Return of the Buck

So here I am, just trying to mind my off-season business, when bam, here comes the (sigh) out-of-left-field news that Buck freakin’ Martinez is coming back to Toronto to do play-by-play for the Blue Jays. This can only mean that the “Flashback Friday” powder-blues will soon become the squad’s everyday choice. Though of all the dumb nostalgia moves that Rogers has pulled, this is one it’s tough to argue against… Shulman and Martinez, for those of you old enough to shave, were a money duo in the booth (yes, they used to be the Jays’ announcing team, believe it or not) and with ol’ Bucky back in that colour seat, maybe he can squeeze some blood from the stone that is Jamie Campbell.

Oh, wait. Martinez is the play-by-play guy, you say? Hmm. Guess Campbell’s out on his ass. Sorry, he’s been “reassigned” — though I know enough out-of-work journos to know what that word means nowadays.

That’s kinda sad, actually. Campbell was bottom-of-shoe-sole crap at times (read: his first few years), but you could definitely tell he did his best to grow into the role. His seemingly legitimate enthusiasm at the big plays (for both teams, sadly) was nice, even if he still didn’t think to look at an outfielder’s reaction to get a handle on whether we were looking at a long bomb or a pop fly. Plus his awkward, stilted rapport with Rance Mulliniks was the stuff of legend. Nothing would help cut through the tedium of another Jays implosion like hearing those two conduct entirely separate conversations while sitting three feet away from each other.

Wow, this ode to Martinez suddenly turned into a eulogy for Campbell. How did that happen? Oh, right, because we’ve now become inured to all the “nostalgia” moves and even the most naive Jays fans should see them as cynical ploys to latch onto past glories in a desperate attempt to drag people out to the ballpark… and to distract from the front office’s sheer inability to build a team that’s set to contend in the long-term.

But, did you hear that guy turned a double play with a broken leg? A broken leg!! And, if we go down to the ‘Centre on Friday, we can get Rob Butler’s autograph and a free slice of pizza if the Jays strike out seven batters! Wow!

Finally, some Jays news from Indy

Until this morning, the most interesting bit of Blue Jays news coming out of MLB’s Winter Meetings in Indianapolis was that GM Alex Anthopoulos was being a hardass regarding the Roy Halladay trade talks. Refusing to reveal his location, making other GMs come to him, being afraid of what germs can do? All AA needs to do now is grow a beard and we’ll have our very own Howard Hughes running the team.

Anyway, I got sidetracked. There is news! Apparently the Jays have either signed or not signed Joey Gathright. I find this news exciting because it gives me an excuse to post this video:

So basically Gathright is Evil Knievel without the bike or jumpsuit. (Too bad about the jumpsuit.)

He’s also a very fast man who is pretty solid in centrefield. I’m no expert on UZR, but it seems to me that Gathright’s career UZR of 17.4 in CF is just a little bit better than Vernon Wells’s -40.3.

So maybe, if this signing turns out to be truth, Wells will be moving out of centre? A man can dream.

Fact: Voting makes you feel good.

Hello everyone. Occasional contributor Squizz here, just poking my head in on the baseball side of things for some shameless promotion of one of my other projects, a little site called Some Canadian Guys Writing About Soccer. We’ve been nominated in the sports category in the 2009 Canadian Blog Awards, and we’d love your votes!

I’m sure that Chris, who usually holds down the fort here at Infield Fly, would attest to the awesomeness of said blog and its three contributors (he’d better, or we’ll deprive him of his status as a lovable 15-foot-tall cartoon bear).

Yes, there are baseball favourites on the ballot too — the drunks, Tao and Sports and the City among them –  but fear not! You can vote for them and Some Canadian Guys! It’s a ranking system, where you rank as many (or as few) choices as you like.

So while you’re over there voting for your actual favourites, be a pal and show some love to Some Canadian Guys too, won’t you? Thanks.

(By the way, Chris, this counts as my “one post every two months”. You’re welcome.)

Don’t make Doc the new Sundin

What’s the difference between Roy Halladay and Mats Sundin?

Doc wants to win.

(Sorry, eyebleaf, I know Mats wanted to win, too, but stick with me.)

At the top of their professions, both guys were stuck on mediocre Toronto-based teams. Both guys were coveted by basically every team in their leagues. Both guys had no-trade clauses. Both guys seemingly wanted to finish their careers in Toronto. Both guys were subjects of hysterical trade rumours. Neither guy wanted any part of the media circus. And now, with the latest out of Doc’s camp, neither player is willing to be a rental during the last year of their contract.

If you can believe Doc’s agent, Halladay will approve a trade during the off-season. But if he starts spring training as a Blue Jay, he’ll end the season as a Blue Jay.

