Question Time

The rumor mill is still grinding slowly, and likely will continue to for the  week leading up the American Thanksgiving weekend. Other than the Jays being out on Pablo Sandoval (and at a likely $90 million plus, over five years, I'm happy with that), there really isn't much rumored to be going on.

Bob Elliot gives us the timeline on the Russell Martin deal and does his usual great job (other than the weird mention of Kingston a couple of times).

I figured I'd ask another question, we did the negative end of this one, a couple of days ago, so let's do the positive side: Which player in Blue Jays history for whom you had little in expectations, out performed your hopes the most?

The obvious answer is Jose Bautista, we figured he was a platoon player, he could hit lefties, but shouldn't be out there against right-handers (and for some reason we were using him as a leadoff hitter early in his Jays career), but he turned into Jose Bautista. I remember the 'we hate Jose Bautista' facebook page, so I wasn't the only one that didn't

Putting Bautista aside, I'll go with Marco Scutaro. When we traded for him, I thought he was roughly a replacement player, a little better with the bat than John McDonald, but not much more than that. We had Aaron Hill and David Eckstein, so Scutaro looked like a bench guy.

Eckstein turned out to be pretty bad, then his biggest hit of the season was an elbow to Hill's head, putting Aaron out of the lineup and Scutaro into it.

Marco turned out to be great. He put up a 2.9 fWAR in 2008 and a 4.2 fWAR in 2009, did a great job in the leadoff spot. And he was a lot of fun to watch. His teammates seemed to like him. And he was a very 'heads up' player.

Now that's veteran presents.

So give us your choice of the Blue Jays player that exceeded your expectations the most.