VOTE FOR TOM CHEEK!!!  DETAILS AND LINK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POST!!!

6:10 PM Eastern

The Blue Jays began their 2008-09 off-season with Paul Godfrey announcing that he won’t seek a new contract as President of the Jays when his current one expires at the end of December, which was followed a few hours later by J.P. Ricciardi holding his annual end-of-season meeting with the media – this one done via conference call since Ricciardi is already in Dunedin watching the Jays’ kids in the instructional league.

By the way, as I write this, there are close to 100 comments waiting to be moderated.  With the two conferences as well as taping The Grill Room in between (watch tonight at 11:00 PM Eastern on SunTV!!!), I haven’t had time to get to them, and with Rosh Hashana almost upon us, I’m not going to have time to get to them until Thursday, so please hold tight through the first of the High Holidays.

Godfrey leaving isn’t a shocker.  He hadn’t been direct about wanting to stick around beyond this contract, and I took that to mean that he was leaning towards going, which he confirmed this afternoon.  Godfrey says his personal philosophy was that he’d rather leave a job two years too early than two minutes too late.  The search for a new team prez begins now.

I’m a big fan of Godfrey’s, on a personal level.  He’s been a very open, accessible guy throughout his tenure as the Jays’ president, and he’s been very good to me, so I’ll miss him.  From a business standpoint, the ballclub was hemorrhaging money when he took over, and now it’s at the point where it’s close to breaking even.  A lot of that has to do with the Canadian dollar, it’s true, but Godfrey’s been good at the job he was given.  He fired Gord Ash, brought in J.P. Ricciardi, helped to engineer Rogers’ purchase of SkyDome and rode herd over all the improvements to the stadium once they bought it.  He helped to convince Ted Rogers to raise the payroll from $50 million in 2002 to double that for 2008 and forward.  Under Godfrey’s watch, attendance rose every single season from 2002 to 2008.  Business-wise, his tenure was a great success.  Baseball-wise, not so much, since the team never made the playoffs.  But the ballclub is in FAR better shape now than it was then.

Immediately, thoughts turned to Godfrey’s possible successor, and four names spring to mind:  Paul Beeston, Pat Gillick, Bob Nicholson (not the Hockey Canada guy) and Herb Solway, the Jays’ current chairman of the board.  I don’t think Beeston is ready to give up retirement, though it’d certainly be fun to see him back in that chair, and the hot rumour on Gillick is that he’s going to take the president’s job in Seattle, where he lives.  Chances are the new guy is none of those four.  I would think that the Rogers people would lean a lot harder towards a business guy than a sports guy, but  hopefully they get someone who’s both.

As for the Ricciardi call, it was brief compared to the usual two-hour sessions we have with him at the end of the season when he’s here in person, but he touched on a lot of subjects.  Among them:

-He’s not going to exercise the opt-out he has in his contract with Godfrey’s departure.

-While keeping A.J. Burnett is the top priority, they’re not going to wait long for him to make up his mind once November hits.

-Word on contract extensions for the entire coaching staff should come down in the next couple of days.

-He doesn’t foresee the Jays making major changes in the off-season, but they won’t come back in 2009 with the status quo.

-He’s very happy with the job Rod Barajas did behind the plate, and might go shopping for a veteran back-up catcher rather than go with an internal option.

-Shortstop isn’t a major issue, since Marco Scutaro did such a great job.

-He’d like to add a middle-of-the-order power bat.

A couple of points he made deserve deeper discussion, specifically about the internal solutions for the starting rotation next season and the potential trade bait that J.P. will be using.

Ricciardi mentioned both Brian Tallet and Scott Downs as pitchers who could be stretched out in spring training to be candidates for the rotation.  When he talked about Downs, he used the word “revisit”, which implies that they’d already considered Downs to start (which we knew) and decided against it (which we didn’t).  I know that Cito Gaston would rather have Downs in the bullpen, and I think that J.P. would rather get as many quality innings as possible from his pitchers.  This reminds me of the Casey Janssen thing this past spring.  Ricciardi wanted him in the rotation, John Gibbons wanted him in the bullpen.  It appeared as though J.P. was going to win that one, but Casey’s injury made it a moot point.

Janssen, by the way, will head to spring training this year as a starting pitcher.

The point about trade bait was that J.P. wants to hold onto his pitching.  He said “maybe it’s not our pitchers that get us what we need, maybe it’s some of our everyday players.  We’ve got a good farm system, and maybe some people want some of our younger players.” 

To me, that means that at the very least Adam Lind is available, but the Jays want a bunch back for him.  Lind has more trade value than Vernon Wells, and may have more than Alex Rios because of his contract/service time status, but not as much as Travis Snider.  Both Ricciardi and Gaston seem sold on Snider, and if they sign the big, scary bat they want to be the DH, Snider can slip into left field and Lind can be shipped off for help in the rotation.  If they do acquire a number two-type pitcher in trade, then there will be plenty of money still available to add a bat or two.

With Rosh Hashana almost here, I won’t be doing any work for the next couple of days, and that includes tending to the blog, but I’ll be back on Thursday.

