Part of what draws us all to sport is the visceral immediacy of it all that allows us to get lost for a moment in the games. So it is understandable that some baseball followers get annoyed when a constant chorus tells them “It’s early” or “It’s a long season” as they react to what they’re observing.
At this point of the season, with more than five weeks’ worth of games in the books, we’re starting to feel the tension between what we’ve seen and what we know and that about which we can feel certain. There’s been enough baseball played that you start putting stock in what feels like an abundance of visual evidence regarding who the Blue Jays are, and which players are likely to be positive contributors, while still recognizing that there are five months of baseball yet to be played.
There are many seasons where preaching patience would be marginally easier, and skipping past it would be far less fun. The Toronto Blue Jays would enter a season with a set roster and not much depth beneath it, so any substantial positive changes in theory would require some heroic transactions to achieve. But this year, with the abundance of depth and more saliently, the future of the franchise pounding on the door, it’s getting increasingly difficult to hold one’s anticipation at bay.
Early this season, that’s meant attempting to restrain the feeling that it’s time to move on from Kendrys Morales, especially when there is such a compelling replacement in Vladimir Guerrero Jr. It’s meant taking a breath and accepting that Randal Grichuk is still probably a decent big-leaguer, and not someone who you may attempt to slide through waivers because he has had a bad month.
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On the flip side, it also has meant believing that Devon Travis is not a minor-leaguer, but rather a player who has not played for much of the past two seasons and who needs to find his game again.
Patience is a virtue, and virtues are moral strengths, not because they are easy to grasp or nurture but because they take energy and wisdom to embrace. Looking at the four classic Platonic virtues of temperance, prudence, courage and justice, one can see how patience is in some sense where these four essential virtues intersect.
Which is to say: Patience is really hard.
Maybe even harder in our modern world, where we live in a state of constant data and messages being dumped into our consciousness at such a high rate that Marshall McLuhan could hardly have imagined when he spoke of “information speed-up” almost 50 years ago.
In some ways, with its deliberate pace and protracted season, baseball could be the antidote to such living, and could help to nurture a sense of patience. But given the manner in which we observe the game, with three screens open at once and a barrage of noise to fill in the quiet moments, it’s hard not to want to skip ahead to the next moment rather than absorbing the one you’re in.
For Blue Jays fans, embracing patience will be even more important in the coming seasons, even as we are breathless with anticipation for what comes next.
On one hand, there is every indication that the current regime in the front office values patience, and deliberate processes for operating. They aren’t going to act on impulses, whether those impulses are their own or those of the fans.
You can question this approach, and many have and do on a regular basis. But if you can’t accept that Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins are likely to take an even-tempered and calculated approach to building the roster, you might as well resign yourself to years of self-inflicted angst and fury.
(And one could argue that their biggest mistakes since they’ve arrived was acting out of an abundance of impatience, moving on quickly from Edwin Encarnacion and compounding the error by jumping the market on Kendrys Morales. Although that’s obviously the outsider’s view of what transpired.)
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To appreciate the benefits of patience, cast an eye towards a different young player who is excelling in New Hampshire this season: Sean Reid-Foley. For several seasons, he was the quick and easy top-five prospect to send out of the system in imaginary trades for some player who presumably would have helped immediately.
When Reid-Foley took a step backwards last season, it might have even been tempting to suggest that the Blue Jays had waited too long to move him, and now his trade value was shot.
But take a breath and look at the early returns for the young hurler in 2018: A 1.53 ERA, a 0.89 WHIP, and 31 strikeouts versus 10 walks in 29.1 innings.
Had just one of the thousands of imaginary trades sending Reid-Foley onward been executed, he’d be having this moment – and the ensuing future – elsewhere.
Of course, the action is what draws us to sports, and nobody can be blamed for wanting to see boldness in every aspect of the game. But even for as much as it feels like every game counts in an age of parity and wild cards and the return of the Yankees and Red Sox to dominance, Blue Jays fans are going to need to take a breath, and savour the moment.
