I think Vegas has the Jays as the best bet to win the WS at this point.
They do, but that's more about the books trying to protect themselves than an actual "ranking". Lines get set based on where the money is going, not necessarily on who's the best team.
All I can say to that huge blurb is there is a snowball's chance in hell of us missing the post season with 95 wins.
Obviously we aren't guaranteed a playoff birth and winning the offseason doesn't mean squat (see '11 BoSox and '12 Marlins), but now all we need is our players to have average seasons and we' re good, which is way ahead of previous years where we needed multiple career years out of people to even hope to see the post season. As far as big moves the Sox and Yanks might make, they're both retooling their farms gearing up for future runs and all the big time FA's are gone. Don't hold your breath on them changing the game anytime soon. Father time is not being kind to the Yanks and the Sox have made very meh moves and their clubhouse is a mess, something we know their newfound messiah isn't terribly good at managing
I predict a pretty great race between us and the Rays for the AL East with only the number of new faces for us (entering a new league as well) being a cause for concern on our part aside from injuries as usual.
Considering I was 5 when the games were really played it's been fun to properly see them.
I was 11, and I remember them, but I'd be drifting in and out of sleep when they usually concluded, and they're all a little hazy. 1993 I remember clear as a bell, though.
Darren Oliver will be back with the Jays next season. If Santos returns to form, I have faith in the bullpen, especially the back end. Jansenn, Santos and Oliver should be good at the back. Delabar, Rogers and Lincoln are the 3 I would guess. Happ would be the long man. Cecil is the odd man out...
Darren Oliver will be back with the Jays next season. If Santos returns to form, I have faith in the bullpen, especially the back end. Jansenn, Santos and Oliver should be good at the back. Delabar, Rogers and Lincoln are the 3 I would guess. Happ would be the long man. Cecil is the odd man out...
I wouldn't doubt we see both Lincoln and Happ in AAA. AA said if Lincoln doesn't make the team out of camp, he'll be sent to AAA to be stretched out as the 7th starter.
I could see the BP looking something like:
Janssen
Santos
Delabar
Oliver
Rogers
Cecil
Jeffress/Happ/Loup/Lincoln
An astounding read by RA Dickey in the NY Daily News:
Quote:
I am walking down a street called Lane 14 in a city the world used to know as Bombay, and my senses are under assault. I sidestep human feces on my left, and a puddle of vomit on my right. Garbage is strewn everywhere, and so are people of all ages, many of them deformed, enough human beings to make Times Square look like Palookaville.
I keep walking. I pass raw sewage in the gutters and decaying food and rats the size of possums. I have all I can do to not gag and wretch. I come upon a boy who can’t be more than 4 years old. He is eating a half-rotten banana. He is wearing no pants. Oozing sores cover his legs. I wonder what his name is. I wonder how he came to be left on his own in a city of some 20 million people, half-dressed and wholly neglected.
Not far from the boy, I spot a used condom on the street – hardly surprising, seeing that the row of decrepit two-story buildings on my left are all brothels, with bars on the windows upstairs, where young women are kept in cages the size of a walk-in closet, in captivity to service the needs of men and make money for the monsters who brought them here.
It occurs to me that maybe one of the women behind the bars is the pants-less boy’s mother.
This is Kamathipura, the red light district of Mumbai, among the most notorious sex-trafficking locations in the world. I am here as a guest of Bombay Teen Challenge (BTC), a charity that has been fighting human trafficking for more than 20 years, one I joined forces with last year, when two friends and I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and raised $130,000 , much of it from generous and kind-hearted Mets fans. I have come with my two daughters, Gabriel, 11, and Lila, 9, to witness the fruits of our climb – the conversion of a former brothel to a health clinic. I want my daughters to share the experience not so much as a gratitude check, but to learn that each of us has a capacity to make a difference in this world, and to see that God’s grace makes that possible.
I also want them to know that the only way to go at this sort of rampant evil – there are an estimated 20,000 women who are held as sex slaves in Kamathipura – is to confront it and fight it. Knowing that some of the women in these cages are not that much older than Gabriel makes the whole experience even more chilling.
