Obligatory Blue Jays Blog

It seems like everyone around has Blue Jays fever right now.

I think those die-hard Jays fans who have been around for years really deserve to see Toronto win another World Series.  I'm a Red Sox fan, but I can recognize that the Jays have been working on building this team for a few years now. And I do like seeing hard work pay off.

To be honest, I don't really care who wins the World Series.

I live in Canada and don't even cheer for a Canadian hockey team, so the likelihood of me being a Jays fan is pretty small.  But I do remember the excitement of Joe Carter, Roberto Alomar, Todd Stottle... Stoddle... Stodtel...Oscarmayer, and Cito Gaston from '92 and '93.  I even had a World Series champs shirt.

my 1992 baseball card.

Those were the days.

I mean, I guess they were.  I don't remember them all that well anymore.  As a kid I liked the Expos too, mostly because they had Youppi as their mascot.  I met him in the summer of '92 when I went with my dad to an Expos game.  Youppi didn't have time to talk though because his very attractive assistant told me that, "Monsieur Youppi aas ay teyleyfonn cahl."

Wow, the French-Canadian accent is a hard one to type out.

Anyway, back to the Blue Jays.

In 1999 I went to a Jays game with my buddy and pseudo-brother Brian.  We sort of went on a lark and had a great time.  Mostly because Tony Fernandez was there.  Tony Fernandez is the all-time greatest baseball player in the history of sports.  He was so good at baseball, and at being Tony Fernandez, that he could have excelled at anything he put his mind to.

God.

But enough about Tony Fernandez, let's talk about Kelly Gruber.  When I was ten years old I had a life-sized Kelly Gruber poster that hung in my basement.  Me and all my friends, because we were a bunch of ass-hats, called him Kelly Booger and used the poster as a dart board.  One of my friends took a dart and dug out a hole in Gruber's crotch.  It was big enough to put your fingers in and totally ruined the drywall in the basement.  Come to think of it, looking back on that poster... having a huge hole in Gruber's crotch was really weird.  I can only hope that none of my friends had any weird ideas of what to do with that poster when I would go to the bathroom.

So these days I'm seeing a lot of "Go Jays Go" around town, and part of me wants to assume it's because the Maple Leafs fans are so sick of seeing their team suck at anything NHL related that they'll become baseball fans while it's chic to do so.  The better part of me knows that nothing makes Canadians happier than having the opportunity to be better at something than the Americans.

But, it does look like fun to be cheering along with them.  And girls look really sexy in baseball hats.  So if the Blue Jays are the flavor of the month, maybe I'll try and... CATCH THE TASTE!

- ryan
(...check out this really flattering picture of me from 1992.  I bet I got all the chicks.)