Last September John Suomi was playing in the most exciting baseball series of his life and he had every reason to feel on top of the world. The 23-year-old catcher had just completed a very solid season for the Modesto A’s of the California League, which had included a spot in the California League All-Star Game. The A’s were playing the Lancaster Jethawks in the California League Championship Series and the best of five series was knotted at one game apiece. Suomi had solidified his status as something more than organisational filler, and a ticket to Double-A looked to be in the cards for 2005. However, in the third game of the championship series came the play that may have irreparably changed Suomi’s career.

I'm homeless.

Test your prognostication skills in the 2005 Batter's Box Predictions Contest!

In 2004, Simon held off 78 other contestestants to win the 2004 Contest. In 2003, I somehow won. Will this be your lucky year?

The prize for winning this year's contest may or may not include one of the following:

• Buster Olney's two-volume set Productive Outs: Theory and Practice and Fun With Scattergrams.
  
• A copy of Quiet Dignity: The Ozzie Guillen Story.
  
• A genuinely terrifying 24x36 picture of Jose Canseco, suitable for framing.

On to the Contest!

The following story will appear in the April 1 and April 15 editions of American Way magazine, the award-winning inflight magazine of American Airlines. It is republished here in full with permission of the author.

I saw the below cartoon today and just absolutely could not resist, because it leads to such an interesting QOTD (remember those?) ...

Each year, I always enjoy seeing the Jays' upcoming schedule: look at all that baseball waiting to be played! The following are some random ramblings on the subject.

This article was inspired by Jordan Furlong’s original Dunedin Diary from Spring Training 2004, and I suggest you read that one -- if you haven’t already -- before continuing here. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

I tried to post this on a really cold day here in the Greater Toronto Area, just to rub it in. Enjoy!

A news release today from Rogers Media and the FAN 590 reported that Jays broadcaster Tom Cheek will require additional brain surgery next week.

Please be sure to include Tom and his family in your thoughts and prayers over the coming weeks. Batter's Box wishes him a successful surgery and speedy recovery, and if you'd like to add your good wishes for Tom please do so in this thread.

I've always thought that predicting an individual player's performance was next to impossible: there are just too many factors to consider, one of which is just plain luck. But, just for fun, I thought I'd make two predictions for each Blue Jay hitter and starting pitcher likely to make the team in 2005. The first prediction will be wildly optimistic, the second wildly pessimistic.

(Bonus points to anyone who can name the 1980s Canadian band that debuted with that album title.)

There's a lot of sound and fury in sabrmetric circles today, and it's the doing of Bill James. He wrote an article for SABR's Baseball Research Journal titled "Underestimating the Fog," and he's gotten a lot of folks pretty riled up in the process. We don't have access to the essay itself, so here's a link to an article that discusses it.

The DH was implemented in the American League in 1973 with the stated intention of increasing offence. Unlike most of major-league baseball’s innovations, this one actually worked, kind of. Scoring, which had been in the doldrums, perked up: the AL’s collective batting average rose 20 points, and the AL has outscored the NL in runs per game in 31 of the 32 seasons that followed (interestingly, the NL actually outscored the AL by 0.05 runs per game in 1974, the year after the DH’s introduction).

March Madness is upon us and I have created a NCAA Pick 'Em tournament for the Batter's Box community.

Your typical baseball fan knows all about 1961. Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, home runs, Whitey Ford, New York Yankees, asterisks, Ralph Houk, Ford Frick, Yogi Berra, a million books, movies, you name it. More boring Yankee crap than you can shake a stick at.

Well, forget it.

Pistol linked, in another thread, to an online article by Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci, who spent some time in the Blue Jays’ training camp this spring and has written about it for SI. Better him than Garth Brooks, I say. Suiting up for a big-league team is the secret dream of virtually everyone who writes about baseball, and Verducci clearly had a blast doing that in Dunedin. The article is a lively read, and promises an equally lively feature piece in SI. But it also scores a very positive hit for the Blue Jays organization in other ways.

One year ago, Smooth Johnny Gizzi told you that whether the A’s would win the West depended on just how good the Angels were, and to a lesser extent what Texas and Seattle did. Turns out the Angels were very good and the Rangers good enough to cause trouble, spelling the end of the A’s 4-year run of playoff appearances. Seven months before the Sox made their incredible comeback against the Yankees and it became fashionable to spread the word that The Curse was so much bunk, there was Jordan saying so. Craig B told you that the Rays were awful and would continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Check.