Thanks to TBS’ decision to start the early evening playoff games at 6:35 Eastern, we won’t have a Blue Jay A Day Pre-Pre Game Show for at least the first week of the playoffs.  Hopefully there are more normal start times during the League Championship Series, and we can get back into full BJADPPGSdom.  This is the place to check every day to see who our Blue Jay guest will be, coming on to take your phone calls.  I’ll post his identity as soon as I have each player confirmed.

Today and tomorrow are you last chances to VOTE FOR TOM CHEEK and ONLY for Tom Cheek to be on the ballot for the Ford C. Frick Award to gain entry into the broadcasters’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.  It’ll make more of an impact on the voters if Tom alone gets the overwhelming majority of the votes.  Just click on this link:

http://web.baseballhalloffame.org/awards/frick_2008/vote.jsp

It’s a bit of a pain to fill out all the info, but it only takes two minutes at the most, and Tom Cheek was certainly worth your time.  Thank you.

Rational, reasonable comments are always welcome!

VOTE FOR TOM CHEEK!!!!  DETAILS AND A LINK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POST!!!!

6:30 PM Eastern

The Blue Jays finished a frustrating, disappointing season in fine style, destroying the disinterested Orioles and dispersing to various destinations around the Western Hemisphere with a good taste in their collective mouth.

Vernon Wells needed to homer twice to make sure the Jays didn’t have their first non-strike season since 1977 without a 20-homer man, and he had that in the books by the fifth inning.  He would finish the season with a .300 batting average with a 4-for-4 day, giving the Jays one regular with a batting average that high.  Check that one, too.  And his five RBIs gave him 78, just one shy of team leader Alex Rios.

Travis Snider went o-for-3, but a sac fly gave him 13 RBIs in 24 games while hitting 8th or 9th, which is pretty impressive.  Despite finishing the season 0-for-his-last-9, Snider hit .301/.338/.466 in his late-season audition, and with the starting rotation in disarray, he may well have punched his ticket to an everyday job in 2009.

Not to disparage Snider at all – I think he’s a terrific hitter who is likely to have a great career – but great first impressions don’t always mean a player is ready.  Adam Lind hit .367/.415/.600 as a September call-up in 2006 and followed it up with a .238/.278/.400 mark in the big leagues the next year.

Jesse Litsch was sensational again – who among you didn’t allow “perfect game” to creep into your head after the 3rd inning? – and even though the O’s quit on this season weeks ago, Litsch still went out and got the job done, limiting the Baltimores to a run on three hits over seven innings, with all three hits coming on ground balls.  I was one of those who this spring wanted to see Casey Janssen as the Jays’ 5th starter.  I was unimpressed by Litsch’s lack of stuff, propensity to give up home runs, and by the fact that lefties hit .308/.385/.478 against him last season.

He’s certainly proven me wrong.  Even with the mid-season meltdown that wound up with him being sent to Syracuse (last time I’ll get to write that – sniff), Litsch finished the season with a 3.58 ERA and a 1.23 WHIP.  I know you can’t throw out nine starts, but dig this:  Remove the meltdown (June and July) and Litsch’s numbers are as follows:

12-3, 2.57.  1.103 WHIP, 0.43 HR/9 IP.

That’s outstanding, and it includes three starts against each of the Red Sox and Rays and two each against the powerful offenses of Texas and the White Sox, as well as a start each against the big bats of the Yankees, Phillies and Tigers.

Am I saying that Jesse Litsch could be the Jays’ number two starter next year?  Heck, no.  But I am saying that his detractors have a lot less about which to detract thanks to the statement he made with his performance this season.

The Blue Jays finished 2008 with a record of 86-76, their third-best mark since 1993.  They wrapped up the season having scored 714 runs (cool baseball number) and allowed 610, a run differential of 104 to the good. That’s the second-best mark in the American League, behind only the Red Sox, and the fourth-best in all of major league baseball (with the Cubs and Phillies finishing 1st and 3rd).  Of the top 10 teams in run differential this season, six are in the playoffs.  The four that will miss are the Jays, Mets, Yankees and one of the Twins and White Sox.  That’s pretty strong company to be in, just in case you’re one of those who still feels as though the Jays are mediocre, never mind the idiots who think they suck.

Yes, the Jays finished in 4th place in their division, but saying that “they’re a fourth-place team” is intellectually dishonest.  Look at the other fourth-place teams this season:  Kansas City (75-87), Seattle (61-101), Atlanta (72-90), St. Louis (86-76) and San Francisco (72-90).  Only one of them finished within 10 games of the Jays.

They definitely need to get to work in the off-season to improve the starting pitching, because without A.J. Burnett and Shaun Marcum next season, and with Dustin McGowan’s availability still a huge question mark, they’re in trouble.  But this is not a bad team, nor is it even a mediocre team.

The Jays wound up with four winning months this season, going 20-10 in May, 13-11 in July, 16-12 in August and 16-10 in September.  April and June killed them.  They played at a 63-99 pace those two months, and at a 98-64 pace the rest of the season.

