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Thanks to the stupefying greatness of Sean Forman's BaseballReference.com. we can now view the Opening Day starting lineup for every team, every season, ever. Here are Blue Jay Opening Day lineups dating back to that Opening Opening Day back in '77. Go take a look, revel in a trip down memory lane, then come back here and answer these questions ...


  • What was Toronto's best Opening Day lineup?
  • What was the most disappointing? (That is, the lineup that psyched you up so much you can't believe they didn't go 144-18 or something.)
  • Do any one-time-only Opening Day starters really strike you as surprising? (Either that they didn't start more than once or that they started even once at all?) Think Lance Parrish, Danny Ainge, Garth Iorg, Sil Campusano -- and of course, Mark Bomback.
  • Has any team had a run of solid consistency in CF over the past three decades to match Toronto's Moseby-White-Cruz-Wells streak?
  • No player has ever (yet) started 10 Opening Day games as a Jay -- Ernie Whitt leads the way with nine starts, while Lloyd Moseby, Jesse Barfield and, of all people, Alex Gonzalez each had eight. Roy Halladay is scheduled to make his sixth Opening Day start today -- already the most by a Jay hurler -- and Vernon Wells his seventh. What current Blue Jay (if any) will be the first to get to 10?
  • After winning their inaugural Opening Day game, the Jays dropped eight of their next nine -- but since then, they have won 14 of 21, so are 16-15 overall to start the season. Does this matter, do you care, so what?
  • What are your most indelible Opening Day memories?
  • Anything else jump out at you?

Opening Day Through the Years | 9 comments | Create New Account
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AWeb - Monday, March 31 2008 @ 08:03 AM EDT (#181737) #
What was Toronto's best Opening Day lineup?
1994 looks the best hitting-wise at first glance to me, although Delgado wasn't yet the beast of later years. Maybe 1986 instead?

What was the most disappointing? (That is, the lineup that psyched you up so much you can't believe they didn't go 144-18 or something.)
This one's 1986 for me. What happened that year after the greatness and disappointment of 1985?

Do any one-time-only Opening Day starters really strike you as surprising? (Either that they didn't start more than once or that they started even once at all?) Think Lance Parrish, Danny Ainge, Garth Iorg, Sil Campusano -- and of course, Mark Bomback.
Erik Hanson got an opening day start? So did Stottlemyre? and L-----?  The only repeat opening day lineup surprised me, mostly that it was the only one to happen twice. 21 DH's and 16 RF and LF's will do that, I guess.

Has any team had a run of solid consistency in CF over the past three decades to match Toronto's Moseby-White-Cruz-Wells streak?

Atlanta, with Jones, Grissom, Murphy? Cleveland with Butler, Lofton, Carter, Sizemore? Toronto's is certainly consistent with the above average non-superstar run.

What current Blue Jay (if any) will be the first to get to 10?
Wells seems most likely to get to 10 first. If he comes up short, then it'll be up to Rios, or Hill perhaps. Neither is nearly as likely as Wells

After winning their inaugural Opening Day game, the Jays dropped eight of their next nine -- but since then, they have won 14 of 21, so are 16-15 overall to start the season. Does this matter, do you care, so what?
Being in first place so early almost every year, and yet they always find a way to blow it! Bums!  [/sarcasm]

What are your most indelible Opening Day memories?

George Bell's 3HR, smoking Pedro Martinez in 2002, winning 12-11, accounting for 7 of the 50 ER's Pedro would allow that year. Within a month, they had put together a 4, 5 and 9 game losing streak, so it's fair to say 2002 peaked on Day 1. 1995's destruction of Oakland was pretty sweet, with the 11 run 2nd inning.

Anything else jump out at you?
Homer Bush started 4 straight years? Yeesh.
smcs - Monday, March 31 2008 @ 08:05 AM EDT (#181738) #
You seem to have missed Carlos Delgado and his 9 Opening Day starts: 1994 in LF, 1996 at 1B, 1997 at DH and then 1999-2004 at 1B.  I think this also qualifies as the most-surprising 1-time starter: Delgado started in LF?
Mike D - Monday, March 31 2008 @ 10:09 AM EDT (#181742) #

I vividly recall the '04 opener.  I was living in New York and had an appointment that day; on my way back to work, I "inadvertently" ducked into my apartment to watch the first inning on the Extra Innings package.  Doc looked amazing in the first inning.  His curve was maybe the best I had ever seen it, and he struck out the side. 

Checking in on the game later in the day at work, the fact that Roy Halladay, with the first-inning stuff he had, lost a blowout to Jason Johnson and the Tigers by a 7-0 score just floored me.  It was quite the omen for an injury-plagued, uninspiring last-place season, easily the worst in recent memory.

