Another blast from the past while we await the return of baseball to our frosty shores. Here we have Frank Menechino hitting a home run off of our old buddy Mark Hendrickson:

The Blue Jays jumped all over Kevin Millwood with a five-run first and never looked back as they walloped a Cleveland split squad 12-9 in a game that was more one-sided than the score might indicate. The boxscore is available here.

Ah, lunch time on Monday, possibly the dreariest time at work except for maybe 9:00 am on Monday. But today we have baseball to cheer us up...

Sadly, the Jays are not broadcasting today's game. If anyone sniffs out a working Indians feed, please share it.

Two years after one of the worst seasons in baseball history, the Detroit Tigers will finish above .500 and contend for a division title.

With an exciting comeback in the bottom of the ninth the Blue Jays came back to beat the Minnesota Twins yesterday 6-5. Tied at four after four the Jays scored in the bottom of the seventh to take a 5-4 lead. The game looked lost when Jesse Carlson surrendered two in the top of the ninth.

However, the Jays strung together a rally in the bottom of the ninth and pushed two runs across the plate for an exciting, although relatively meaningless, victory. The winning hit was provided by pinch-hitter John-Ford Griffin, which brings forth the question, what does the future hold for Griffin? And what have we said about Griffin in the past?

Who is this mysterious Blue Jay?

Do you recognize him?

And what is he grinning about anyway?

Three days into Spring Training and already there's a rematch against Koskie's old team. How will the Fightin' Jays fare this time around?

The pitching matchup should be a good one, at least for the first two innings -- according to Saturday's Globe and Mail, we'll be seeing the mighty Roy Halladay up against the equally mighty Johan Santana.

“The south side of Chicago is the baddest part of town...”

In 2004, the Sox finally broke the curse. Having not won a World Championship since the dark days of World War I...

Oops. Wrong Sox.

Weaver's First Law: No one's going to give a damn in July if you lost a game in March.

On the topic of strategy, we'll discuss bench strategies the Jays could employ against right-handed pitchers this season.

Ah, the weekend. The time for all of us to say thanks and offer panegyrics to the good people behind the labour movement, without whom we'd all be toiling away in sugar factories on Saturday instead of enjoying some yerba mate, some Liquid Paper, a few calendars, an apple, myriad envelopes, a five-line telephone, UW directories . . . wait a second. Those are the contents of my desk! Ugh. It was a long week. Count me amongst the grateful masses for having two days of semi-freedom—though I'm not always as grateful as I should be.

The BBFL concluded its offseason trading window with a modest amount of activity: five trades in the Alomar Division and seven in Barfield.

MLB determined that there was "bad blood" between Toronto and Tampa Bay back in '03, maybe because the Rays thought the Jays were rhyming copycats intent on stealing their cleverly original idea of a black alternate jersey. Since that fateful homestand with its manufactured enmity, well, there has been some halfhearted bad blood.

Sadly, without Victor "My balls, they got a lot of move" Zambrano pitching for Tampa, there's not much of a chance that we'll see a half-dozen hit batsmen, ejections, or a bench-clearing brawl. Or at least we won't see all that started by a perfectly innocent series of wild pitches.

The Jays started playing baseball again yesterday, even if it didn't count. So, naturally, I want to think about the last baseball game that most of us saw.

Remember? October 27, 2004; the final game of the 100th World Series. That night we all saw something we had never seen before.

No, not Boston winning a big game.

The Jays opened their grapefruit schedule yesterday against the defending AL Central champs.

They played the game, there were umpires and everything. I'm sure someone was even keeping score.

But no one cares about any of that stuff. It's spring training.

Kansas City headed into 2004 coming off of a surprising 83-79 record. Hopes were high that the team would improve and challenge for the AL Central crown. However, those hopes didn't materialize as the team managed just 58 wins and saw Carlos Beltran leave town.