You wear a Toronto Blue Jays hat around the city. You go down to the Rogers Centre every once in a while on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. You’re becoming vaguely familiar with the notion that Tampa Bay has a team, because they seem to be in town quite often.
Your favorite player on the Jays is Jose Bautista, with good reason. He’s clearly the best player on our roster. But he might also be the only player you know by name. Now, loving Bautista’s home runs doesn’t make for a fulfilling baseball fan experience all by itself. What you need is some information. Nothing helps the relationship between a team and the fans in its home city like actually getting to know some of the personalities on the team, and that is exactly the chance that we’re presented with right now.
Like, how do you go about identifying newcomer Brett Lawrie in and around the city? Hint: don’t try to track him by his uniform number, 13. Search him out instead by the modified quotation from 8 Mile that’s tattooed on his right shoulder. Observe 3rd base prospect Brett Lawrie and try to determine the myriad of ways 8 Mile might be a pivotal text to his psyche. It’s a whole new game.
Last week I ‘broke the story’ that the Jays ‘lost twice‘ to the Tampa Bay Rays. The Rays sit ahead of us by a spot in the American League East division, and things weren’t looking good for any kind of playoff push. Of course the hard facts of the matter are that we share a division with the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox (powerhouses both). It simply isn’t the case that fielding a fair team and playing hard is going to give us a real chance to win a pennant. Not with how A-Rod and crew have been dealing the cards (there was absolutely no reason for an Alex Rodrigues poker joke there). But it remains, we need a strategy other than to try and string a few wins together down the stretch of the season (see: Blue Jays 2010, also: our chances for making any noise this season). So there was real significance to recent moves made by Jays’ management, even though the Rasmus trade at this year’s trade deadline in particular was read as a signal that the year is over. Because the message is: Long Live Next Year.
A great (or two great) places(s) to start getting to know the fuller extend of the Blue Jays roster is with the two new additions who have been the most prominently featured in the media. Brett Lawrie is only 21 years old. Colby Rasmus is 24 (almost 25-a Happy Birthday on Thursday there, Colby). Colby Rasmus was the centerpiece of Toronto’s trading-deadline maneuvers. Like Brett Lawrie last year, Rasmus didn’t come for nothing. The Jays had to give up really solid players, starters even, who might at the immediate moment of the trade be better players (at least in terms of what they can produce right now). This was certainly the case with Lawrie because he wasn’t even called up to play for the Jays until this past weekend, and Rasmus also comes to town with his own maturing to do.
But that’s the point. Just like last year when the Jays signed unproven but highly sought after Cuban shortstop Adeiny Hechevarria (whom the Yankees wanted as Derek Jeter’s replacement) for $10 million over four years, efforts are being made to synchronize the talent base. Jose Bautista has matured into an MVP-type player in the MLB. Over the last two seasons (and this one obviously isn’t over yet) he has 90 home runs. And Bautista arrived in Toronto with a warning attached to him similar to the one that was tagged to Rasmus, but is the clear leader of the team now. If Bautista can keep up his dominant play, then instead of being content with the number of wins that will get us for the next few years, if the Jays have a core of young talent being brought along, becoming a cohesive team together, there’s additional hope. If any of the prospects we’ve gathered together can really start to pay off at the same time as each other then we’ll have a kind of home-grown team that’s all of the sudden ready to take some of the power teams in our division by surprise.
However, just because that isn’t our goal right now as we wind down the season doesn’t mean there’s any less reason to play attention. As I mentioned, it’s a whole new game. More so than just finding ways to enjoy Brett Lawrie’s apparent allegiance to 8 Mile, and more than inventing ways to antagonize Colby’s Dad, Tony Rasmus, to ensure a little bit of attention from the press, the game now is about watching to see who these 2 guys (as well as many of the other lesser known quantities on the field at the Rogers Centre) really are. What is the way they play the game of baseball going to tell us about them? What are their personalities and personae going to tell us about how they play baseball? What better chance is there for young players, full of potential and needing to prove their major league worth, than in a rotation with the likes of Jose Bautista drawing the lion’s share of the attention from (even more than the fans) opposing pitchers and defenses?
