The Blue Jays, and a frog in a pot of water
Plus: Donald Trump, Greg Norman, and the defiant CWNT
Mark Shapiro arrived in Toronto facing an 0-2 count. The Blue Jays had just, finally, made baseball in Toronto fun again, snapping a 22-year playoff drought that was the longest in North American sport at the time.
The team had swagger, and a loaded offence, and it was unabashedly going for it, trading prospects for stars in 2015 even when very recent attempts to trade prospects for stars hadn’t exactly worked out. Shapiro came to replace Paul Beeston, the team’s only link to its championship years, as president, and didn’t sound very impressed with the work that the Canadian GM had done in assembling that team. Then he replaced him with his own guy from Cleveland.
Fans were, naturally, suspicious. So was the media, to be honest, because Shapiro and Ross Atkins, his GM, made precious little attempt to explain their thinking to anyone who wasn’t a Rogers employee. They had smartest-guys-in-the-room vibes from the outset, a sense that wasn’t helped in the least by the fact that both of them spoke like the were flipping through a 365 Banal Motivational Phrases desk calendar.
So it was always going to take some convincing that they knew what they were doing.
Nine years later, it remains hard to be convinced. The MLB trade deadline passed on Tuesday and the Jays shipped out eight guys for a bunch of prospects. None of the trades were surprising — they were parcelling off the players not under contract for 2025 and beyond — but it’s still kind of amazing that it’s Shapiro, and especially Atkins, who were entrusted to oversee the rebuild/retool/reorg whatever.
As I wrote in my latest for theScore, are these guys really going to get another chance to build a contender?
Donald Trump and The Shark
Before I became a full-time sports watcher writer, I used to cover politics a bit, too. I’ve done a little of it since starting the freelance life, but hadn’t yet had the chance to go full-politics-column until a conversation yesterday with an editor at the Toronto Star. I’m paraphrasing, but it went something like this:
Editor: Did you see that Trump appearance at the journalists’ convention?
Me: I keep thinking about Greg Norman at The Masters.
Editor: (blinks eyes, not sure where I’m going with this)
Anyway, such was the birth of this column, over at the Star.
Nine points minus 6 points = 3 points
When FIFA handed down a six-point deduction to Canada’s women’s national soccer team after a coach was busted — jailed, even! — while trying to record an opponent’s practices with a drone, it seemed pretty clear what they were trying to do: punish the team severely enough that it would get eliminated from the tournament, while not having to deal with the headaches of forfeits and empty match slots.
Canada, though, found the loophole: Win all its games. In my other latest for theScore, I wrote about the conflicted feelings that another run to the knockout rounds presents.
Thanks, as always, for reading.