Most books on baseball are written by baseball journalists for a simple reason. They have the day-to-day relationships with the teams and players, and they write, so eventually a book falls out of them. But the real challenge is that most journalists are good at their specific format; the 500-to-3000-word article but the structure of a book is very different. Some excel, like Tom Verducci, adapting their long form approach to the new format. Others, like Jeff Blair, find it difficult to scope and frame their normal coverage and commentary to the larger requirements of the book format. Keegan Matheson surprised me. I’ve always found him to be very capable in his coverage of the Jays, but without the kind of voice to separate him from Toronto’s surprisingly high calibre of baseball journalists.
However, the Keegan Matheson of MLB.com who I found as a reliable but uninteresting scribe in his regular coverage finds an entirely different voice in a larger work. There’s a level of connection within the text; a rare ability to communicate to the reader the strangeness sports reporters face daily of covering men and events at the very highest level of their competition in the world and yet relate them to their readers as people, with all the flaws and human frailties associated with it. There’s an almost effortless empathy in the book, which makes it all too short a read at the end because you only reluctantly want to leave the world he conveys so well.
Keegan makes some very smart decisions, framing his work as a ‘curated history’ of the team, which allows him to dip in and out of the Jays history, creating an aggregate narrative that is very effective in framing the team’s history. The main issue is brevity; the curation style makes it important to keep the narrative moving, but if there’s anything disappointing with the book is that it moves at a high level bracketed by a quote or two that really deserve more time and context. Still, for someone with little knowledge of the team and someone who has read every book on the team’s history, both will come away with enough new material to make it worthwhile.
Springtime in Dunedin
“I want to find a place that we can establish an identity with Toronto.” – Paul Bavasi
Matheson approaches Dunedin with a bit of incredulousness on how it came to be the home of Blue Jays Spring training. It was a town of 29,000 in 1976. The only existing ballpark was Grant Field, which wasn’t even up to the level of a decent high school field. The clubhouses were shacks so minimal that visiting teams dressed for the games in their hotels or the bus. The inaugural Jays team and Front Office set up their spring headquarters at a local Ramada Inn. Appropriately, the very first scheduled spring home game was called off due to torrential rains, leaving the Jays and the Phillies to be dropped from the cover of the Toronto Star’s sports section in favour of a picture of an ugly bullfrog setting atop the pitching mound in the rain.
And yet. The threads get quickly drawn tight with the throughlines of the first fans coming down for spring training and buying their Florida condos in town. How the facilities were relocated to newly built ones on Sloan St which continues to be the home of the Jays’ newly refurbished state of the art complex. The fact that despite the population swelling to 133,000 today, it retains a uniquely small community feeling with heavy brushes of the Canadian influence. But most of all, cheekily hinted, is that for all of these incredible developments that grew out of the choice of Dunedin, a big reason for its selection may have been that due to the proximity to the Tampa airport, it was the easiest possible location to get to in the spring.
The Canada Problem
“The consensus over the majority of my career has been that, if guys had to pick between a team in the United States or the Blue Jays, they’d probably pick the team in the States.” – Kevin Gausman
In the 1992 film ‘Mister Baseball’ Tom Selleck’s character, New York Yankee’s first baseman Jack Elliot discovers he being traded to make way for a rookie phenom (played by Hall of Famer Frank Thomas) and while going through the teams he doesn’t want to join, he blurts out ‘No, not Canada! I ain’t paying those taxes!’. It’s funny because it has long been accepted knowledge in the MLB that Toronto was not a place that players wanted to go to. The surge of the Jays in the mid-80s was driven by homegrown and developed talent at the top in. At the time of the movie, the Jays were in the midst of being a perennial contender and would win back-to-back World Series involving top free agent talent. But the accepted wisdom remained that if the Jays wanted to land free agents, they needed to overpay in terms of money or years.
It’s quite interesting how Matheson tackles it, with the front half talking to Beeston and JP Riccardi agreeing with different levels of certainty; Beeston makes it clear that the issue only appears when the team isn’t winning and Riccardi underlines its veracity when the Jays are trying to compete on small budgets. The return to winning and increased budgets under Anthopoulos and Atkins has negated some of that impact, especially as cross border issues like using cell phones, credit cards, and expeditated Customs clearance have been smoothed out. But it is George Springer that really makes it clear that in the era of social media, when players are in close communications with former teammates, the biggest draw for the Jays are current and former players, many of whom have come to love the city and act as cheerleaders.
Jose Bautista
“Jose Bautista, the heart and soul and middle finger of the Toronto Blue Jays had just done it.” – Keegan Matheson on the Bat-Flip.