That, as ESPN’s Buster Olney says in the link above, means the Jays will only get two draft picks in compensation instead of whatever haul a trade would bring in. He also says it’s now “less than 50-50″ that a trade will happen in the off-season because Doc’s contract expires after 2010. Guess he hasn’t heard that the Jays are allowing a window for potential trade partners to negotiate an extension.

Personally, I hope Anthopoulos gets a deal done ASAP. Doc will get a chance to win and the Jays will get something more than draft picks in return. I’ll miss Doc, and it would be cool to see him carve up Toronto’s opponents for one more year, but he deserves better than the idiocy Sundin had to deal with during his last year in Toronto.

Link Dump

• Griffin sets the record straight on what went down last season in regards to Doc and how Ricciardi didn’t botch the trade talks.

• No surprise here, but A.J. wants his bestest bud in the whole world to join him in New York.

• Think this Halladay situation is bad? Imagine you’re a Twins fan. Not only is Mauer arguably the most valuable player in all of baseball, he’s from the Twin Cities.

• Matt Stairs now has a street named after him in his hometown of Fredericton, N.B.  The street is right outside Royals Field, where Stairs got his start with the Fredericton Royals of the New Brunswick Senior Baseball League.

• As Bud Selig gets ready to step down, Federal Baseball says good riddance. And they’re right. The way he treated the Expos was disgraceful.

The only thing that could possibly make me cheer for the Yankees

If the Jays don’t pull out some kind of miracle season next year — which, let’s be honest, they won’t — and Bob Elliot is right that that Roy Halladay will follow the path of David Cone and Roger Clemens to New York, then I’m in for one of the shittiest baseball seasons ever in 2010.

I can’t root for the Yankees, but I can’t not root for Doc.

Maybe if the Yanks get Doc they’ll also unload Jeter, A-Roid and Pussada. Then I wouldn’t have to be so conflicted.

Fuck building long-term. Build a winner now so Doc’ll stick around.

Alex Gonzalez? *facepalm*

When the Blue Jays signed John McDonald to a two-year deal yesterday, there was a lot of consternation among Jays fans. Sure people were happy to have a fan favourite back, but you can’t expect to win with an all-glove no-bat shortstop in a lineup that has trouble producing the runs needed to win, can you?

Well, no need to worry! Alex Anthopoulos had no intention of The Prime Minister of Defence being the team’s starting shortstop. No, as every Toronto fan’s favourite reporter tells us, AA had another all-glove, no-bat shortstop in mind for the starter’s job.

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2010 Toronto Blue Jays shortstop, Alex Gonzalez!

To be fair to Gonzalez, he does have a pretty good glove. Fan Graphs has him ranked eighth in the majors in UZR and fifth in UZR/150 among shortstops. And he did hit for .284/.316/.453 in 44 games after joining Boston last year, but he can’t be expected to keep that pace up. Especially since he’s averaged .247/.294/.395 over his career.

Call me crazy, but I just don’t see what Gonzalez offers that Johnny Mac doesn’t.

UPDATE: MLBastian is filtering the details of the Gonzalez signing as he gets them. Definitely worth following if you’re not already. Apparently the deal is one year with a club option. Gonzalez will make $2.75 million in 2010 and stands to make $2.5M in 2011.

The meaning of valuable

Baseball awards are a funny thing. Everybody seems to have a different definition of what each award means. Should the rookie of the year award go to a pitcher or a position player, and how do you compare the two? Should wins or WHIP or ERA or even more advanced stats be used to determine the Cy Young winner? Just what does the valuable in MVP mean?

To me, the easiest way to avoid the main problems associated with the MVP award would be to change the name to the MOP (most outstanding player).

Joe Mauer won the MVP this year and he did it almost unanimously. But if he hadn’t led the Twins to their improbable playoff berth, would he have won the award? We’ll never know, but when it looked like the Twins would finish out of the playoffs, there sure was a lot of noise about how “a player can’t win the MVP if his team didn’t make the playoffs!” If the award were the MOP, that wouldn’t have been a concern.

No matter though. The Twins made it and Mauer won the award.

But still, what does valuable mean? If you look at Mauer’s stats in terms of the money he earned, he did not represent the best value to an American League team in terms of dollars spent. (If you accept Joe Posnanki’s intriguing argument that Mauer’s actually worth $30 million per year, then maybe you can make a case.)

No, based on numbers calculated by Canadian Business, in terms of dollars spent per performance, Toronto’s Adam Lind led the Major Leagues in dollars spent per RBI and per total base. He also led the American League in terms of dollars spent per run created, per home run and per hit.

Admittedly, Lind’s value is so high because he’s not yet arbitration eligible, but that’s not the point. The point is that valuable is a very subjective term. There’s no point in getting your knickers in a knot because some Seattle-based writer voted for Miguel Cabrera. No, I don’t understand why he did it, either. But who knows how that guy defines valuable?

