Every year, it seems, there's one team that the Blue Jays seem to play over and over in the spring. Usually it's the Phillies, who train down the road in Clearwater, but this year it's the Twins, whom the Jays won't see again till the regular season, May 17th in Minneapolis. Dave Bush, the scheduled home-opener starter for Toronto, is slated to oppose Kyle Lohse. Expect the Jays to start sending their everyday lineup out there more frequently now, in an effort to get the squad cranked up earlier for the games that count and to avoid another disastrous April.

This article was inspired by Jordan Furlong’s original Dunedin Diary from Spring Training 2004, and I suggest you read that one -- if you haven’t already -- before continuing here. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

I tried to post this on a really cold day here in the Greater Toronto Area, just to rub it in. Enjoy!

The spectacular World Series that just concluded with Boston coming from behind in the tenth inning to snatch the championship away from New York went a long way indeed to redeeming a season that had been, in all honesty, rather disappointing.

The Series, however, and the final game in particular, was filled with drama and tension to a degree that was - well, frankly it was excessive. It was as if all the excitement and pleasure that one normally derives in the course of the long season had instead been crammed into these eight unforgettable games.

Batter's Box reader Max Parkinson gave us the heads on a deal that sends Aaron Wideman to the Jays in exchange for the Nationals being allowed to send former Jay and Rule 5 draftpick Ty Godwin to the minor leagues. This trade has been confirmed by TSN.ca.

Bauxite Keith Talent has passed along a few images from Dunedin to tide us over these last couple of weeks before the new season. Here's the first, up close and personal with a familiar face:

I've been going to different baseball websites to see what they predict for the Toronto Blue Jays for 2005. This is what I've found so far:

We hates them! It's ours, it is, and we wants it!

Yarrr, the Jays won in the bottom of the ninth yesterday. Sparky with a fake bunt single and Huckaby chugging around third. Yo ho ho! Okay, enough dumb pirate jokes.

Today's Game Report is going to be a little different. I don't think anyone has ever done this before.

We saw Josh Towers shut down the Reds last year, and today we hope for the same against the other National League Central archrivals of the Toronto Blue Jays, the Pittsburgh Pirates. It's Roy Halladay versus Kip Wells, or so Spencer Fordin tells me.

How much difference does a manager make to a baseball team? Conventional wisdom suggests that managers are not that important, a bad manager can lose you more games than a good manager can win you; 2005 will be an interesting test of that piece of baseball wisdom. Jekyll, aka the fiery Larry Bowa, is gone; Hyde, in the guise of Charlie Manuel, is in. Will that change be the catalyst for the Phillies to finally win the division? I have seen a number of suggestions that the Phillies will do better in 2005 with their new manager, but this writer says the Phils will not win the NL East.

I tune into the game yesterday through an online feed, and who do I hear doing play-by-play? Mike Wilner. I have only heard him do one inning before -– the first inning on the day of Tom Cheek’s tribute. I believe Reed Johnson hit a homerun.

Mike Wilner, or Wiener Milk, is clearly a Box favourite. So why is this important?

The Dunedin Blue Jays are the team's high-A affiliate in the Florida State League. The team's top college prospects, from Russ Adams and David Bush to David Purcey and Adam Lind, usually begin their first full season there. With the move of the low-A affiliate from Charleston to Lansing, Dunedin also has the nicest spring climate of any of the team's minor league franchises. This makes it a natural destination for pitchers recovering from arm surgery.

Since the rise of the A’s five or so years ago, the AL West has featured, at minimum, two teams who could be reasonably ranked in the top five or six in all of baseball. For much of that time, the Seattle Mariners were one of them, winning at least 90 games four consecutive years—including, of course, the 116-win season in 2001—and earning two post-season berths in the process. That epoch is over. The Mariners lost 99 games last year, but even if they had lost only 85, they have been passed by the Rangers and now stand as the fourth-best team in a four-team division.

Today in Spring Training action the Jays take on the mighty Reds, a team tabbed to battle it out for the big potato this October by a certain Batter's Box analyst who will remain nameless to protect his reputation.

Unfortunately, the Toronto Raptors, a team that's actually playing a regular season sport, have forced this game off of the dial in Toronto. The good news is that it appears that the Fan network is carrying the game on their other channels, so if you've got a radio with decent reception you should be able to pull in a signal even if you're a Torontonian.

Today we'll look at the Spring Training stat sheet and decide who should make this year's club.