Under Cito Gaston and his merry band of hitting coaches, the Jays were 51-37 – a 94-win pace over a full season.

We said our goodbyes at the end of the broadcast, but I just want to reiterate here how much of an honour and a pleasure it was to spend another year in the broadcast booth with Jerry Howarth and Alan Ashby.  Like a lot of you, I grew up listening to Tom Cheek and Jerry calling Jays games, and watching Alan play both for the Jays and for some memorable Astros teams (1980 and ’86 spring to mind immediately).  I was one of the kids who went to sleep with the radio on – I even had my parents buy me a pillow speaker from Radio Shack so I didn’t keep the whole house up.  To actually be in that booth is an extraordinary thrill.  And Tom Young did a phenomenal job in his first year as our engineer/producer.  It’s not easy to step into an established situation like we have in there, but we couldn’t have asked for more than what Tom provided.  It’s amazing – we’ve made two changes to the crew in the last two years, and I don’t think either one could possibly have worked out better.

The final edition of The JaysTalk for this season wasn’t a very lengthy one, especially given the super-long phone segments we’d had the two days prior because of the rain delays, but it certainly wasn’t our last chance to talk baseball.  I’ll be taking calls after every one of the post-season games we have on the network throughout the month of October.

Here’s this afternoon’s The JaysTalk, for your listening pleasure:

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MAKE SURE you tune into the Fan590 – or listen live on this very website - Monday morning at 11:00 AM Eastern, because I’ll be spending an hour in-studio with Mike Hogan and Mike Toth.  Also spending the hour with us………….Richard Griffin.  Then, later in the afternoon, J.P. Ricciardi will do his annual end-of-season sitdown with the media, and I’ll post about that and remind you again to vote for Tom Cheek.  You can count on pretty much daily posts throughout the playoffs (with the exception of the High Holidays), and I’ll continue to answer comments through the post-season as well.

Now, you only have three more opportunities this month, so once again PLEASE vote for Tom Cheek and ONLY for Tom Cheek to be on the ballot for the Ford C. Frick Award to gain entry into the broadcasters’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.  It’ll make more of an impact on the voters if Tom alone gets the overwhelming majority of the votes.  Just click on this link:

http://web.baseballhalloffame.org/awards/frick_2008/vote.jsp

It’s a bit of a pain to fill out all the info, but it only takes two minutes at the most, and Tom Cheek was certainly worth your time.  Remember, you can vote once a day throughout the month of September, so it’s just today, tomorrow and Tuesday that are left.  Thank you.

Rational, reasonable comments are always welcome!

VOTE FOR TOM CHEEK!!!  DETAILS AND A LINK AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST!!!

1:03 AM Eastern

It’s as though the baseball gods want to keep the Jays’ season going as long as they can.  Well, it’s that, or it’s them saying that the Jays of 2008 are all wet.  Either way, the Jays and Orioles were stopped in the 7th again (despite the 10:00 tease), but this time it was the Orioles who came out of it with a win when all was said and done.

In the penultimate game of the season, Cito Gaston decided to give Alex Rios, Marco Scutaro, Vernon Wells and Scott Rolen the day off, and Brad Wilkerson decided to muscle up.  Wilkerson provided the Jays’ only offense, belting his 4th homer of the season to right-centre in the 2nd.  It was Wilkerson’s first home run (and 6th extra-base hit) in the Cito Gaston era, v.2.0 (107 plate appearances).  Since Cito’s arrival, Wilkerson has hit .163/.252/.272.  That got him the fifth spot in today’s line-up.  He was just heating up, too, and was set to come to the plate in the 7th after Lyle Overbay’s double put the tying run on second, but that was when the umpires had seen enough, and pulled the teams off the field.  Thankfully, tomorrow’s season finale will mark the end of the Wilkerson era in Toronto.  It was a reasonable gamble to take, but bait should have been cut on him a LOT sooner – there’s no way that Buck Coats, or even Russ Adams, wouldn’t have provided the same production, at the very least.

It was, in the overall, a game without much to it.  The Orioles haven’t been interested in five weeks, and the Jays weren’t all that into slogging through the rain without their two best hitters.  Now all that’s left is for Jesse Litsch to have a shot at a 13th win, and for Wells to try to take Jeremy Guthrie deep twice to have the Jays avid the ignominy of going through a full season without having a single player hit 20 homers.

The long rain delay gave us a chance for a ton of baseball talk on both The Rain Delay Programme and The JaysTalk – we even had guest appearances by Alan Ashby and Jamie Campbell.  Here it is, for your listening pleasure:

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Remember, today and every day in the month of September, please vote for Tom Cheek and ONLY for Tom Cheek to be on the ballot for the Ford C. Frick Award to gain entry into the broadcasters’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.  It’ll make more of an impact on the voters if Tom alone gets the overwhelming majority of the votes.  Just click on this link:

http://web.baseballhalloffame.org/awards/frick_2008/vote.jsp

It’s a bit of a pain to fill out all the info, but it only takes two minutes at the most, and Tom Cheek was certainly worth your time.  Thank you.

