the offseason, so he's well past his peak.
  
  
• Actually, many of the Jays are now either at their peak or past it. The time to win is right now, if not sooner; of the Jays' starting nine, only Hill and Rios are younger than the traditional prime age of 27. Soon, the hitters will grow old, and we'll all have to sit around for a couple of years and endure a lot of 3-1 games until Travis Snider grows up.

• The Jays' pitching hasn't improved as much as some people think. What's happened: the infield defense has become wonderful. Replace McDonald and Hill with non-superhuman defenders, and the pitching will quickly revert to average at best.

• Related to this: the Jays have to do whatever it takes to keep Brian Butterfield. You can tell that Butters is good: the Jays' second basemen keep turning into awesome Gold Glove monsters. Neither Hudson nor Hill were that good defensively coming up; in fact, neither was a full-time second baseman.
  
  
• I believe that A-Rod will return to the Yankees, after being offered an extra $150-million or a small savings and loan, or maybe Ecuador. This is all an elaborate dance. (I think that Joe Torre will be back, too.)
  
  
• If A-Rod does opt out, and the Yanks decide not to re-sign him, he'll go to one of the teams with a rich owner who sees his team as an expensive plaything. If Mark Cuban buys the Cubs, he'll probably be willing to throw $300-million over 10 years at A-Rod. The Angels are another possibility.
  
  
• Regardless of what happens, A-Rod will never come to Toronto. The Jays would never pay that kind of money: Ted Rogers is a businessman. The Jays are an investment for him, not a way to stave off Rich Man's Ennui; he saw that the franchise was capable of generating more revenue than it had been, and he made his move. The evidence shows that he was right. (I'm not complaining about Rogers, by the way - things are a lot better with him in charge than they were when the team was run by absentee brewmasters from Belgium.)
  
  
• Barry Bonds will not be coming to Toronto. The Jays have Frank Thomas, who (a) is hitting just as well, (b) is younger, (c) isn't causing any problems, and (d) swings a mean pillow. Bonds is the one player I cannot root for; if J.P. signs him, I'm gonna spend my summer at Christie Pits and/or drowning my sorrows in Mill Street Tankhouse Ale. (I might be doing the latter anyway, but that's beyond the scope of this article.)
  
  
• Did you know that John Gibbons now has the third-longest tenure of any Jays manager in history? Only Cito Gaston and Bobby Cox have held the job for longer than Gibbons has had it. If Gibbons can make it to mid-August of next year, he'll pass Cox.
  
  
• Did you know that Vernon Wells actually hit well in April this year? His OBP was .368, and his SLG was .563. Both those numbers are, you know, kinda good and all that. This lends support to the "Vernon's numbers were off because he was nursing a secret injury" theory, as opposed to the "Vernon isn't very good" theory, or even the "Vernon is a lazy slacker" theory.
  
  
• After the All-Star break, Roy Halladay's ERA was 3.02, with 71 strikeouts in 116 innings. He'll be just fine. And A.J. Burnett, who is trying his very best to become Doc II, is just about managing it - though Gibbons will have to resist the temptation to overwork him, even if A.J. is still striking people out after having thrown over 120 pitches. The man is human, and does not deserve to be criticized for going on the DL this summer.
  
  
• Shaun Marcum, on the other hand, had an ERA of 4.68 after the break. I don't know whether he can be relied on any more. Regardless of what happens, he'll always have that wonderful summer when he was throwing four pitches for strikes and batters were consistently guessing wrong. Sometimes, all you get is one moment in the sun.
  
  
• We'll find out by about June whether Dustin McGowan can handle a front-line starter's workload. One of the reasons why so many pitchers get injured is that it takes a few months for an overworked pitcher to break down. Arms, unfortunately, do not come with flashing warning lights; pitching injuries are often subtle and gradual things. For example: B.J. Ryan looked just fine all last year. If McGowan's going to go on the shelf, it'll happen next spring.

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