- 32 years ago today (yes I'm old) John Lennon was shot and killed by someone whose name doesn't deserve to be mentioned. I was out that evening and came back to the car, brushed like a foot of new snow off the car, it was a very cold night in Edmonton, (every night in December is cold in Edmonton), got in the car and that news was the first thing I heard on the radio. I stayed up most the night listening to the coverage, hoping it was a hoax. It was incredibly sad, he had just come off a 5 year break from music to raise his son. It's good he got that time.
7 Years Ago:
- Bluebird Banter was born (actually, 7 years ago yesterday, I forgot). Here is the very first post, welcoming readers to the site, by Marc Normandin (now he's got his dream blogging job, writing about the Red Sox at Over the Monster). 7 years and 6,247,000 visits later (13,151,000 page views) and we are still here. We had our best month ever for page views last month, just over 688,000, helped along by all the news.
- Later the same day Marc talked about the, then recent, trade for Lyle Overbay.
- And on the 8th, mark w, took at look back at our World Series winning teams of 1992-93 and we haven't stopped talking about them since.
6 Years Ago:
- mark w looked at J.P. Ricciardi's response to Gil Meche signing with the Royals over the Blue Jays. JP had a case of sour grapes.
- mark also wondered if the Blue Jays were getting ready to trade Vernon Wells. Instead we were getting ready to sign him to a huge contract.
4 Years Ago:
- I put up a post accumulating rumors that were circulating at the time, and a link to John Sickels Top 20 Blue Jays Prospects. 8 of the 20 played for the Jays at least at some point last year and several have been include in trades in the last couple of years.
- A day earlier Hugo previewed the Winter Meetings that were about to start.
- And a day later Hugo puts up some more links and takes a couple of shots at the New York Post and, separately, Richard Griffin: "As I have noted before, Griffin is a good writer and it's unfortunate that he doesn't know, and doesn't want to know, anything about baseball."
3 Years Ago:
- I mentioned a rumor that the Jays were interested in Milton Bradley. Thankfully it didn't happen, thought it would have been fun.
- And then there were the Roy Halladay rumors. This time he was going to the Angels.
- And Winter Meeting rumors. All we had were rumors. The fun of the comments is the reaction to Cito suggesting Jose Bautista would hit leadoff. We really weren't fans of the guy back then.
2 Years Ago:
- masterkembo put up a links post. Much of the fun of it was the discussion about Brett Lawrie's makeup.
- And I complained that things were too quiet, and, again, the comments became another discussion about Brett Lawrie.
- We also talked about rumors the Jays were after Russell Martin. The part that interested me was a suggestion by Gregor Chisholm that Martin could 'transition to second or third base'.
- Yu Darvish posted. We had a poll asking how much people would bid. 15% said over $55 million.
- Tim McCarver won the Ford Frick, I didn't think it would ever be Tom Cheek's turn.
- We reviewed the Winter Meetings. We traded for Sergio Santos (I was happy) and Jeff Mathis (I was less happy) and re-signed Kelly Johnson.
- And Alex Anthopoulos' Off-Season Wish List was another topic of conversation.