Rational, reasonable comments are always welcome!

VOTE FOR TOM CHEEK!!!  DETAILS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POST!!!!

12:45 AM Eastern

The Jays opened their final series of the season by shutting out the long-since-having-packed-up Orioles in a game that was rained out four batters into the 7th inning.

Scott Richmond got his first big-league win, and it was the first start in which he got the last out of the 6th inning.  He was denied his opportunity to throw a major-league pitch in the 7th for the first time in his life only because of Mother Nature.  In each of his previous four starts in the bigs, Richmond had taken it into the 6th, but never finished the 6th, and had allowed exactly three runs.  Tonight, he finished the 6th and didn’t allow a single run, nor did he allow a walk, and at one point he retired 17 of 18 Baltimore hitters.  His 79 pitches thrown was also a career-low, in his career-long outing.

Yes, the Orioles are in another one of their patented September swoons.  They haven’t had more than 10 wins in a September since 2004, and had a total of 11 wins in September ’01 and ’02 COMBINED.  This year, they’re 4-19 so far in their favourite month.  Still, their offense isn’t bad, and Richmond completely stifled them.  He’s certainly opened some eyes this year and could find himself in a battle for the last spot in the Jays’ rotation next season.  No doubt that’ll honk off some patriots, because if he has a shot to make the Jays, but only a shot, Richmond won’t be pitching for Canada at the World Baseball Festival.

Congrats, too, to Curtis Barnard Thigpen,  who smacked his first big-league homer in the 7th.  It came on the first pitch of the inning from Chris Waters, and went six or seven rows deep into the seats in the left-field corner.  Years ago, it wouldn’t have counted, because they used to take the score from the last completed inning when a game was rained out after it had become official.  Now, though, progress has been made, and everything counts right up until the last pitch.

It was a big day for Scott Rolen, too.  He drove in the Jays’ first run with a ground-rule double to left-centre, added another hit, and made a spectacular defensive play on an Omir Santos grounder in the 3rd.  As I mentioned in the comments, somehow I got it in my head that Rolen’s homer against the Yankees the other night was just his second since coming back off the D.L., but it was his 4th.  In September (after two games in the last week of August when he came off the D.L.), Rolen has hit .298/.348/.524.  Of course, we thought that May and June meant he was back, too.  I’m hopeful, but still in wait-and-see mode.

The rain delay and subsequent rainout gave us plenty of time to JaysTalk it up, and here it is, for your listening pleasure:

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Remember, today and every day in the month of September, please vote for Tom Cheek and ONLY for Tom Cheek to be on the ballot for the Ford C. Frick Award to gain entry into the broadcasters’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.  It’ll make more of an impact on the voters if Tom alone gets the overwhelming majority of the votes.  Just click on this link:

http://web.baseballhalloffame.org/awards/frick_2008/vote.jsp

It’s a bit of a pain to fill out all the info, but it only takes two minutes at the most, and Tom Cheek was certainly worth your time.  Thank you.

Rational, reasonable comments are always welcome!

VOTE FOR TOM CHEEK!!!  DETAILS AND LINK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POST!!!!!

12:10 AM Eastern

Not much of a post tonight, due to some major back issues, but I’ll try to put an update up here by early Friday afternoon or thereabouts.

Just, man is Roy Halladay something else.  Aside from all the everything, dig this: Halladay retired the last 13 Yankees he faced tonight – and did it with just 32 pitches.

Here’s tonight’s edition of the JaysTalk, for your listening pleasure:

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Remember, today and every day in the month of September, please vote for Tom Cheek and ONLY for Tom Cheek to be on the ballot for the Ford C. Frick Award to gain entry into the broadcasters’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.  It’ll make more of an impact on the voters if Tom alone gets the overwhelming majority of the votes.  Just click on this link:

http://web.baseballhalloffame.org/awards/frick_2008/vote.jsp

It’s a bit of a pain to fill out all the info, but it only takes two minutes at the most, and Tom Cheek was certainly worth your time.  Thank you.

Rational, reasonable comments are always welcome!

VOTE FOR TOM CHEEK!  DETAILS AND LINK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POST!!!!

11:45 PM Eastern

Jesse Carlson has done many, many good things for the Blue Jays this season.  He’s come out of nowhere to have a phenomenal year, helping to anchor baseball’s best bullpen, and was the Jays’ overwhelming selection as both the club’s rookie of the year and most pleasant surprise of the season.  So let’s not blame him for the loss that basically clinched a fourth-place finish, the first time the Jays will hold that position at the end of a season since 1996,  a year in which they finished 74-88 and Pat Hentgen won the Jays’ first Cy Young Award.

How about we blame the offense instead?  After perfectly executing the textbook “how to manufacture a run” in the first, with a double, grounder to the right side and sac fly (OK, maybe not perfectly.  Perfectly starts with an infield single and a stolen base.), they managed just three more hits all night.  Phil Hughes gave up all five of those hits in his eight innings of work.  The same Phil Hughes who, yes, has tremendous stuff and by all indications will be a great pitcher someday, but against whom the league was hitting .349 going into tonight.  Also, he had a WHIP Over 2.00.  19 of the last 21 Jays to come to bat were retired.  This was as ugly as pretty much any point in the early part of the season, and the Jays seem to have slid into those old habits in the season’s last week – having scored a total of three runs in their last three games combined.

