Enough Stuff to Make a Post

Just a quick comment on yesterday's game and post before we get moving here.  Yesterday's post was mostly in jest, in the sense that I'm not actually going to let myself get overly upset over 3 games, even if they were all terribly contested losses.  I know that it doesn't have a whole lot to do with anything, but if, instead of going W-W-W-W-L-L-L, these last two series were made up of some kind of combination of alternating wins and losses or some non-sweep scenarios, but still finished with a 4-3 sample, I doubt I'd be complaining in this manner.  The fact of the matter is that the Orioles are playing at their peak right now, and the garbage is sure to come sooner or later.  I think we can all agree that the O's pitching staff isn't really as good as the Jays offense made them look over the last three days (or at any point so far this season), and that this Blue Jay offense hasn't really woken up yet.

I won't pussyfoot around it; the Jays haven't really played all that well so far in the regular season, save for some really nice defense, Edwin Encarnacion tearing the cover off the ball, and some nice performances by the starting pitchers in games where the offense didn't show up.  Basically, the Jays are currently 10-9, and they haven't really played to their abilities yet.  This is the kind of team that, once they finally click it together, is going to score a lot of runs and win more than their fair share of ballgames.

Let's try to keep from jumping off the bridges.

Having said all that, I think I forgot to dole out some Zaunheads lately, which, combined with getting in to a habit of saying "such and such gets a Zaunhead" and then forgetting to record it on the scoreboard... basically there should be 19 Zaunheads and 19 tally marks on the scoreboard right now, and there aren't, even if that's just a product of yesterday's rushed post.  I might go through at some point and try to verify this whole thing, but if I end up being too lazy to even bother, I think we can just say that nobody has really earned one over the last three days, save for maybe Hutchison, and leave it at that.


Stuff
Apparently Travis Snider left the 51's game last night with a jammed wrist.  Enough of this nonsense.  Drew at DJF talks about that one.

Are you embarrassed to be a Blue Jays fan?  No?  You should be now.

MLB.com looks at the Rays and their shifts, with a bonus Blue Jays mention.

Beyond the Boxscore looks at Yu Darvish's pitch repertoire, and more specifically, at a nasty shuuto pitch, or essentially a screwball/reverse slider/super 2-seamer thingy.


Ken Rosenthal went with a Jim Bowden-style "Fix the Angels" article.  This one actually makes a little more sense, probably because Rosenthal isn't senile yet, but these types of posts are almost always "get-rich-quick" schemes.

Lineups
Jays
Escobar SS
Johnson 2B
Bautista RF
Lind 1B*
Edwin DH
Thames LF
Lawrie 3B
Rasmus CF
Arencibia C

Romero P

Mariners
Ackley 2B
Ryan SS
Ichiro RF
Smoak 1B
Montero DH
Liddi 3B
Saunders CF
Olivo C
Wells LF

Beaven P

*John Farrell, on 24 April: "Encarnacion "has emerged as our four-hole hitter right now ... That's the way we're going to go."  That lasted.