• Vernon already has one-fifth of his 2009 home run total. Whee!
• I'm okay with Buck as the lead broadcaster. He doesn't exactly have a classic baseball announcer voice, but I don't find him grating.
• Finally saw Kevin Gregg pitch, and I am in awe of those glasses. He looks like a founding member of Devo. Someone needs to get him a yellow jumpsuit pronto. He seemed confident out there.
  
• I was starting to worry about Jason Frasor, but then he went to his Wondrous Relatively New Changeup [tm], and with the help of a couple of somewhat low strike three punchouts, he was fine.
• Alex Gonzalez The Second looks like a shortstop out there, mostly because he likes to throw on the run. This doesn't mean that he necessarily is a good shortstop, but he's got the moves down.
• It's too early in the season to make judgements, but the bottom half of the Jays' batting order does not inspire confidence.
  

I don't remember how Martinez was pronouncing "Encarnacion"... was he emphasizing the "car" and nothing else? Something like that.

I think Gaston likes having players around he isn't going to use. Weren't there one or two guys like that in the bullpen last year? I heard his comment the other day, that "it's too early in the year to pinch hit," and I thought, yeah, it's too early in the year to try to win. Something like that, you have to work your way up to it. I know the guy has his strengths, but I won't miss him after he steps down.

Both Tabler and Buck are pronouncing "Edwin Encarnación" — almost always the full name — like it's a bomb they're trying to defuse.

Bingo! 

Buck is almost certainly hoping the EE's stay on the team isn't a long one. Night after night of tackling that surname could prove to be his undoing. I imagine a nickname is forthcoming.

And like many others, I have to concede that Buck isn't as terrible as I had anticipated. He's not good, not by a long shot, but he has learned the value of silence. That at least limits his cliche-spewing, a lesson Tabler could certainly stand to learn.

While I might not share many people's wide-eyed enthusiasm for Ruiz and the success he might have at age 32, he could nonetheless have a role on this team were Gaston taken to pinch-hitting just a wee bit more. Neither the starting catcher nor shortstop, whoever either should be, should  be immune to being replaced late in the game.

Of course, John Buck is batting 6th so a new love-affair with a Barajas clone appears to be in the offing.

The memory of Garth Iorg coming up to face Tanana in '87 with Cecil Fielder languishing on the bench is burned on my brain

Wait a minute--wasn't Fielder caught stealing earlier in that game, just before Lee's triple? Doesn't invalidate your example; there must have been somebody on the bench. Beniquez or someone.

Sounds like Davey Concepcion, to Buck.

Bingo! (my second bingo in this thread)

I can't vouch for the proper pronunciation of Encarnacion and Concepcion, but to we Anglos, those are 5- and 4-syllable surnames, respectively. Buck is trying to squeeze Encarnacion into 4 syllables, just as if it somehow were intended to have the same cadence as Concepcion.

• Buck and Tabler were good but not great. Some good nuggets of information but a lot of repetition. They need to tone it down a notch.
• Is Vernon Wells slimmer or just false memory based on last year?
• "Wild Thing" Gregg is awesome.
• The corner infielders are going to help me teach my kids new swear words this year.
• A meltdown in Beantown would be wonderful. The previous decade has been just too good for Boston fans, in all sports.
  

McCoy can steal bases = leadoff hitter.....quite simple in Cito-speak.

As for Overbay?  Everybody knows Overbay can hit righthanders.  His value is maximized if it can be demonstrated that he can play everyday.  He has hit lefties in the past.  I don't think it was luck, but is it a diminshed skill?  That's the question AA wants the answer too.  I don't blame him. 

Gaston, asked if he'd use a late-inning def replacement for EE: "I think that would almost destroy him, as far as his confidence."

There are legitimate reasons to criticize Cito and non-legitimate reasons. Complaints or arguments about inconsistency concerning moving Bautista down for McCoy are the latter.

The last two seasons have seen a broken hand and a platoon reduce his effectiveness against lefties.  I'm inclined to believe he won't hit them again, but I think it's worth a 2 month investment.  Jays management apparently agrees.  Let's see what's happening in July before condemning these decisions too much.

Apparently Cito's team is very psychologically fragile.

I wonder what Earl Weaver would have made of Gaston's philosophy.

How about, instead of worrying about player's confidence, you give them confidence by saying, "Do it my way and we'll win. If that means I pinch-hit for you, if it means I send in a defensive replacement for you, if it means I tell you to play shortstop with a freaking paper bag over your head, then you say yes sir and we'll win. Because I have a plan, and it doesn't involve you striking out in the eighth inning against a pitcher you can't hit in the first place." Treat players like they're special special snowflakes and you become the prisoner of their weaknesses.