A.J. Burnett was terrific in what was likely his final performance as a Blue Jay.  He only gave up one earned run in eight innings, walking two and striking out 11.  The two runs he allowed both came on one swing of the bat, a 1-2 fastball to Xavier Nady that was either over the outside black or off the outside corner.  Much like David Ortiz and his homer off Scott Richmond on Sunday, Nady leaned out and hit a pitch he had no business hitting, and stroked it on a line to centrefield for a two-run single.

It was a two-run single because there were runners at second and third.  There were runners at second and third because Robinson Cano hit a shot off the back of Burnett’s leg that trickled over to shortstop, and Marco Scutaro thought it would be a good idea to barehand it, then make an off-balance throw to first with nothing on it to try to get the runner.  Notwithstanding the fact that Scutaro had no chance of retiring Cano, even with a perfect throw, his throw was nowhere near the bag, way up the line, and instead of first and second, the runners each picked up an extra 90 feet.  If Scutaro just sticks the ball in his back pocket, as he should have, it’s first and second, that Nady single only scores one (assuming the new space-time continuum thus created allowed the same results in the rest of the inning), and who knows what happens the rest of the way.

Scutaro has had a far, far better year on defense than I ever imagined he might have, especially at shortstop, but there was just no earthly reason to throw the ball right there.

From that point on, Burnett was in shutdown mode (and not the Derek Bell kind).  He took it through eight, allowing only two hits the rest of the way, and retired 13 of the last 14 Yankees he faced, eight of those by the strikeout.

He came back out for the 9th, having thrown 117 pitches, and I thought Cito Gaston was going to let him go one more, since he’s not pitching again this season (and likely never again for the Blue Jays), but Cito only let him warm up as a classy gesture in order to allow Burnett to soak in the crowd’s appreciation upon his removal.  A.J. left the field to a standing ovation, and waved several times to the audience.  As he hugged his teammates in the dugout (he’s a big hugger, don’cha know), the crowd started to chant “A.J., A.J.” and he came out for a curtain call.

After the game, he said all the right things about how emotional a moment it was, how much he loves his teammates and the city, and how he thought the fans appreciated how much he’s grown in his three years here.  He seemed genuine, and I’m sure he was.  He said that he hasn’t even thought about his contract and whether to opt out after the season, which was also the right thing to say, if not pretty far-fetched.

All that said, there’s no chance that Burnett pitches the next two seasons in Toronto at $12 million per (unless it’s followed by a couple of seasons at about $25 million per).

So what’s left?  Getting Roy Halladay his 20th win against possible future teammate Carl Pavano.  If the Jays win tomorrow night, they’ll close out the home schedule having gone 47-34 in front of the Rogers Centre faithful, and that’ll be 146 home wins over the past three seasons.

Tonight was the finale of Wednesdays with J.P. for the season, and here it is, for your listening pleasure:

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Remember, today and every day in the month of September, please vote for Tom Cheek and ONLY for Tom Cheek to be on the ballot for the Ford C. Frick Award to gain entry into the broadcasters’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.  It’ll make more of an impact on the voters if Tom alone gets the overwhelming majority of the votes.  Just click on this link:

http://web.baseballhalloffame.org/awards/frick_2008/vote.jsp

It’s a bit of a pain to fill out all the info, but it only takes two minutes at the most, and Tom Cheek was certainly worth your time.  Thank you.

Rational, reasonable comments are always welcome!

VOTE FOR TOM CHEEK!  DETAILS AND LINK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POST!

11:50 PM Eastern

The Blue Jays struck out 14 times tonight, which a lot of people think is a terrible thing but really it’s not.  But they struck out looking EIGHT times.

Again, games can be won by teams that strike out a whole heck of a lot, even when a team strikes out looking a whole heck of a lot, but what I don’t understand is why the Jays’ hitters couldn’t get it into their heads that a ball that was just off the plate was going to be called a strike.

Hitters need to adjust to what the pitcher has at-bat to at-bat, and often pitch to pitch, so why the refusal to adjust to what the umpire has brought to the table?  Even if you’re sure it’s a ball, the guy has been calling it a strike all night – why would he change mid-stream?

Gregg Zaun was the worst culprit, by sheer number, but Lyle Overbay had him beat as far as timing was concerned.

Zaun went down looking three times (in his other at-bat, he struck out swinging on just three pitches), but Overbay watched strike three go by with the bases loaded and two out in the 8th, on a 3-2 pitch with the runners having gotten such a great jump that all he would have had to do was get the ball into the outfield (with a hit, of course) and three runs would have scored.

