Toronto Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos experienced his team’s first game the way the club’s fans did: catching updates on television as he ran around keeping up with whatever else needed to be done on opening day.
In his case his plate was pretty full. His wife was in bed with the flu, leaving the man who assembled the club that took Yankee Stadium by storm playing Mr. Mom – assembling breakfasts, organizing lunch, getting little people to swimming lessons – all while taking quiet satisfaction in the team he put on the field this season.
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"Growing up an Expos fan, I always wanted a team of two-way players who grinded out at-bats and guys who were great athletes and [had] good on-base percentages but also contact bats that could put the ball in play. You want power arms in the bullpen and all those things," he said. "You want those things, but you can’t do it all in one off-season. It takes time to draft those guys, sign those guys and trade for those guys [but] I feel like we’re finally starting to get there."
If Anthopoulos likes his team, how do you think everyone else feels?
With one game down and 161 to play – and don’t forget the playoffs! – the Blue Jays are on a fast track to being the warmest, fuzziest, feel-great story in Toronto sports, granted, there isn’t a lot of competition for the honour.
But if the unthinkable happens and they actually end up where some have optimistically projected them, if the 38th edition of Canada’s last remaining MLB team somehow breaks its 21-year playoff drought, the Blue Jays could go down as one of the feel good stories in Canadian sports, ever.
Now, don’t get this twisted. I am not suggesting that on the basis of their impressive 6-1 victory over the New York Yankees on opening day the Blue Jays are locks for the American League East or the Wild Card or anything else other than being no worse than .500 after Game 2 on Wednesday night. Certainly that’s the farthest thing from what Anthopoulos is saying.
Ultimately the team’s fortunes will be determined by fortune: Will Drew Hutchison be able to shave a run off his ERA? Will R.A. Dickey and Mark Buehrle be good for another 400 innings? Can Jose Bautista extend his prime and Edwin Encarnacion stay healthy?
And perhaps most important: Will the rest of the AL East play as mediocre a brand of baseball as their lineups collectively suggest?
But how this team will be embraced is a much more certain thing. The Blue Jays are a team you can root for.
Part of this is by design, as Anthopoulos, heading into the final year of his contract, decided to field a team on his terms, and gathering a roster that was easy to like was part of his agenda.
"We definitely placed an emphasis on character and makeup this off-season," he said. "… Obviously we needed talent as well, but we weren’t going to take any shortcuts when it came to makeup and character. It was hard to do because there were a lot of times in the off-season where you are very tempted [because] someone is out there and they are very talented and you can get them at a really good price, whether it was contract or trade, but we walked away because the background work we did on their makeup and character was not going to fit with what we wanted."
Still, it’s one thing to want a team of good character, what Anthopoulos ended up with is a roster so full of storylines that it appears nearly scripted. It’s way too early to know if the Jays lineup can play good, but its feel-good factor is off the charts.
You have the out-of-nowhere (seemingly) twin 20-year-old power-armed wonder kids Roberto Osuna and Miguel Castro, using their big-league break to lift their families from poverty in Mexico and the Dominican Republic, respectively. Will Osuna be wowed by pitching in the bigs? He left school at 12 to help his family by working alongside his father in the fields, so my guess is he’ll be all right, and yes, I’ll be cheering for him.
And given that Castro’s first pitch as a major leaguer was a 98 m.p.h. strike to Mark Teixeira on his way to retiring the three MLB hitters he faced, I think Jays manager John Gibbons might be on to something when he described the poker-faced rookie as one of those "slow heartbeat guys".
You have [former] farmhand Devon Travis, schooled in the art of good manners and common sense by his stern police officer father, hitting a home run at Yankee Stadium in his major league debut and never seeing it land because he didn’t want to celebrate presumptively.
"I don’t hit enough [home runs] to know they’re gone when I hit them," Travis said. "I’m not going to break stride or slow down."
Home-run trot? How about a sprint – according to @TaterTrotTrkr he was around the bases in 18.56 seconds.
The club’s centre-fielder, Dalton Pompey, was raised in the Toronto suburbs and is only five years removed from giving an interview as a member of the Canadian National Junior Team where he declared his goal to be the starting centre-fielder for the Toronto Blue Jays.
Rookie lefty Daniel Norris is already one of the most famous new faces in the game thanks to stories at home and in the U.S. national media about his minimalist lifestyle, encapsulated by his taking up residence in a VW van, surfing and brewing coffee with a French press.
And then you have Russell Martin cast as the flinty-eyed veteran catcher who will lead the youngsters and preserve the veterans, all while easily carrying the weight of his Canadian passport in both official languages. Martin’s contributions will be measured against the full value of his five-year, $82-million contract, but with just one weekend exhibition series in his hometown of Montreal, he already served up more than his share of goose bumps as he positively glowed while sharing the moment with his subway-busking father.
"He [Martin] just has a presence. More so than we could have expected," said Anthopoulos. "It’s in the clubhouse, on the field, there’s a confidence, a belief. We knew he was going to be a good player, we knew he was going to frame [pitches] and all of those kinds of things, but the presence, the work ethic, the way the young players gravitate to him. … That was a big part of the value we saw in Russ when we talked about signing him, and he embraces that role."
The Blue Jays’ immediate future remains to be written in the long-form novel that is a 162-game season. No one knows the ending, no matter how carefully the beginning is crafted.
But based on the introduction, there is plenty to like with a good chance that the feelings could run far deeper than that.