Jays vs. Indians, April 5

Boy, that feels different.  I think I'm too excited to write anything even remotely coherent for any more than a paragraph or two, but whatever.  To boot, I'll probably start drinking in about two hours, and hope to find some Masters coverage until the ball game starts.  I'm used to coming up with some kind of pun about a piece of baseball-related news or something, but there's no time for that today.  Straight preview.

Ricky Romero vs. Justin Masterson is your pitching matchup.  We all know what to expect from Ricky, but Masterson is a bit more of an unknown entity, especially since he plays in Cleveland and has only been good for a year.  He's like 6'6'', so he has a really nice downward motion to his pitches, making him an extreme groundball-heavy pitcher.  I expect him to be fairly successful this season, especially when you consider the infield defense behind him.

This Cleveland lineup seems pretty meh to me at the moment, so maybe we can just go right ahead and call for a sweep?  Seems fine to me.  I find it interesting to see all the lefties against Romero, especially Hafner at DH, though I suppose they might not really have any other options.

I watched most of the MIA-STL game last night, and uhh, frankly... that stadium is a piece of shit.  Two balls that Stanton hit to CF should probably have been gone, but apparently they opted to play that game in San Diego or something, because those balls just didn't carry at all.  I still think that Miami is going to be a really fun team to watch this year, even if they finish under .500 and disappoint an awful lot of people.  It will be interesting to see if they bring those green screens fences in during the offseason, because if Stanton can't get a ball out of there, nobody can.

I'll probably be surfing around, trying to check out Roy Halladay pitch against Pittsburgh, because he might just no-hit them, and I'll hope to see Strasburg against the Cubs as well, for the same reason.  Of course, Clayton Kershaw is almost a mortal lock to no-hit the Padres tonight, and I'll probably actually watch that whole game since it's on after the Jays and the Masters.  Big weekend.

Lineups
Jays
Escobar SS
Johnson 2B
Lawrie 3B [sidenote: fuck yes.]
Bautista RF
Lind 1B
Encarnacion DH
Thames LF
Arencibia C
Rasmus CF

Romero P

Indians
Brantley CF
Cabrera SS
Choo RF
Santana C
Hafner DH
Duncan LF
Kotchmann 1B
Kipnis 2B
Hannahan 3B

Masterson P