Middle Place

Well, the dream of an undefeated season is over for the Jays, but somehow not for the Orioles, which, I suppose, is entirely a function of playing the Twins for the first three games of the year.  Anyway, I'm only a little jealous, since the O's are pretty much 5% of the way to their overall win total for the season, so meh.

Anyway, we've got a few housekeeping items to take care of before I start shitting on the Red Sox and how douchey they are.  First, Kelly Johnson gets the Zaunhead for his game yesterday; he got on base three times, including drawing a big walk in the 9th inning to get Bautista to the plate with the game on the line.

Second, following Joel Carreno's first major league start, he was demoted to AAA in exchange for Aaron Laffey, who will pitch out of the bullpen (or start in an emergency, I guess).  The Jays won't need a fifth starter again until sometime towards the end of the month, and by then Dustin Mcgowan ought to be ready, but even if he's not, they can send Laffey back down and bring up Carreno or Cecil to start in his place (or have Laffey do it).  With the two exrta inning games played already, the Jays kind of needed a rest for the bullpen, so Laffey should provide a rest from the bullpen.  All the members of the bullpen save for Villanueva and Frasor had a rest yesterday, but the Red Sox are in town and they always make you throw a bunch of pitches, so the extra arm in the pen should come in handy.

Third, the home opener is tonight, and should be plenty exciting, considering a sold-out-in-ten-minutes type of hype surrounding this game.  That will probably be fun until about an hour in to the game, when the bottom of the second inning begins.  The Red Sox, of course, began the season by getting swept by the Detroit Tigers, starting the season 0-3 for the second year in a row.  Obviously, we can remember that Boston began last season 0-8 or something like that, before having a really amazing stretch of 120-ish games, and then missing the playoffs in hilarious fashion after a delicious final day of the season.  Hopefully the Sox start the season the way they did last year, since it would give the Jays three more wins.  It's only lunchtime right now, so the lineups aren't up yet, but I'll probably edit those in here later if I remember.  This game begins at 7:30 ET, instead of the usual 7.  I assume that's because it's the homo pinner and there will be some big ceremonial bullshit.  Wear blue!  Henderson Alvarez vs. Felix Doubront.

Finally, the Yu Darvish experience begins tonight, and it's going to be awesome since it happens against Seattle.  I'll be doing everything in my power to see this happen.

Lineups
Jays
Escobar SS
Johnson 2B
Bautista RF
Encarnacion DH
Lind 1B (!)
Lawrie 3B
Davis LF
Arencibia C
Rasmus CF

Alvarez P

Red Idiots
Ellsbury CF
Pederast 2B
Gonzalez 1B
Youkilis 3B
Ortiz DH
Ross LF
Sweeney RF
Saltalamacchia C
Aviles SS

Doubront P