It’s major league baseball time in Toronto, once again.

Dustin McGowan gets the honour of starting the home opener against the New York Yankees. He faces off against Masahiro Tananka, who will be making his major league debut. Blue Jay legend Roy Halladay will throw the opening pitch.

Winners all round to start the season. Marcus Stroman, Aaron Sanchez and Matt Boyd all pitched well. Anthony Gose, Matt Tuiasosopo, Kenny Wilson, Ryan Schimpf, Kevin Nolan, AJ Jimenez, Dwight Smith and KC Hobson all had multi hit games.

Lansing played in the cross town showdown against Michigan State, details to come later.

Today is opening day for the minor leaguers. Three of the Jays full season teams start league play today. The Lansing Lugnuts play their annual exhibition game against Michigan State. The full slate is shown below.

The minor league season starts on Thursday but the rosters have been finalized.  Teams are flying in to their cities and ready to meet the media and season ticket holders before the games begin.

Two teams have released their rosters so far.

This is your thread for the Tampa series.  We get a nice surprise to start with, the lineup is not full of lefties.

You have made your 2014 prediction, including the Blue Jays. You have read the Blue Jay round table. Now it is your turn to go on the record and tell us what will happen in 2014.

It is finally time for some Blue Jays baseball, for real. To get you ready for the season the roster answered some questions about the 2014 version of the Jays.

Better late than never, here are the results of the 2013 record prediction contest. 2012's winner rpriske failed to repeat. Last years third place finisher came in third again. The second place finisher was fourth last year while the winner was 18th showing its better to peak than to be consistent.

It's time to go on the record with your predictions for 2014. You should know the drill by now and try and do better than last year.

Over the next few days the rosters of the Blue Jays full-season minor-league affiliates will be released to the public. But for this upcoming season, Lansing has the potential to be a very exciting team to follow.

Your 2014 Toronto Blue Jays appear to be set now, unless a trade happens.

And so the last week of spring training begins.  This week includes a trip to Montreal before the team reverses direction and returns to Tampa to face the Rays one week from today.  Things are looking better today than they did a week or two ago.  Back then it looked like no-one wanted to be the fifth starter, now we have a competition.  But first the news.  Anthony Gose, Mike Nickeas, Chris Getz and Steve Tolleson were all sent down today.  It will be interesting to see how Gose reacts to his demotion, he was unhappy last year to be sent down.  Gose improved his hitting as spring training progressed and finishes with a 250 average.  He needs to show some hitting skills in AAA.  In other news Munenori Kawasaki will not be part of the team but he remains in camp.  I assume that if he can catch on with a major league team the Jays will let him go.  Finally Jose Reyes is going for an MRI on his hamstring.  The Jays say it is just to confirm that nothing major is wrong but it doesn't sound good.

There has been a lot of talk of the 'good old days' lately - how a deeper bench is more useful than a bigger bullpen. But how true is that?  Lets try to find out.

As we get ready for another season I thought I would spotlight a few players for whom 2014 will be a make or break year.  This category fits players whose prospect staus is on the bubble or almost gone.  The top prospects are generally not in the make or break category, they are on a path to the majors, they will get a second chance if they have a bad year.  Newly drafted players would not be make or break, they still have time to fix any problems or recover from a bad season or bad half-season.  Make or break are players who have been in the system for several years and have hit some bumps in the road, and those bumps could knock them out of baseball if the player cannot overcome them.

Yesterday I looked at the expected assignments for hitters coming out of spring training.  Today I will look at the starting pitchers.  Usually to start the season there will be at least one starter per two teams that is on the DL so for some teams I will list six starters.