Overbay, like Zaun and Scott Rolen and Travis Snider after, took what he believed to be a close pitch that was ball four.  All of them flipped their bats away and were in the process of walking to first when Vanover rang them up. Given the events of the first seven innings, though, one would think that Overbay might have realized that even though the pitch was a ball, Vanover had an itchy trigger finger and, therefore, would have swung the bat.

After the game, Lyle said he wanted to look at the Questec, the computer-generated strike zone, to see if the pitch was a strike or not.  I put it to you that it doesn’t matter.  It probably wasn’t a strike, but only probably.  And if it was a couple of inches off the plate inside, well, congrats.  It’s a hollow moral victory at best.  You don’t get any points for being right about a call that the umpire blew – especially when you had reason to know it was coming.

It seems sometimes that some hitters are more concerned with being right about a pitch than the result.  This is not just about Overbay, by any means, but what good is it to be right when you’re walking back to the dugout?

Jesse Litsch pitched very well tonight, and continues to light it up since his return from The ‘Cuse – over eight starts, he’s pitched 54 innings, allowing 41 hits and 19 walks, striking out 35 (including a career-high eight tonight – thanks, Larry) while allowing only three home runs.  Litsch also tagged out Robinson Cano trying to score on a passed ball in the seventh.  Vanover called Cano safe, but Litsch got the tag down before the Yanks’ second baseman touched the plate.  The ensuing argument, brief as it was, was the most emotion I’ve ever seen Jesse show on the field.

I’m not one to enjoy seeing other people get hurt, but I kind of liked it when Snider lined one back through the box, and off Mike Mussina’s right arm, in the third.  Mussina wants 20 wins very badly, and I want to see him miss out just as much.  I was hoping that liner would have knocked him out of the game, to end his shot at 20, but he gutted it out and pitched another 2 1/3 shutout innings to get his five in before leaving.  Mussina is a very bad man, as we discussed in The JaysTalk and in the comments section, but the Jays couldn’t score on him or tie the game later to leave him with a no-decision.  It’s now up to the Red Sox to pin his ears back on the weekend – hopefully they’ll still have something to play for.

With A.J. Burnett going tomorrow and Roy Halladay Thursday, the Jays could still easily be a game back of the Yanks going into the weekend in the “battle” for third place.  And hey, the Yankees were mathematically eliminated tonight, which was kinda nice.

Oh, by the way, the Jays are shutting down David Purcey for the rest of the season (he’ll miss one start, John Parrish gets it) because of concerns about his innings jump from 62 in last year’s injury-wracked season to this year’s 182.  Also, while Cito Gaston continues to say that Scott Downs is still day-to-day, he basically stuck a fork in The Captain’s season before the game today.

Quick thought about the Vegas thing – the Jays didn’t want to wind up there and I’m sure the 51s didn’t especially want them.   It’s a terrible fit, both ways, and hopefully it’ll only last two years.

Here’s tonight’s edition of The JaysTalk, for your listening pleasure:

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Remember, today and every day in the month of September, please vote for Tom Cheek and ONLY for Tom Cheek to be on the ballot for the Ford C. Frick Award to gain entry into the broadcasters’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.  It’ll make more of an impact on the voters if Tom alone gets the overwhelming majority of the votes.  Just click on this link:

http://web.baseballhalloffame.org/awards/frick_2008/vote.jsp

It’s a bit of a pain to fill out all the info, but it only takes two minutes at the most, and Tom Cheek was certainly worth your time.  Thank you.

Rational, reasonable comments are always welcome!

VOTE FOR TOM CHEEK!!!!  DETAILS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POST!!!!!!!!

4:40 PM Eastern

The Blue Jays reminded us all why they spent the season on the outside looking in this season with their putrid offensive performance in today’s loss to Boston – the loss that eliminated them, mathematically, from playoff consideration.

It was a weird game.  Quiet, with almost a Grapefruit League-type feel.  The Jays weren’t hitting, so they looked flat, but when Scott Richmond came out after five innings, Lyle Overbay came out with him.  Scott Rolen left the next inning, and the Red Sox flipped their infield around late (the natural defensive moves for them if Kevin Youkilis is starting at third).

Daisuke Matsuzaka imposed his will upon the Jays, limiting them to just two hits over his seven innings of work, though they were both doubles.  They were up to their old tricks, though, going 0-for-7 with runners in scoring position.  Again, a fitting tribute to a season in which their inability to come through when they needed to killed their chances.

No complaints about Scott Richmond.  The B.C. native actually really showed me something today.  I agreed with Alan Ashby when he said in the pre-game that the Sox weren’t exactly a good match-up for Richmond.  In fact, I thought that was pretty kind.  Richmond seemed to me to be “just a guy”, the prototypical guy you start when you need a starter, the journeyman-type who can eke out a big-league career getting people out here and there but really, that’s it.  Today, though, he looked very, very good.  He refuses to walk people (just two so far in his 21 big-league innings), and he shut the Sox down pretty effectively despite  not having pitched in over three weeks.

