The Minnesota Twins’ pitching staff couldn’t trick anyone on April Fools’ Day at the Rogers Centre, where they kicked off the 2011 season.
The Jays ended the 2010 season in Minnesota beating up on the Twins’ pitching staff, much the same way they kicked off 2011 on Friday night in Toronto.
The parallels to last year don’t end there, though. The Jays enter 2011, much like they did 2010, with most pundits having picked them to finish the year under .500 and struggle mightily. And, as they did in the early goings of 2010, the Jays are showing every indication of making the so-called experts look silly.
It would be tough to draw up a better beginning to the 2011 season for the boys in Blue.
Staff ace Ricky Romero turned in a gem of a pitching performance and the bats showed the same power that drove the Jays to the top of the league in home runs last year.
But there was one key difference — new manager John Farrell showed a willingness to play aggressive baseball that erstwhile skipper Cito Gaston would have never dreamed of.
We got an early indication of what 2011 might hold for the Jays in the bottom of the first, when Rajai Davis led off the year for Toronto by beating out an infield hit. He then got himself caught in a run down and somehow escaped, later moving up to second on Yunel Escobar’s single.
Farrell called a daring double steal of second and third base that was successful, a play so foreign to the Gaston era that anyone who watched the Jays for the past two years could be forgiven for wondering what just happened.
The Jays were off to the races from that point on, cashing in four runs in their first offensive inning of the year.
A sign of things to come? Hopefully. And not improbably, either.
The only drawback last night (other than the closed dome, which is a shortcoming Jays’ fans will have to live with for the foreseeable future) was the kind folks who threw their rally towels on the field after every Jays home run delaying the game for at least five minutes at a time.
It’s something of an annual embarrassment to Toronto baseball — drunk people who won’t attend another game all year throw the free giveaway item onto the field, making all Toronto baseball fans look ridiculous to anyone watching on TV. It’s almost enough to make a Jays’ fan dread the thought of that happening a future Jays’ playoff game televised across North America.
But first, the Jays have to get to the playoffs, and considering they won two out of three games in this weekend’s series, that might not be impossible.
Opening night may have been on April Fools’ Day, but there’s no reason to think that the Jays were tricking anyone with their dominance.
