Monday? Bantering: Blue Jays bits

Good Afternoon.

I’m sure I’m not the only one, but I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I tend to get insomnia on occasion anyway. Now when days are all the same, it is that much worse. But, it seems to be lifting.

I have a friend who said he plays a round of golf in his head to push away insomnia. And I took his trick and made it my own for a while, in a different way. I would take a MLB team, pick a decade, and pick out who played each position that decade. It chased out the circular thoughts that kept me awake. But then I started writing on the site and doing this trick started its own circular thoughts.

Over in the Athletic, Andrew Stoeten has a great post talking about the most fan hated players in Blue Jays history.

It is a great idea for a post and Andrew, as always, does a good job with it.

Most of the players listed were hated because of their play. Some were hated because they didn’t immediately play up to their potential. When Jose Bautista started his Blue Jays career 1 for 14 there was a Facebook group “We hate Jose Bautista”, which I didn’t understand. Edwin, Smoak, some of the others, seemed to get immediate hate. I have always been more on the let’s give them a chance to show what they can do.

Anyway, Andrew missed out on a couple of my least favorites:

• Kevin Millar. Man, I really didn’t like him. Alex signed him before the 2009 season. He was 37. He hadn’t had a 2 WAR season since 2004. He was brought in for ‘veteran presents’ (every time I say that something emails me, so I thought I’d mention here that it is a in-joke on the term veteran presences) and then turned out to be a jerk. And he played way too much, 78 games and hit .223/.311/.363 with defense at first base that was less than good. And the Cowboy up stuff was irritating.
• Gord Ash. Understanding that Ash became GM at a tough moment. He had a team that had been great, but was aging (sounds like Mark Shapiro), but instead of rebuilding and getting younger, he doubled down on older guys. Instead of building around the younger players they did had, Ash seemed to trade off the young guys. The Ash years seemed to be a time of spinning our wheels. There were some good draft picks and good individual players, but he couldn’t put together a team. He also seemed to let his managers push him into moves. Sometimes the managers didn’t have the future of the team at heart, but GM has to be thinking of the future.
• And, of course, Roger Clemens. Though I didn’t dislike him at the time, I hated it when he wanted out of Toronto so badly and acted like a jerk for the rest of his career/life. I tend to dislike players that make a big show of wanting to be out of Toronto and telling us how they hate being here. I know I should ignore, but that sort of thing bugs me.

Anyway tell us about the players you disliked (hated is likely too strong a word, hating a baseball player seems over the top)

Keegan Matheson at Bluejays.com has a list of five top left fielders in Blue Jays history. After George Bell, at the top, there is a drop in quality. Shannon Stewart was good, but it is a bit sad that he’s number two. Number 3 and 4 are platoon players, Frank Catalanotto and Reed Reed. And Candy Maldonado played all of 207 games in left for us.

Most of our best left fielders were former center or right fielders and were listed in those positions.