John Northey - Monday, March 31 2008 @ 12:31 PM EDT (#181765) #
What jumped at me was 1993. Domingo Martinez played at first base over John Olerud in one of only 4 games Olerud would miss all season (he also didn't start 1 other game). He wouldn't miss another game until May 7th so I doubt it was an injury. Guess Cito wanted Olerud to sit vs Randy Johnson which makes some sense as a single misthrow from Johnson could've ended Olerud's life and Johnson was still a wild thing back then (just finished a 3 year streak of 120+ BB's). Domingo would go on to play a total of 15 ML games in his career. Probably the lowest for any Jay opening day starter.

Interesting also to note the Jays won all 3 of Jimmy Key's opening day starts (87-89) and did the 3 in a row trick for 94-96, 2000-2002, and are on a 3 in a row streak now 05-06-07.

Lets hope for a new record set today with a 4th in a row!

ryan_the_canuck - Monday, March 31 2008 @ 12:44 PM EDT (#181769) #

Re: our 1993 1B...I forget if it was Brunt's book or O'Malley's, but one of them speculated that it was a combination of Johnson starting for the opposition and Olerud having a lot of family in attendance, Cito not wanting to put extra pressure on him.

Kinda surprised Randy Knorr never started during the mid-90s, especially when Parrish and Sandy/Angel Martinez both did.  And if you had told me that Greg Myers had two OD starts, I'd have guessed that at least one would be from his recent run - rather than Huckaby or Cash.

Never would have guessed that 2000 and 2001 would be the two years we'd use the same lineup.  I'd have thought mid-80s, but Bobby and Jimy found a way to keep every year different.

Delgado should already have 10, but he was injured to start 1998.

Domingo Cedeno.  That was a horrible year - him, Tilson Brito, Tomas Perez...a revolving door of subpar 2Bs.  Nice that we've had three different starting 2Bs with the surname Garcia, though.

Also surprised that Upshaw got a start in LF.

Let's also not forget about the decision to start NELSON LIRIANO as DH, or Dave Hollins' entire run with the Jays!

Rob - Monday, March 31 2008 @ 07:39 PM EDT (#181800) #
Odds are that centrayfielder Vernon Wells will be the first to reach 10, but everyone seems to be forgetting August 10, 1981, when Ernie Whitt kinda-sorta picked up his tenth Opening Day start. With the loss that day, the Blue Jays became the rare team to have an 11-game single-season losing streak over a 71-day period.

The fact that Alex Gonzalez started Opening Day eight times in a row frightens me terribly.

1978 is the only year with 17-year-vet Alan Ashby, the batting average at .245 lifetime.

Shawn Green started four times. Raul Mondesi started three. Wasn't he here longer than that? He was here that long?

Tony Fernandez started at three different defensive positions. Take that, Carlos.

1982 reminds me of a story. As a steamboat pilot, Samuel Langhorne Clemens needed to know the location of every hidden bomback along the Mississippi River. He would mark these bombacks so diligently on the map that his crewmates came up with a nickname for him, a name he would later use often.

Longest time between "Opening Jay" starts: Shannon Stewart, five years, tomorrow. Looks like Ken Huckaby dealt vicious blows to two players on March 31, 2003.

The lowest attendance for an Opening Day game appears to be 1996 in Las Vegas, with 7294 fans, or 6294 more than the last home opener for the Ottawa Lynx.

Mike D might even remember previewing that 2004 series, because he said "this might not be as much of a cakewalk as the easy, breezy pair of series that the Jays played with Detroit last September." Moral of the story is nothing's a cakewalk when Nate Robertson gets a four-inning save.

--

And Montreal's first games can be best dissected by someone who was there (Joe Orsulak!), but a trivia question is in order. As far as I can tell, three players started Opening Days for both the Jays and Expos. Name all three.
Mick Doherty - Monday, March 31 2008 @ 08:25 PM EDT (#181804) #
Rob, great question, and at least one -- maybe all three! -- of these will be wrong, but off the top of my head, three first basemen come to mind ... Lee Stevens, Brad Fullmer and Ron Fairly.

Or not. I don't know!

ryan_the_canuck - Monday, March 31 2008 @ 09:28 PM EDT (#181808) #

I think you got two out of three there Mick, but Stevens was never a Jay.

I'm pretty sure the third is still with us, sort of - Darrin Fletcher?

smcs - Tuesday, April 01 2008 @ 02:31 AM EDT (#181826) #
As far as I can tell, three players started Opening Days for both the Jays and Expos. Name all three.

Tony Batista, Brad Fullmer, Darrin Fletcher
Opening Day Through the Years | 9 comments | Create New Account
The following comments are owned by whomever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.