Spring Training and the Jays

I am not going to lie, when Wells was traded I envisioned this:


And boy, I was *not* happy. Considering how much of a man crush I have on Alex Anthopoulos, I felt disappointed. Wait, what? As a Jays fan, I was disappointed? Damn straight I was upset at the time. This is Vernon Wells, a man who, at one time, was a perennial ALL STAR, GOLD GLOVE, 30+ HR, 100+RBI, I daresay MVP candidate if the rest of the Jays roster ever decided to pan out the way Ricciardi envisioned. It hurt, a lot.

Considering how well Bautista played last year, and how he did make adjustments that aren't indicative of what you would call a "one year wonder", I questioned how much Bautista would do for the locker room.

I always thought that Wells' cool, calm demeanor was something that's healthy for a locker room. After all, it's always the quiet leaders who rake up the championships. I thought with his very-good season last year, especially considering he was batting behind the human broom Jose Bautista, that he was going to have a great year this year. Anyways, he's gone now and I'm over it.

Wells is one of the best catching outfielders in the game today, his arm isn't what it once was... His Wins above replacement (which is a metric that evaluates how many more wins your team will receive if a given player plays this position instead of an average player) is tied with Gutierrez, which is no small feat.
With all that being considered, I still love Vernon Wells as a player, but I understand that even if he got us 30+ HR, 100+ RBI, his OBP would still be 330 and that he'd still make some questionable decisions at the plate. And we would be paying 23M for this.

And this is where I'm giving AA a ton of credit, because I never envisioned that Jose Bautista would take control of a locker room so fast, and also be an incredible asset. He is helping the young guys, and also leading by example. He is helping in every way possible, which I cannot say for Wells.

I guess sometimes we're all served humble pie. Jose Bautista seems like a player who will lead this team to success like we've never seen. Considering how far our team has come in a year, we actually have a lot of promise for once.