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I first learned about BTC from a friend at our church in Nashville. I quickly felt called to be a part of it, and not long after Gabriel, Lila and I completed our 20-hour journey – from Nashville to New York to Doha to India – I understood why. The breadth of the wickedness is almost too much to bear. Recruiters go to the poorest and most remote towns and villages, often hanging around train stations, enticing girls and young women with the promise of a job in the city as a seamstress or a house cleaner. Except that there aren’t any seams or houses; there are only the brothels and the cages and the 4-foot by 7-foot rooms where they are kept for years, until they die of HIV, or are just discarded as if they were trash. After a while, a year or two – however long it takes for them to be broken – the women are let out of the cages. They are so hopeless and beaten down they no longer need bars or wires; they are incarcerated by their shattered souls. They are people who are not even on the map, not even a number in a government file. They can’t speak up for themselves; BTC does it for them.
The organization was founded by a man named K.K. Deveraj, whom everybody knows affectionately as Uncle. He and his BTC staffers have rescued more than a thousand women over the years, a ministry amid the squalor. They walk among the broken and reach out to them and build relationships. Six women who used to be in the cages and escaped now work for BTC, trying to let people know there is another way, a life beyond the brothel. One day as Uncle and I walked down Lane 14, we met a young woman who was accompanied by a daughter who could not have been more than 5.
“Please take my daughter away from this life,” the woman pleaded. “My life is already ruined, but please help me save my daughter.”
A bit farther on I was introduced to a woman named Sapna, a small, slight Nepalese in her late 50s or early 60s. She had her hair in a bun and wore a sari. She had deeply weathered skin and lifeless brown eyes. She lived for years with an abusive husband who beat her and her son, she said. He threatened to kill them both and she had to do something so she fled, and met one of the recruiters who spoke to her of a great opportunity and then delivered a life as a sex slave.
It is way too common a story. I met the daughters of another woman who was sold into slavery by a friend and died of HIV in her 30s. Before she died the woman granted custody of all four of her children to BTC. It would at least give them a chance. When I looked at the purity and innocence in my own daughter’s faces, and then in the world-weary faces of this dead mother’s girls, it made me weep.
If the despair seemed overwhelming at times, well, seeing the work of Uncle and Tom Varghese, the BTC official who did more than anybody to make my trip a reality, restored my spirit. On the second day of our visit, BTC had the ribbon-cutting for the health clinic we’d raised money for. Uncle warned me that we were probably being watched, and needed to proceed with caution. The building used to be four separate brothels. Now it is a pristine, fresh, completely sanitary facility to get medications and health care. What was once a place of pain and exploitation is now a place of healing and hope – a doorway into another world. It is a place where people get cared for and loved, and where God is at work, using the heart of the humanitarians to try to eradicate evil. Seeing the clinic open made me want to do more. It made me want to grab every downtrodden person I could find and walk them through the door, into the light and possibility, beyond the vile and violent world they’ve grown so accustomed to.
Before our six-day trip was over, my daughters and I had our most exhilarating experience of all, in an area called Ashagram, about two and a half hours away from Mumbai’s red-light district, a campus devoted to healing and life and rejuvenation. It’s where BTC brings the women and families whom they’ve freed from slavery (the escape process is an elaborately detailed plan that I’m not allowed to write about) and where counselors begin the arduous process of rebuilding lives, seeking to instill a sense of worth to people who have come to feel worthless, aiming to give them the equipment to live and trust and be productive members of society. It is a place where you hear children singing songs and playing games, and where you feel lightness. Like me, my daughters were deeply saddened and uncomfortable with so much of what they saw in Mumbai, but in Ashagram they flourished, making friendship bracelets and braiding hair and reveling in the simple pleasures of camaraderie. It reminded me again how the deepest, most basic kind of joy has nothing to do with the accumulation of things or the size of your paycheck; it has to do with being secure, and feeling loved. These kids who had lived their whole lives in Kamathipura were happy now because they were safe and nourished, and because they had people loving on them.
It’s really not all that complicated, is it?
I head off to Dunedin, Fla., this week, for my first spring training as a member of the Toronto Blue Jays. It has always been one of my favorite parts of being a ballplayer, the renewal and metaphorical rebirth that comes with a new season. Soon I will be throwing knuckleballs again, and though the motion may look the same, the man behind it is altogether different, having been enriched by the spirit of the good people I met in Mumbai. I will take the mound hoping and praying that, person by person, life by life, the women in captivity in Kamathipura wil find their own renewal and rebirth. People at Bombay Teen Challenge tried to tell me that the contribution I’ve made has been such a blessing, but my daughters and I know the real blessings are ours.
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