Today in Blue Jays history

Today in Bluebird Banter history:

Two Years Ago:

Blue Jays won game 2 of the ALDS over the Rangers, 5-3.We hit 4 home runs, Tulo, Pillar (apparently on a pitch that was head high), Ezequiel Carrera and Edwin all homered.

Happ got the win, despite giving up 10 base runners in 5 innings of work. Biagini, Brett Cecil, Jason Grilli and Osuna pitched in relief. Osuna got a 5-out save.

Three Years Ago:

I talked about the 22 years between playoff appearances. I wrote about many of the mistakes made over 22 years and managed to get it all in in under 1800 words. I hope I’m not writing a similar post in 20 years. I actually kind of like the post.

Four Years Ago:

I wrote about a story Shi Davidi post on the Jays players having a “lack of trust” in the Alex and the front office. To remind you, this was before our 2 playoff years. The players were unhappy that the front office didn’t add any players at the trade deadline, and, for that matter, didn’t fix any of the glaring roster holes at any point.

Shi’s story talks about how Alex went to the players to get money to try to sign Ervin Santana. It was a sad moment in Jays history. The team badly needed another starter, but instead of going to Rogers for more money (or more likely after being told no by Rogers), Alex asked some players to take a pay cut to free up money. That's just bad business.

Also some players were unhappy with Alex for not talking to them. Shi said:

Compounding matters was that Anthopoulos wasn’t with the team in Houston on deadline day, and didn’t address the non-activity with his players. When the team returned to Toronto on Aug. 5, a member of the team approached me, nodded his head in the direction of Anthopoulos and said, “Who’s that?”

”You mean the GM?” I asked.

”I don’t know,” he replied. “Haven’t seen him for a while.”

I finished the post saying that:

I think Alex is a smart enough guy to learn from his mistakes. I hope that when they take a look back at what went wrong, they consider what Shi has said here, and learn from it.

I think Alex did learn from his mistakes.

Five Years Ago:

Minor Leaguer took a look back at two playoff losses the Jays had on October 7th in the distant past. One in the 1989 ALCS vs. the A’s. Mike Flanagan took the loss. Rickey Henderson homered twice and Canseco hit one (ML includes video that shows Canseco’s homer reached the fifth deck).

The other was ALCS Game 1, also against the A’s Jack Morris started for the good guys. Dennis Eckersley got the save in both games.

Go take a look.

And we posted that hitting coached Chad Mottola and Dwayne Murphy were let go by the team. I was surprised about Mottola:

Mottola’s philosophy did seem like a big switch from what the Blue Jays hitters had been hearing in the past, under Murphy and Cito, but I was sure he would still be here next year. Chad has been part of the Blue Jays system since 2007, this year was his first full season in the majors, as a coach. He was thought to be a miracle worker with players sent to the minors in the past couple of season.

Eight Years Ago:

JohnnyG (what ever happened to him?) wrote about how conflicted Jays fans were over whether we should cheering for Roy Halladay who had pitched a no-hitter for the Phillies in the playoffs two days before, or not. I don’t remember being unsure, I cheered for him, but I can understand why some might have not wanted to see him do so well with another team.

I still miss him.

Ten Years Ago:

Hugo did a report card on our starting pitching. Doc got an A+, A.J. Burnett B+, Dustin McGowan C+, Shaun Marcum A-, Jesse Litsch A- (man, I liked him, just a great guy), David Purcey C- and Scott Richmond B (he pitched in Italy this year). I think he needs to write a book about it.