Hello everyone and welcome the 2010 Season!
Hat tip to Mop Up duty for putting together the video I found on Youtube
It has been a long 182 days since our beloved boys in blue took the field back on October 4th 2009. It has been a long and busy off-season which saw many changes to our lineup and rotation. We lost arguably the best pitcher in baseball and are in the process of infusing more youth into our lineup. All of these things add up on paper to equal that the Jays should not be very good this year. In fact most of the experts have written us off as the worst team in the American League with the possibility of a 100 loss season.... but you know what? At the risk of sounding like a giant cliché the game is played on the field and not on paper. So let's play ball.
To kick off the season we draw the Texas Rangers who are already missing one of the biggest pieces of their lineup as Ian Kinsler has been placed on the DL with a sprained right ankle. He is expected to miss the first week of the season so it doesn't seem like we will see him in this opening series at all.
The MO of the "Power Rangers" in the past has always been that they can slug with the best of them and hope that their pitchers hold the line just enough to get the win. That doesn't look like it is about to change this year. Although they do have a couple of more promising young arms including Neftali Feliz who should clean up in the back of the bullpen with Frank Francisco. The strength of this team remains their power at the plate. Even though they are missing Kinsler to kick off the year they still have some great weapons with Nelson Cruz, Josh Hamilton and even the aging Vladimir Guerrero.
The opening day Starters will be Shaun Marcum for the Jays and Scott Feldman for the Rangers. Last year Feldman went 17-8 with 113K's, 65BB's in just under 190IP. He finished the year with an ERA of 4.08 and a WHIP of 1.28.
Marcum as we know, missed all of 2009 with injury,surgery and rehab. Let's hope this opening day start is just step 1 on his way to his comeback player of the year award.
Check after the Jump for Lineups and pitcher information.
Lineups courtesy of MLB Jordan Bastian here
BLUE JAYS1. Jose Bautista, RF
2. Aaron Hill, 2B
3. Adam Lind, DH
4. Vernon Wells, CF
5. Lyle Overbay, 1B
6. John Buck, C
7. Edwin Encarnacion, 3B
8. Alex Gonzalez, SS
9. Travis Snider, LF
RANGERS1. Julio Borbon, CF
2. Michael Young, 3B
3. Josh Hamilton, LF
4. Vlad Guerrero, DH
5. Nelson Cruz, RF
6. Chris Davis, 1B
7. Jarrod Saltalamacchia, C
8. Andres Blanco, 2B
9. Elvis Andrus, SS
Now just for a few more serious housekeeping matters. As was previously mentioned in the rules post done up by Tom which can be viewed here, we like to pretend that this place is our living room. This means typically we don't like a lot of swearing. In the heat of the game some things happen and we get that but let's not go overboard shall we? That being said under no circumstances will I tolerate ethic, racial or sexual preferences used as insults towards any players, teams or other commentators. There is no place for those slurs in civilized society and as such I don't want it here.
Basically let's use some common sense. Disagree all you want but do so intelligently and you won't ever have any problems.
So let's play ball. Here's to a great season!