A Little Burnt Out

Today's matinee illustrated perfectly how this team doesn't play as a unit very often. J.A. Happ had a strong outing, but the bullpen (Casey Janssen, actually) imploded, likely because they've had to bail out the starters too often this season. Everyone is just a little burnt out.

Happ, who will leave the team to attend his grandfather's funeral, allowed three hits and one run in seven innings.

"I definitely had a heavy heart, but I tried to use it," he said. "I probably had a little bit of a different attitude, a little different outlook, given the last few days."

I hate watching this team right now because there are pieces working well, but it isn't amounting to anything. Brett Lawrie is playing his face off right now, but it exists in a vacuum. There might be great pitching, but they have to scratch out runs. There might be lots of offense, but the starter gave up 6 runs early. I realize that this is the nature of baseball, but it can't be like this 90 per cent of the time.

I also hate it because it inspires articles like this.

Seldom in the annals of local baseball has so much been expected of a team that has accomplished so little.

There is just the one team. So they get all the press and all the hype. That's the local baseball scene. Also, sports press does this all the time. They hype a team up and then wonder how a team so hyped couldn't live up to expectation, as if they had nothing to do with building the hype. The drama is irritating.

Too often, the Jays appeared to put more energy into celebratory dance routines than mastering the fundamentals of hitting a cut-off.

That's the problem. The dancing.


Grantland's Jonah Keri sums up the issues facing the Jays rather nicely.  He doesn't put enough blame on the starting pitching for my taste (cause it's not been pretty), but he does highlight the defense issue. Which is an issue.


Look at the trolls who showed up to the game:

Totally disgusting. 

Did you know that if you tweet Adam Jones about that person who threw a banana at him in San Francisco and call it racist, you get tweets about it for close to 24 hours after you tweet? Look at all this.

Did you know that maybe someone just had a banana and maybe just decided to throw it? Maybe the banana doesn't mean anything, even though there is a long history of this happening in Europe at soccer games and it’s always racially motivated. Maybe the guy just brought a banana to the ballpark because that’s what people do all the time. Except they don't. That never happens.

Did you know that if you tweet about the banana pancakes you made and enjoyed pre-SanFranBanan, you get called racist randomly post-SanFranBanan, because that makes sense. I see what you tried to do there, but you failed.

Eating bananas isn't racist. Had I thrown my banana pancakes at Adam Jones or some other athlete of colour, I would accept being called racist. I didn't throw my pancakes. I ate them. They were good. I tweeted about them because people tweet about food sometimes.

I couldn't believe that I actually had to explain to people this- but apparently I did.

Also, this is just amazing. 

But one of my @ replies did get paraphrased on Deadspin. Famous! Quasi-famous!