Can we have a thread dedicated to Cito's idiocy please?

Absolutely not. The topic already gets plenty of play in virtually every thread that is published. There is no reason for us to encourage by-definition, negative-and-unproductive whining about "idiocy" on a site that, as even certain of our fellow Jay sites have admitted, has stayed remarkably civil and positive.

Three games into the season and this site is already dominated by the "Cito is an idiot" crowd.  If this is really going to become the main theme of this site, it's going to be a long and boring season.

Anyone who things "Cito is an idiot" should also be saying "AA is an idiot" and "the owners are idiots" because Cito's managerial philosophy has been widely known to everyone for years and they've retained him for another season.  By giving him another year, AA and the owners have accepted that Cito is not an idiot.  They believe it is not necessarily idiotic to keep players in the game, to refrain from pinch-hitting at every opportunity, to give pitchers a chance to pitch out of a jam in the 7th inning when his pitch count is not excessive, to refrain from endless statistical matchups at every at-bat.

Like it or not, there's more to baseball than operating a computer in the dugout.  There's a human component that none of the snipers and cynics will ever understand when they moan from the sidelines.

Of course it's fun to speculate about alternative strategies in any game situation, but can't we retain some politeness about it?  Can't we at least acknowledge the possibility of two sides to a situation?  Most of the critics are bull-headedly assuming that Cito doesn't even have an arguable case for his decisions -- as if these decisions were so black-and-white that any 3-year-old would know what to do.   Sorry, baseball is an art, not a science, and you can't always operate on percentages like a Vegas bookie or a Bay Street trader or a robot.  Humans are involved and an instinct for emotion and psychology is involved, like it or not.

Veterans like Lyle Overbay and John Buck can, of course, accept an occasional benching without psychological collapse.  But critics like Matthew E want to tell these players that they simply "can't hit" certain pitchers -- an insulting and abusive comment to make to these guys.  Doesn't that betray the whole notion of sabermetrics anyway?  Nobody "can't hit" certain pitchers -- they just can't do it at quite the same rate that someone else might do it.  And in a certain situation, when they're not constantly second-guessing themselves because of a fear of being benched at any moment, they might do just as well as someone else.  If you're going to be hooking Overbay and Buck as soon as a high-pressure situation arises, good luck with maintaining any team morale or cohesiveness or confidence -- you'll have the locker-room mutiny in Game 4 instead of Game 158.

So, 92-93, when did you develop the ability to read AA's mind?  You're trying to tell us that AA secretly agrees with your thesis that Cito is an idiot (and Beeston is an idiot) but somehow AA was never able to voice it to anyone -- and luckily you're able to tell us his secret thoughts?   When he became the GM, did AA suddenly become so pathetically weak that he couldn't even choose a non-idiot manager?  If he actually thought that Cito is an idiot, presumably he would have made this the first order of business as soon as he became GM:  "Job one, find a manager who is not an idiot."  Yet somehow he didn't.  Maybe he doesn't think Cito is an idiot?

Ryan Day, I agree with you about Cito's comments, but it wouldn't quiet any of his attackers if Cito had said that he had faith in Overbay's ability to hit lefties etc.

Here's another way to look at the confidence thing. Let's use Overbay/Ruiz as an example.

The proposition is that by pinch-hitting Ruiz for Overbay, you're hurting Overbay's confidence. But aren't you also showing confidence in Ruiz? It's kind of a zero-sum game, isn't it?

If you leave Overbay in to hit without the platoon advantage, you're putting him in a situation where he won't succeed as often. Ruiz can look at this and say, with some justification, that as badly as Overbay is doing in these situations, the manager must think I'm even worse. Might that not be extra bad for Ruiz's confidence?

So if maximizing confidence is one of our goals here, the thing to do seems to be to put the players in the positions where they can succeed most often. I don't think Gaston's doing that.

Of course, Gaston's approach works perfectly on a roster where the regulars are so much better than the bench players that a) you're always moving away from the optimum when you make a substitution, and b) who cares about the confidence of the bench players anyway? But I don't think that applies to this team either.

-Good to see Wells get off to a good start, hopefully it will help him feel more comfortable at home this year and he won't have the horrible home/away splits

-Will be hoping Arencibia gets off to a torrid start and earns a midseason promotion as our catching options are looking even worse then they did on paper

-Mccoy doesn't look to even have as much gap power as Inglett did

-Romero and Marcum throw great games and yet Tallet is the only SP with a W

-Lets hope Hill is not out long, or we  have quite a stretch of weakness in the lineup