Wednesday Bantering: Adam Lind, Dioner Navarro

Some links:

Adam Lind had a very open talk with Bob Elliot. Among the interesting points:

"They haven't changed the culture of the clubhouse," said Adam Lind - traded to the Milwaukee Brewers in November. "They're my friends, but the guys who still run it are still there. Jose Bautista is the voice among position players and Mark Buehrle runs the starting pitchers.

"There might be a few more smiles with Colby gone."

His favorite moments as a Jay? Hitting a walkoff  homer against Koji Uehara and the Canada Day games.

Least favorite? Playing with a broken foot.

About the managers he played for:

Lind said he was only spoken to by Gibbons on the manager's first tour when he was called in to be demoted, described Cito Gaston as "awesome," John Farrell as the "most prepared manager I'd ever seen," ("relations were good with players, but you have to remember, he was a former pitcher") and Gibbons 2.0 was "very intense - only in 2014."

It is a great interview, go read it. I still love Adam.

Shi Davidi has a spring training notebook up that is full of information. Among them:

• Daric Barton and Justin Smoak are fighting for a spot. Or more, one of them has to show he deserves to make the team or neither will. If one does it will be harder to find at bats for Dioner Navarro.
• Alex won't be adding a free agent reliever.
• They really like Wilton Lopez: "What we like about him is he pitches 70 innings every year, he's a strike-thrower, and he gets groundballs - those things are great for our park....he'll have a very good chance of making the team."
• Miguel Castro made an impression on Josh Thole who said "Aside from the velocity, he was commanding not even his fastball, more his breaking ball. All the sliders he threw - they're a different slider, they're hard, they're sharp."
• Thole also said Steve Delabar looked good.
• Daniel Norris will get a good shot to make the rotation, but if he doesn't he most likely won't be in our pen.
• If Sanchez is equally needed in the rotation and the pen, he'd go in the rotation.
• Gibbons talked to Torre about the pace of game stuff and Jose Bautista was used as an example of keeping one foot in the batter's box.

John Lott has more on Miguel Castro.

Also John Lott tells us that Josh Donaldson figures he will "cultivate a winning culture" in the Jays clubhouse.

Shi Davidi has the same (if longer) story about Donaldson.

And Donaldson is looking forward to hitting at Roger Centre.

Brendan Kennedy looks at the market for Dioner Navarro. He figures the likely landing spots are Arizona Diamondback, Texas Rangers, Detroit Tigers or Chicago White Sox.

Richard Griffin has a profile on Devon Travis, who washappy that John Gibbons took the time out to watch him take batting practice.

And new  MLB commissioner Rob Manifred is floating the idea of moving to a 154 game season. Speaking as someone that figures this off-season has been far to long as is, I'm against the idea. You know how hard it is to keep a baseball blog with 6 months of no baseball? I don't want to add another week.