Dane Johnson is the roving minor league pitching instructor for the Blue Jays.  Johnson spent a long time in the minor leagues before making the major leagues at age 31.  Johnson spent some time with the Blue Jays in 1996.  Johnson has been a coach in the Jays system and since 2004 has been the roving pitching instructor.  In that position Johnson shuttles between all the minor league teams working with the pitchers and supporting each teams pitching coach.  Batters Box caught up with Johnson last week in Syracuse where he took time to talk about some of the lesser known pitching prospects.

 

The glass is half-empty: two quality starts in Arlington, but the Blue Jays were life and death to escape with a single victory.

The glass is half full. Despite playing some pretty bad baseball, the Blue Jays actually won a game in Arlington, and no one suffered a season-ending injury. Time to get out of town...

As we march forwards in our countdown to the All-Star game, Photo of the Day continues to bring you All Stars for your desktop.  Today's subject is Roy Halladay:

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 ...