“I’m not looking for revenge. I’m looking to win ballgames,” Jose Bautista said yesterday.
That’s good news.
Earlier this week, I likened the Blue Jays to Donald Trump: Man-Babies who get in the way of their own success by refusing to let go of perceived slights.
But the current batch of Toronto Blue Jays aren’t the only ones to lack maturity. In the last forty years we’ve seen many examples of players lacking maturity.
Here are the top three Man-Baby stories from the pages of Bat Flip: The Greatest Toronto Blue Jays Stories Ever Told.
1) Derek Bell: After the Blue Jays beat the Oakland Athletics in 1992 to clinch their first World Series berth, Bell and some other young players dumped beers into Dave Stieb’s locker — getting back at what they saw as an arrogant attitude from the veteran Blue Jays legend. “For everything he’d meant to the team over the years, Stieb certainly deserved better,” Stephen Brunt writes in Chapter Six, excerpted from his 1996 book Diamond Dreams.
2) Tim Johnson: The Blue Jays manager told elaborate lies to inspire his players about the pressures he had faced in Vietnam, including a story that he had killed a 12-year-old girl. “The stories were gory, and they were gruesome. They were inspirational, and they were moving. But above all else, Johnson’s stories were 100 per cent, Grade-A bullshit,” Steve Clarke writes in Chapter Nine, excerpted from 100 Things Blue Jays Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die.
3) Roger Clemens: Statistically, his two years with the Toronto Blue Jays are among the greatest by any player. But they were also among the most controversial, and not just because of his use of performance enhancing drugs. In Chapter Eight, excerpted from The Rocket That Fell to Earth, Jeff Pearlman writes that many teammates loathed Clemens by the end of his stint in Toronto. “Roger lived in the SkyDome, but we’d never see him. We’d say, what are you doing? Running the ramps while the game’s going on?” said Ed Sprague, the team’s third-baseman.
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A version of this essay originally appeared in FanReader, a weekly newsletter featuring the very best writing about sports, screen, music and gaming. Each week in October, we’re giving away a free copy of Bat Flip to FanReader subscribers. Sign up here.