Well, the Jays have lost five straight and thirteen out of seventeen. It's a pretty depressing time to be a Jays fan.
If you haven't already heard about what happened , you can read about it here.
Basically the Jays stunk up the joint and scored six runs in the bottom
of the 9th to lose by one run. The game wasn't on generally accessible
television, so I was following it on Gameday and chatting with
occasional bauxite Useless Tyler. There was some confusion with
padding and Rios and Prince Fielder hit an inside the park home run.
The 5'11, 270 pound Prince Fielder. Anyway, the Jays were getting killed at that point and so we sort of laughed at it, with Tyler offering these remarks:
TK says: (3:26:38 PM)
if they lose 7-0 who cares
TK says: (3:26:42 PM)
if they lose 7-6 we can complain
Well I guess we have a lot of complaining to do.
The funny thing is that this is Fielder's second inside the park home run. Both have been against AL teams too! (You can find that video here if you look on the right, and you can sort of see today's effort here.)
In any event, I'm sure the big story for the next couple of days, until the axe inevitably falls, will be John Gibbons' job. I don't really believe that any of this is his fault. Heck, I like Gibbons. This team was supposed to win 90 or so games, and is unlikely to do so at this point, and someone is going to take the fall. I hope Gibbons gets another job, because from all I've observed he is a pretty decent guy, and has generally done a pretty good job with the pieces he has. It's not his fault that his general manager thought that Shannon Stewart could still play baseball, or that Adam Lind got off to a poor start and isn't hitting .300 in the bigs as opposed to AAA. Heck, the Jays have now suffered injuries to every theoretical opening day starter except Alex Rios and Lyle Overbay (Frank Thomas is on the DL, after all). Marco Scutaro has started fifty-four games for crying out loud!
Then there's JP RIcciardi. I don't think Ricciardi is a terribly fantastic GM, nor do I think he is a terribly poor GM. The team's drafts the last couple of years look very promising, and one of the hallmarks of his career as a GM have been some extremely astute, cheap free agent pickups (Zaun, Downs, Barajas, Stairs, McDonald and even Scutaro this year come to mind immediately). With that being said, there have been some pretty... inexplicable small moves, such as signing Shannon Stewart, releasing Reed, playing Stewart, leaving Lind in AAA, starting Stewart, and whatever else you want to throw in there (though these days may also be at an end!). I won't even get into the big things (uh, Vernon Wells in four years is going to be interesting). I'm going to take a closer look at the last couple of years of the JP Ricciardi regime in Toronto on Monday, so I'll get into more detail then. I am basically of the opinion though that if you think Gibbons needs to go, then you have to say that Ricciardi deserves the same fate - Gibbons is his coach, these are his players.
I think that Gibbons is fighting for his job. I just hope that the Jays have enough class to not Randolph him.
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20080620011014494
