Has there been a game this season with more on the line for the Toronto Blue Jays than Monday night’s meeting with the Washington Nationals? Never mind the result. I’m talking about Jose Bautista’s ability to play a full nine innings in the outfield, preferably in right field.
Bautista hasn’t played right since April 21, when he hurt his shoulder throwing to first base in a fit of pique. There was no structural damage, but Bautista, whose outfield arm and routes have become a weapon for the Blue Jays, has been restricted to designated hitter duties along with having his facial grooming featured on GQ.com.
Coupled with Dalton Pompey’s hasty demotion to triple-A Buffalo and Michael Saunders’s non-miraculous miraculous non-recovery from a left knee injury, the Blue Jays have found themselves with nothing defensively resembling a major league outfield. The ball has found them – in particular, it’s sought out Chris Colabello wherever he’s been hidden – and you wonder whether Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos won’t start making calls about available outfielders if Bautista can’t shoulder the burden in the field.
This weekend only reinforced the idea that adding a top-notch arm to the bullpen should be job No. 1, now that Roberto Osuna has traded in his Superman cape for a 20-year-old rookie’s uniform, but as with the case of adding an outfielder, the Blue Jays are said to have come to an internal realization that to make a significant bullpen move – more than signing an out-of-work free-agent – they will need to trade one of their pitching prospects.
What about Dioner Navarro? The fact is, once he’s back, his switch-hitting bat is more valuable to the Blue Jays than what he’d get on the trade market.
No, the most likely commodity the Blue Jays have to trade and maintain a team capable of taking a run at the playoffs this season is a young arm, and the sense I’m left with is that, internally, the idea of moving Daniel Norris has been discussed – and it becomes more of a topic the longer Tommy John refugee Jeff Hoffman continues to meet the organization’s demands. Hoffman used 52 pitches in five innings Sunday at single-A Dunedin, giving up two hits and striking out three and showed better command of the zone while continuing to be between 94-99 miles per hour on the gun.
FI-FA FO-FUM …
The easy thing to do is look at the past week’s shameful re-election of Sepp Blatter as FIFA president and rail against the morality of the people who continue to support him. Less easy to understand is why they would do it – unless you read the best backgrounder on the situation, provided by The Guardian’s excellent Owen Gibson.
While other commentators have simply wrung their hands and cried about filthy lucre and amorality, Gibson explains the geo-political and geo-economic realities behind Blatter’s still-considerable support – and why his anti-American and anti-European rhetoric strikes a chord among a majority of nations. They know that many soccer officials in places like Europe and North America and Australia spend a great deal of time tut-tutting about the prevalence of corruption in the developing world – and they ask uncomfortable questions, in return.
And know what? The European nations need to walk a fine line when it comes to self-righteousness, whether it’s the IOC or FIFA, because Adolf Hitler hosted the 1936 Winter Olympics in Berlin, Benito Mussolini hosted the second-ever World Cup in 1934 and Spain’s Francisco Franco was formally recognized by FIFA two years before the wider international community. Beyond that, it was UEFA’s Michel Platini who helped get Blatter elected in 1998, and the financial might of the world’s biggest clubs – centred in Europe – has meant that in day-to-day matters, the demands of smaller federations sometimes get shoved to the side. Blatter is reprehensible, but the reprehensible atmosphere that created him is in some ways a post-colonial hangover.
QUIBBLES AND BITS
• Chicago Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf must hope that firing head coach Tom Thibodeau works out better than another one of his high-profile firings: the decision to fire Tony La Russa as Chicago White Sox manager in June 1986, with the team mired at 26-38 and vice-president Ken Harrelson feuding both with La Russa and a young assistant general manager named David Dombrowski, who was also fired because he fought La Russa’s battles in the front office.
Dombrowski went on to be GM of a World Series-winning team (1997 Marlins) and is among the game’s most-respected GMs. All La Russa did was go to three consecutive World Series’, managing the Oakland Athletics (winning one) and then going on to win two more as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals. The White Sox had one World Series win during that tenure – 2005.
• And so we arrive at June 1, the end of what many baseball observers believe to be the two-month process of determining whether your team is really as good as it was in spring training and the first couple of weeks of the season – or, as bad. For some general managers, it’s been a wild ride. Jeff Luhnow of the Houston Astros is one of them: his club went into Sunday leading the American League in home runs, strikeouts and stolen bases. Teams have won the World Series with that seemingly unsustainable recipe for success – the 1938 Yankees and 1976 Cincinnati Reds, the latter of whom are considered the last edition of the Big Red Machine – but the guess here is Luhnow just sits back and enjoys it.
• Beyond the individual honours and the rings and gold medals and world titles, there is the ability of Jonathan Toews to write himself large in pressure situations. Toews is the first player in NHL history to record multiple goals in Games 5 and 7 on the road in a playoff series; in fact, no player has done so in a single post-season since Pavel Bure scored for the Vancouver Canucks in Game 7 of the Western Conference quarter-final in 1994 and Game 5 of that season’s final.
Toews is also the first Blackhawks player to score four straight team goals on the road in the playoffs (he scored the final two goals of Game 5 and the first two of Game 7) since 1963, when Bobby Hull did it against the Detroit Red Wings. The last player to score four consecutive playoff road goals for his team was Joffrey Lupul, who scored all four goals for the Anaheim Ducks in a 4-3 win over the Colorado Avalanche in Game 3 of their 2006 Western semifinal series.
THE END-GAME
It was an at-times boring path to trudge, but the NBA has given us the final we all wanted: the Golden State Warriors against LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers, and one player to keep an eye on is Draymond Green of the Warriors, who figures to be a handful for King James and has 10 double-doubles this post-season, leaving him three behind Nate Thurmond’s franchise record for a single post-season (1967) and the 12 double-doubles turned in by Wilt Chamberlain in 1964 and 1962. Green hasn’t always had kind things to say about the King – as Deadspin reported after it searched through Green’s Twitter activities from his college days.
The Internet: God bless it.
Jeff Blair is host of The Jeff Blair Show from 9-11 a.m. ET and Baseball Central from 11 a.m.-Noon ET on Sportsnet 590/The Fan. He also appears frequently on Prime Time Sports with Bob McCown.