Doc should stay in blue (or why Vin Scully deserves another Series)

As I’ve said before, if the Jays are out of it next season and Doc is no longer a Jay, I’ll be cheering for whichever team he’s playing for (even if it’s the Yankees or Red Sox) because nobody deserves to win more than Doc.

But if Roy Halladay has to be traded before the trade deadline next season, I really do hope that the Dodgers pony up the right package to pry Doc away. It’s not that I really prefer the Dodgers to any other of the team — in fact, I’d pick the Giants as a second team if I had to — it’s that there’s something I really want to hear, and time is running out.

When the Phillies eliminated the Dodgers in the NLCS this year, it saddened me a bit. To understand why, you’ve got to understand that when I watch baseball, I typically listen to the radio broadcast whenever possible. Sure, I have the TV on, but most television announcers are bad enough that I’ll suffer the slight audio-visual syncing problems that come with streaming a radio broadcast through MLB’s buggy Gameday Audio service.

The Dodgers being eliminated saddened me because, when it comes down to watching teams I don’t care about, I’d much rather have Vin Scully calling the game.

The problem I have with most play-by-play guys and their colour commentators is that they don’t know when to shut up. It’s like they’re afraid that if they let a second go by without saying something, viewers will change the channel, so the announcers just spew out whatever insipid garbage enters their minds.

Vin Scully does not do this. Vin Scully works alone and stops talking when it’s more effective to let the crowd noise carry the moment. And when he does talk, the man had the knack for saying the right things. Just listen to the following clip. You’ll hear two jokers call Hank Aaron’s home run to pass Babe Ruth. Then you’ll hear how Vin Scully called the same play. If you don’t already know how great Scully is, you will after listening to this:

Scully calls Aaron’s record

And yeah, Scully’s been around that long. He started calling Dodgers games in 1950 — when the team was still in Brooklyn.

Anyway, the point is that Scully has recently said that he’ll call Dodgers games next year, but that might be his last. Faced with having Joe Buck, Chip Caray and Rick Sutcliffe rammed into my ears by the geniuses behind television broadcasts, I’d love to have the Dodgers in the Series so that I can hear a real pro call the games one last time.

As Jays fans, we all know that Doc could put the Dodgers over the top. So if he’s got to go, I really do hope he goes to L.A., stays in a blue uniform and lets a legend call his Series-clinching win.

Giving the people what they want

Freakish, aren't they?

One of the many differences between a blog and a mainstream media outlet is the lack of an assignment editor. I guess a blogger is technically his/her own assignment editor, but if said blogger is of the lazier persuasion, things can go quiet rather quickly.

Since I am generally of the lazier persuasion, I have decided to hire an assignment editor. Its name is Google. It doesn’t speak English; it just sends people to this little blog. Yesterday Google told me that people really, really badly want to know about Sammy Sosa and they want me to tell them about Sammy Sosa.

Well, here’s what I’ve got: His skin is now a different colour. Drugs are bad, mmmkay.

(Sosa says he’s undergoing “skin rejuvenation” that “women have done all the time.” He also says the lighting was really bad when the disturbingly ghostly pictures were taken.)

It looks like The Plan is going to affect Doctor Moose

I listened to Jays’ GM Alex Anthopoulos explain the plan for the team (you can listen here if you’re so inclined) and here’s what I took from it: The man can talk. And I don’t mean in the he-gives-long-answers-to-simple-questions way (even though he does).

No, I mean he can talk in the isn’t-this-pile-of-crap-awesome way and be convincing about it.

Listening to him explain The Plan, I felt excited. Thinking back on what he said, I’m not so excited.

I won’t go into a full recap of The Plan, as others have already done a great of it — check the Jays links to the right if you’re interested — but there are two main points I want to address:

1. The team is going to suck for a while longer.
2. Roy Halladay is going to be shipped out of town.

By themselves, neither of these points would make me very happy; together, I think I can live with them.

If Anthopoulos is resigned to the fact that Doc’s “timetable for winning is different” than the team’s, he’s not going to let Doc walk as a free agent. Anthopoulos is going to have to trade him. While that will be painful for myself and every Jays fan, it will be good, for fans at least, in both the long and the short-term.

In the long-term, the return Toronto gets from trading Doc should mean that the team will complete its “building” phase and be competitive again much quicker. In the short-term, trading Doc will give Blue Jays fans something to cheer for while the Jays are rebuilding.

I’d prefer it if Halladay didn’t go to the Yankees or the Red Sox, but even if he does, I’ll be hoping for him to win. Doc is the best pitcher in the game and has given everything he’s got to Toronto for, let’s be honest, longer than the team has deserved. The man deserves to play for a winner.