Cause it ain't.
I'm usually not one to abandon hope on June 1st but ugghhhhh, I find
myself abandoning hope like a itchy footed bandwagoner with this team. It's not just that they're losing, but they're losing
without any hope of putting up a fight. They'll eventually play better than they are now, but.... ..... ....yeah.
You can bad mouth
the front office all you like on their failings (and there are more
than a few) but really, who really saw all of these pizza pockets
simultaneously blowing up in their faces? Your MVP caliber third baseman
is struggling and constantly hurt, plummeting his trade value; your
young ace right-hander has shoulder problems and pitched horribly before
eventually giving to the DL; your other potential ace righthander
suffers a weird identity crisis and struggles to cling to anything that consistently works. Plus your supposed everyday right-fielder posts an
unplayably bad April, the second baseman you hope will finally stay
healthy and be a star is even worse than that lousy guy, and then your star reliever does
something that is now up to the courts to decide, never anything resembling good look within
any context.
Let's accept that 2018 has been a goddamn disaster so far, in nearly every conceivable way.
Which
players on this team have exceeded expectations? Luke Maile? Teoscar
Hernandez's first three weeks? Yangervis is a very nice utility player to have around, but expecting him to be a key offensive cog in a lineup everyday is damn sad. J.A Happ is still doing his thing, which
in this season feels like a damn godsend because every other starter has made me long for the days of Steve Parris (not Joey Hamilton, because that's too far damnit.)
How about the bullpen? Great. The team isn't winning games. Who cares. Seven games under .500, I'm more interested if some desperate team gives up a potentially useful player for Seunghwan Oh than if this is a real strength of the team.
I'm sorry, but I don't think this is gonna work out for the Bluebirds this year. I'm more optimistic about the playoff chances of the Reds frankly, because their starting pitching is legitimately as bad or just a bit worse, but they have three elite hitters currently (Gennett, Votto, Suarez) and I don't see anybody on this Jays team getting that hot anytime soon. 14 games back of 1st place isn't that much different than 16. Or ten or twelve games back of a wildcard spot. It's a long season and every team is theoretically capable of going on a run, but I'm frankly done with this. I'll watch casually, I'll root and make snide remarks accordingly. But this team doesn't have it. They rolled the dice luckily in April but luck punched them to the curb real hard in May. They're BAD. And Aledmys Diaz, or Randal Grichuk, or Steve Pearce (if he still lives) will not swing the pendulum the other way.
And man this sucks... I really wanted Curtis Granderson to be a part of a good Blue Jays team. Now it's likely just a weird and relatively short stop within a very nice major league career. It's one thing to be bad but interesting, it's another to be disappointing and also completely uninteresting. I think Atkins made a lot of good moves this winter with good, intelligent intentions. But nothing worked. That's baseball. Whatever. I'm willing to give him another chance or two or three.
Anyways, this is fun right? Please, in the eternal words of Principal Seymour Skinner: Prove me wrong Jays! Prove me wrong. And hurry up already.
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20180602010312155