A Beating? J-Mac tribute

Well the Jays got beaten pretty badly last night.  Sure the score was 6-4, but at no point in the game did it ever really feel like a 2-run ball game.  Some good work out of the bullpen by Wil Ledezma and Joel Carreno to keep the good guys kind of in it, or to at least stop the bleeding.  I feel as though we should completely forget about this game, get to work on this John Mcdonald tribute.  Now, the first thing I should mention is that Mcdonald said that he would be back, whether it's as a player or a coach or some sort, whether it's next year or two years or 10 years, he'll be back.

Having said that, the Jays just traded a fan favorite, and there is plenty of reason for him to be such.  I hear he's really good at defense, but also just seems to be a great dude, always doing what he can to help, hustlin', supplying some unreal defense, and coming up with clutch hits just at the right time, despite his career batting average of like .240 or something.  If it weren't such an inevitability that he'd be back in the organization much sooner than later, this post might be a little more sombre, sentimental, or even angry.  He hasn't had a chance to even be in a post-season race, let alone post-season action.  As far as I can tell, in his 10 full seasons as a pro, he has never appeared in the playoffs.  Needless to say, this will be great for him.

It's a pretty rare occurrence that a 36 year old bench player is the favorite of the fanbase, but all you need is to watch opening day, in a sold out Roger's Centre Skydome and hear the massive pop he got when they introduced "Your 2011 Toronto Blue Jays" to confirm that that is/was/forever will be the case.

I think we can all agree that Mac's best moment as a Jay was a week or so after what was probably the worst time in his life.  John's father had just lost his battle with cancer, and had asked John to dedicate his next homerun.  Naturally, as JohnnyMac is wont to do, he went and picked a really awesome time to hit a pinch hit homerun, on father's day.  Obviously MLB is retarded and doesn't allow any of their stuff to be on youtube, which essentially stops me from posting any video evidence of such a homerun, but work with me.

Then there was that time in April when Mac was summoned to second base early on when Jayson Nix got a hangnail or something and had to come out of the game.  Fast forward 10 innings later, and JohnnyMac did this to the Tampa Bay Rays:

And of course, who can forget the D?

This will probably be some sort of ad-furious tugjob for MLB.com, but it's as good as I can do without a big pile of gifs.

This should be some fun.  Seriously, just the stuff he's done this season could put up at least half an hour's worth of entertainment.  He'd been with the club for almost 6 years, and if there were some sort of video highlight package that I could find, believe me, I'd do that.

I don't know about anyone else, but I will now be rooting for Arizona a little bit more, because Mac is one of my favorite players of all time.  It was an absolute pleasure to have him on my favorite team, and I really hope he's back next year, but if not, it has certainly been nice.