He gave up three runs on five hits in five innings, which is about par for the course for him, but it was different this time because he really only should have given up one.  Jacoby Ellsbury led off the game with a triple, and scored on a sinking liner by Dustin Pedroia that Travis Snider caught, but was in a position that gave him absolutely no chance to throw out Ellsbury, who can fly.  The other two runs came on a “you’ve got to be kidding me” home run by David Ortiz in the 3rd.  It was a 3-2 pitch with two out that was well off the plate outside, and Ortiz just leaned out and one-handed it out over the wall in left field.  He had NO business hitting that ball at all, let alone hitting it out of the park, and Richmond can’t be faulted for that.  At worst, it should have been ball four.

John Parrish, Brian Wolfe and Brian Tallet pitched well, I think, but again this game had a very strange feel to it.

So the Red Sox go home for the rest of the season and the Rays hit the road for the rest of the season separated by a game and a half in the division.

Remember, The Blue Jays This Week is on at 7:05 PM Eastern on the Fan590 and right here on this very website.  I have completed the post-season poll of all the Jays’ uniformed personnel and front office staff (with the exceptions of Scott Rolen and Scott Downs, who politely declined to participate, and B.J. Ryan, who impolitely declined – on that note, A.J. Burnett is talking to me again!) and the club has selected its team MVP, Pitcher of the Year, Rookie of the Year and Most Pleasant Surprise of theYear.

Tonight onTBJTW, you’ll hear from the Rookie of the Year and Most Pleasant Surprise of the Year.  Next week, on one of the pre-pre-game shows, you’ll hear from the MVP and the Pitcher of the Year.  Also tonight on TBJTW, I’ll have interviews with Jason Bay and Cito Gaston.  Tune in!

Here’s this afternoon’s edition of The JaysTalk, for your listening pleasure:

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Remember, today and every day in the month of September, please vote for Tom Cheek and ONLY for Tom Cheek to be on the ballot for the Ford C. Frick Award to gain entry into the broadcasters’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.  It’ll make more of an impact on the voters if Tom alone gets the overwhelming majority of the votes.  Just click on this link:

http://web.baseballhalloffame.org/awards/frick_2008/vote.jsp

It’s a bit of a pain to fill out all the info, but it only takes two minutes at the most, and Tom Cheek was certainly worth your time.  Thank you.

Rational, reasonable comments are always welcome!

VOTE FOR TOM CHEEK!  DETAILS AND LINK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POST!!!

5:10 PM Eastern

I knew it was going to be a good day today when I woke up to find a real, live white-tailed deer hanging out on my front lawn, eating pears and crabapples that had fallen to the ground.  That was an incredibly cool way to begin a day, and the day lived up to expectations.  I had a nice conversation with Peter and Marie Kottaras, parents of the Red Sox’ George, who grew up in Markham, booked Jason Bay for a TBJTW inteview tomorrow, got to meet a few of the Jays’ Webster Award winners, and got to watch Roy Halladay pitch a nearly mistake-free six innings in beating the Red Sox.  Good times.

Two of the Webster winners will be on the pre-pre-game show tomorrow, so tune in to the Fan590 or check in here at the website at noon Eastern to hear from Bobby Bell, who had a sick year at short-season Auburn and low-A Lansing, and from Marc Rzepczynski, a lefty who had a strong season for Lansing.  When I say sick for Bobby Bell, though – sheesh.  He threw 30 2/3 innings, allowing 15 hits and no walks while striking out 43.  I just looked at those numbers again, and there are no typos there.  And he doesn’t even throw hard.  His out pitch is the change-up.

It was nice to see the Jays jump out to a big lead early against a lefty, especially one as good as Jon Lester.  They had a 1-0 lead and the bases loaded with one out in the second having hit only one ball hard.  Marco Scutaro changed that with a two-run double into the left-field corner, Jose Bautista followed with a ground single to left, and Alex Rios hit a grounder into the 5-6 hole.  Alex Cora made a nice play to get it, but tried to nail Scutaro at the plate and threw it away, making the score 5-0 Jays, which was more than enough.

Halladay only made one mistake in throwing six innings to pick up his 19th win of the season – the home run to Jason Bay – and even that didn’t look as though it was going to get out off the bat.  The three-run rally for Boston was the result of a ground ball just inside the line at first that went for a Dustin Pedroia double, another ground ball up the middle by David Ortiz for a single, and the homer.  Outside that four-batter stretch (and it’s not like getting those grounders was a bad thing), Halladay allowed the Red Sox three hits over his six innings of work, walking three thanks to a tiny-strike-zoned home plate umpire, Jim Reynolds.  That would be the same guy with whom the Jays had such a problem at first base last night.

Here’s today’s edition of The JaysTalk, for your listening pleasure:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Remember, today and every day in the month of September, please vote for Tom Cheek and ONLY for Tom Cheek to be on the ballot for the Ford C. Frick Award to gain entry into the broadcasters’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.  It’ll make more of an impact on the voters if Tom alone gets the overwhelming majority of the votes.  Just click on this link:

http://web.baseballhalloffame.org/awards/frick_2008/vote.jsp

It’s a bit of a pain to fill out all the info, but it only takes two minutes at the most, and Tom Cheek was certainly worth your time.  Thank you.

