Happy birthday to bench coach Don Wakamatsu, who turns 48 today. Hope he has a great day.
There are a couple of good stories about Jose Bautista out on the web. Jayson Stark, on ESPN.com has a long story calling Jose the (bearded) face of the Jays.
If last season had really been a fluke for Jose Bautista, would he really have kept driving those baseballs deep into the night right through September? Really? We remind you, this is the information age. So if a hitter has holes, somebody finds them. If the scouts don't, those holes show up on the video or the computer screens. But they always show up. Always.
Joe Pawlikowski, on Fangraphs, wrote about Jose too, talking about how unusual it is that Bautista had his big home run season in a year when home runs were down across baseball.
Even in 1996, when Anderson hit his 50, the league hit 300 more home runs than in 2010. In fact, 2010′s total is the lowest the league has experienced during a full season since 1993. That Bautista's home-run total rose drastically while the rest of the league's dropped off seems like a significant detail when evaluating his performance and his fresh five-year, $65 million contract.
I am glad to see that once folks get past the shock of Jose's contract and look deeper into the numbers, they all seem to think that Jose will continue to hit the ball high and long.
John Lott has a couple of good stories in the National Post, the first on Anthony Gose and the other on John Farrell's suggestion that players stay off Twitter:
"We're not going to say they can't do it. But I think they've got to be careful. If they're going to engage in it, then they really need to be able to follow through on some of the things that might be put out there."
I don't really share his concern, I think players should tweet if they want, but if I was on the team and my manager said that, I think I'd give up twitter. Might as well stay on the boss' good side.
By the way, if there is someone you should follow on twitter, John Lott is the guy.
Gregor Chisholm on bluejays.com and Shi Davidi for the Canadian Press each have stories on Adam Lind learning first base.
And, on the 'not related to the Blue Jays' side of things, Justine Siegal wrote about what it was like to throw batting practice to Cleveland Indian batters.