In a section about the key faces of the franchise, Matheson approaches Bautista from both his transformation to a player larger than his role and even the team in Toronto but also from a personal perspective, covering him at his height as a rookie reporter and later as Bautista was in Toronto to see his name added to the Level of Excellence. It’s heavy on testimonials, as former teammates can’t wait to talk about the defacto captain of the Jays through to their return to the post-season in 2015-2016. One of the core elements was that Bautista represented a lightning rod for the team that helped shape its identity; other teams hated Bautista. Other fanbases loathed Bautista. And in response, Bautista kept stepping to the plate and launched dinger after dinger in the teeth of their hate.
For a polarizing figure, Bautista was apparently a favourite of the media, providing articulate, well thought out answers that are the quote equivalent of gold for sports journalists. He didn’t mind pushing back against questions he thought were baiting or standing up for teammates against an article he thought was unfair, but he also liked to have fun with them. Matheson in his earliest days was asked to check in with Bautista to ask why the Jays had broken out the curveball machine for batting practice lately, and after researched for days, he asked Jose with all his stats if the Jays were good at the curveball and that’s why they were focused on it during batting practice. Bautista provided a perplexed single line response and left, leaving Matheson to discover he’d been given the baseball version of a rookie mechanic being sent for headlight fluid – there is no such thing as a curveball machine.
Vladdy
“It was like the World Series, everybody there for this one kid. That first day he got called up I thought this isn’t fair to that kid.” – Charlie Montoyo
We all knew Vladdy before we knew Vladdy. The pictures of him on the field with his father as a child were iconic. The hype around his signing – a young, dynamic prospect with total zone control and light tower power – who just happened to be the son of a Hall of Famer and a Canadian citizen to boot. The only way he could have made the media frenzy bigger in Canada was if he took questions in French at his signing while Gordon Lightfoot played on the speakers behind him. The section acknowledges both Vladdy’s unique ability by also the inconsistency, matching elite seasons with good ones and so on.
The biggest voice is Charlie Montoyo, who talks at length about the adjustments the young Guerrero had to make to the big-league life, his connection and help in improving teammates Gurriel and Hernandez, and his ability in managing the sky-high expectations and hype as part of his place on the team. It really underlines how young Vladdy was when he came to Toronto and established himself as a superstar and how much he’s had to weather and grow as a very young man in the heart of the media spotlight. It also reminds us that Vladdy is coming into his prime, and the best may be yet to come.
Return to Glory 2015-2016
“We weren’t boring.” – John Gibbons
All Jays fans remember the feeling in the city during the 2015-2016 seasons. The sense of urgency to win. The fearsome heart of the lineup with Donaldson, Bautista, and Encarnacion. An infield anchored by Canadian Russell Martin, and a rotation with Buehrle, Price, Estrada, and Sanchez. Rather than try and summarize the events of the actual seasons, Matheson smartly tells it through the stories and reflections of the players who lived it, dropping in and out with enough context to frame their words.
Ryan Goins and Kevin Pillar get a nice spotlight, talking about their experiences as key members of the teams, prized for their defensive accomplishments but also providing key offensive contributions. The overall them through was just how special those years were, with the fans and the whole country along for the ride, but also how unbelievable they were, like they were part of an improbable story, and they still can’t entirely believe it all happened to them.
Buck Martinez
“Arlene said ‘You got traded to Toronto’, and I went, ‘Oh fuck. Really? That’s the best they could do?” – Buck Martinez
Ending his section on ‘The Storytellers’ with Buck Martinez is both a very smart idea and a testament to his familiarity working around him for a decade. Matheson is sure people understand Buck’s origin story, coming to the Jays from the Brewers, essentially expecting to be the backup for the rest of the 1981 season, working with a young rotation and mentoring Ernie Whitt. Instead, Martinez spent six seasons with the club, including his best offensive seasons of his career and the astonishing 9-2-7-2 double play on a broken leg that, if only for that, would have burned him into fans memories forever as the archetype of the tough veteran catcher.
But he also spends as much time on Martinez march to broadcasting, especially on the support of his wife. Arlene’s influence is highlighted; a trained actress herself who studied at the famous Lee Strasburg Institute for three years, who pushed him not only to accept the transition to broadcasting, but to put the same effort and intensity as he approached the game as a player, taking acting and speech coaching, endlessly rewatching his appearances to refine his delivery. Paired with his unparalleled connections with players and organizations all over baseball, it almost seemed inevitable that Buck would build a career that would see him beloved by a whole country.