Rational, reasonable comments are always welcome!

VOTE FOR TOM CHEEK!!  DETAILS AND A LINK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POST!!!

11:55 PM Eastern

Not that a one-run loss to the Red Sox that drops your tragic number to one isn’t bad, but that was hardly the Jays’ biggest loss of the night.  Before the game, a sullen Shaun Marcum told the assemblage that he was going under the knife for ligament replacement surgery in his right elbow.  The dreaded Tommy John that we speculated about last night.  Marcum was near tears as he answered our questions, and his voice cracked when he mentioned the fact that he wouldn’t be”one of the guys” next season (Jordan Bastian’s question.  Damn Bastian made Marcum cry!).  He was firm, though, in his determination to be back even stronger in 2010, and hoped he’d be part of a World Series team.  Could be – that 2010 team has a chance to be very, very good.  2009 is a whole ‘nother story, though.

A team that showed so much promise with its end-of-season run is now in utter disarray.  The upshot may well be that the Jays return the exact same offense next season, with the addition of Aaron Hill, and take a good, hard look at the pitching that’s available on the free-agent and trade market.

It’s going to be difficult to sign a starter to a big-money, long-term deal, because (assuming the Jays resign Roy Halladay, which is their intent) they’ll have about $60 million gobbled up by four players in 2011, with players like Marcum, McGowan, League, Accardo, Janssen and Lind well into arbitration.  Also, there’s really not a starter out there beyond C.C. Sabathia and A.J. Burnett to whom to give a long-term, big-money deal.  Guys like Derek Lowe, Jon Garland and Paul Byrd could all be reasonable one-year stop-gaps, but will any of them take a one-year, $8 million deal, or even a two-year, $14 million dollar contract?  The Jays may well wind up waiting on this year’s Kyle Lohse to slip through the cracks.

I think they’re going to need to get aggressive on the trade market, dangling valuable pieces like some of the younger pitching, B.J. Ryan, maybe even Adam Lind in order to see what they can get back.  This could be a really fun off-season, because if J.P. Ricciardi wants to be here in 2010, the Jays can’t go 75-87 in 2009.  With a rotation of Halladay, Litsch, Purcey, Downs and Davis Romero, with McGowan arriving in May, they just might.

A.J. Burnett isn’t coming back.  I’m not sure why so many people seem to believe that now, with Marcum gone for ’09, the Jays need to keep Burnett.  One has nothing to do with the other.  Burnett is just like any other free agent out there on the market this off-season – the fact that he played here the last three years holds no sway at all.  Remember, too, Burnett has only had two healthy seasons in his career – the two in which he’s been pitching for a contract.  He may be past that now, but is that a $50 million chance you want to take?

He gave us some fine glimpses of his old self tonight, though, giving up back-to-back rockets to score three runs right after he didn’t get a call.  Burnett struck out Kevin Youkilis with two on and two out in the 5th, but first-base ump Jim Reynolds didn’t ring Youkilis up on the swing.  The next pitch was lined into centre for an RBI single.  Burnett then fell behind Sean Casey 2-0 before Casey smacked a two-run double off the right-field wall.  That’s vintage A.J. from the last two years, stuff I had thought he’d matured his way past.

He also, for some reason, has fallen in love with the barehand play on balls hit back to him, much to his detriment.  He tried to barehand a Jason Bay comebacker in the second and botched it, when he had all kinds of time to make a safe play with the glove.  In the fateful 5th, he thought about barehanding a Jacoby Ellsbury bunt, but instead chose to give way and let the ball go by him to nobody, since Scott Rolen had gone to cover third and Marco Scutaro second, as they should have.  He made up for that by picking Ellsbury off first, at least.

Burnett, by the way, mentioned after the game that he wouldn’t risk injury by taking the ball on three days’ rest to start on the season’s last day if he had a shot at 20 wins.  I’m not sure that’ll still be true if he beats the Yankees on Wednesday.

I said a few times during the post-game that the Jays have been mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, but I was wrong.  I didn’t look at it from both sides.  While the Jays are now 8 1/2 games back of the Red Sox with eight games to play, the Sox have nine games left on their schedule, which means that if the Jays win out and the Sox lose out, the Jays could still force a tiebreaker.  Those of you who are glass 999,999/1,000,000th full-types can hold onto that, maybe for another few days.  I hate when I make those kinds of mistakes on the air, and I apologize profusely.

Here’s tonight’s edition of The JaysTalk, for your listening pleasure:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Remember, today and every day in the month of September, please vote for Tom Cheek and ONLY for Tom Cheek to be on the ballot for the Ford C. Frick Award to gain entry into the broadcasters’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.  It’ll make more of an impact on the voters if Tom alone gets the overwhelming majority of the votes.  Just click on this link:

http://web.baseballhalloffame.org/awards/frick_2008/vote.jsp

It’s a bit of a pain to fill out all the info, but it only takes two minutes at the most, and Tom Cheek was certainly worth your time.  Thank you.

Rational, reasonable comments are always welcome!