Gerry and I got a chance to speak with Jon Lalonde regarding the team's most recent draft.

The good doctor shuts down the Rangers for 7-2/3. B.J. Ryan has a rare brush with human-ness, but gets it done for the Blue Jay win.

Josh Banks had a strong night on the mound as the affiliates went 5-1.

Sorry that it's not as elaborate as last year's.

Here are the five Jays headed to Pittsburgh for the All-Star game:

With today being Independence Day in the US here's a look at the college players on Team USA.

The Jays are 5-18 in Arlington over the last four years.

A 2 – 4 night for the Toronto Farm.

That's right, for the next two weeks it'll be all All-Stars, all the time over at Photo of the Day.

We begin with The Mighty Tree, Troy Glaus:

Travis Snider hit his first home run, a grand slam, and had three hits to push his average over .300.  Pulaski are 9-1 and cruising.  Jesse Litsch made his AA debut yesterday and pitched very well.  Those were the highlights of a day where the affiliates could only get one win.

The Jays were 9-9 in interleague play. The rest of the AL did much better.

It took two innings of Friday night's game for me to decide who was going to be Photo of the Day today.

Here's Lyle Overbay:

In the recent Bicentennial Men Hall of Names feature here on Batter's Box, which formed a fine All-Star team made up of big leaguers all born in the year 1976 a number of people stepped up with alternate all-year teams, and so we also met at least partial squads from, among others, 1957, 1959, 1980, 1982 and 1983. [Wednesday 7/5 Update: already added to this story are teams or partial teams for 1903, 1934, '35, 1945, '46, '47, '49, 1951, '55, '58, 1963, '64, '65, '66, 1970, '75, '77, '79 and 1981.]

Nice teams, one and all. But what's the very best year for producing big league talent? I'm going to set the bar pretty high with the year ...

This return to Toronto by a former starter whose name begins with C and now pitches for an NL team that wears red went a lot better for the home side than the last one did.

On our day, the Canadians in the Jay minor league system did pretty well.  David Corrente hit 2 sacrifice flies (how Canadian is that?) and caught a shutout in a Dunedin victory, while Jonathan Baksh doubled and singled and drove in 2 in an Auburn loss.  The farm affiliates went 4-2.

It's Canada's 139th birthday today, which is one hell of a coincidence, since that was probably the paid attendance at the game in our nation's capital last night.