TULOWITZKI’S DEBUT
The newest Blue Jay made a great first impression on fans.
After a decade of purple, suddenly all was blue. He was accustomed to batting third, but for the first time in his career, he was leading off. The country and the city were foreign. And his face went blank when he heard the last letter of the alphabet pronounced “zed.”
Troy Tulowitzki knows he will need some time to find his bearings.
“I’m still shocked,” he said. “When I walk into a clubhouse and it’s not purple, it’s different for me.”
But at 6:44 p.m., as the newest Blue Jay trotted onto the Rogers Centre turf to loosen up, the fans behind the third-base dugout greeted him with applause. Without breaking stride, he replied with a little wave.
At 7:02, the crowd roared when his name was announced. Seven minutes later, the first Phillies batter hit a ground ball to him and he assisted on the first out. At 7:13, when he walked to the batter’s box, the crowd gave him a standing ovation. After another little wave, the applause continued, so he stepped out and touched the brim of his helmet.
When he struck out, everybody went “awww,” and cheered him again.
Then in the third, with a runner aboard, he drilled a Jerome Williams pitch into the second deck in left field, and the fans were on their feet again. He rounded third, gave coach Luis Rivera a low five, and sprinted home like he was 20 again instead of 30.
Troy Tulowitzki was starting to
feel at home in his new home office. In Colorado, where Tulowitzki starred for a 10 years, the décor in the home clubhouse was purple. In his first full season, he helped lead the Rockies to the World Series. He became the face of the franchise. In 2011, he signed a 10-year contract worth almost US$158-million. He thought he would be with the Rockies for good.
Then, on Monday night, he was “blindsided,” he says, by the trade that brought him to Toronto in exchange for the popular, jaunty Jose Reyes and three prospects.
For Reyes, smiling was like breathing. Tulowitzki is not like that, as he stressed during an introductory news conference Wednesday, after someone asked him to describe himself in a baseball context.
“Intense,” he said, sounding not at all intense. “Someone that at times, people want me to smile more. But that’s just not me. I come to the ballpark and care a lot and work very, very hard. And as soon as the game is over for me, it’s not time to celebrate, it’s time to look forward to the next game, and back to business.
“That’s the way I’ve always been. Over the years, I’ve changed a little bit, but I think winning is what makes me happy. When I’m smiling, when I’m happy, it’s usually when the team is winning.”
The Rockies have not had a winning record since 2010. On his first day as a Blue Jay, Tulowitzki was chanting the mantra of the moment, that a team with a 50-51 record in July can make the playoffs. After all, his 2007 Rockies team was 51-50 on July 25, performed magic the rest of the way and made it to the Series. If anybody in his new clubhouse asks, he’ ll gladly talk about that, he said.
So despite the stunning separation from the only big-league team he’d known, he said all the right things, thinking about that old magic and envisioning it recurring, in blue this time instead of purple.
“The last couple days have been crazy for me, to say the least,” he said. “When you sign a 10-year deal, you think you’re going to be with that team for the long haul. To be with a different organization now is shocking. At the same time, I’m looking forward to the future because I see a winning team, a winning culture.
“I know they haven’t won a World Series here in a while, so to be a part of something like that would be memorable. That’s what you play this game for, is to win. I think that there’s a great possibility here that that can happen, and very soon.”
Then, he added a caveat that might sound surprising, after all that optimistic day-one diplomacy.
“Hopefully, pitching gets addressed and they add an arm,” he said. Quickly, he added: “But if they don’t, then offence can win ball games as well.” As trade rumours swirled around him for the past two years, Colorado ownership had always told Tulowitzki he would be the first to know if trade talks became serious. Instead, he found out when word came down from the top on Monday night to take him out of a game at Wrigley Field.
That hurt. He was sitting, stunned, in the manager’s office, barely able to speak, when Toronto general manager Alex Anthopoulos called.
“I t hi nk he probably thought I was upset because I was in shock, but I think I was more upset on the Rockies’ end,” Tulowitzki said. “I think now that I’m here in Toronto, it’s a new chapter in my career. I’m excited about it. So there’s nothing like, ‘ Oh, I don’t want to be here,’ and ‘upset about the trade.’ I think it was just more of how everything went down.”
He said he began to feel better when he rejoined his wife, Danyll, and their 18-month-old son, and packed for the trip to Toronto.
At that, a reporter asked his son’s name and how to spell it. Taz, he said. T-A-ZEE. A few wiseacres in the crowd chuckled and mumbled “zed,” as though he would have a clue. Tulowitzki looked bewildered, like a man wondering where all the purple had gone. Tulowitzki probably would not have batted in the leadoff spot in his Blue Jays debut, except that Devon Travis was visiting a doctor about his sore shoulder and hoping he could avoid the disabled list. So manager John Gibbons put his new, 6-foot-3, powerhitting shortstop at the top, ahead of Josh Donaldson and Jose Bautista.
Tulowitzki said he doesn’t care where he hits in the lineup.
“Let’s be honest here: if it becomes a problem, where there’s so many middle-ofthe-order hitters, I think that’s a good problem that we all would like to have,” he said.
To concerns about his injury history, he said last year’s hip surgery left him feeling fine. He said he works hard in everything he does, including his conditioning regimen. After playing a demanding position for so long, he has a few aches and pains, he admitted, but he has been healthy all year and is confident he will remain so.
He left a Rockies team that was 10 games under .500. He joins a Jays club that has hung around .500 all season, but still harbours hopes for a surge to the playoffs. Tulowitzki insists if the Jays play “great baseball” for a month, they can do it.
He also insists that the trade has rejuvenated him. Winning will do that. For the moment, so does the mere hope of winning.
“I think more than anything, when you wake up you’re excited to come to the ball field,” he said. “Sometimes when you’re out of it with a month left, it’s tough to get up and find something to play for other than personal pride and to keep that good image that you have up.
“Now to wake up and know, hey, these games are very meaningful [and] every time you win a series it means something in the standings, I think that’ll bring me back to some of my younger days when you wake up and all you were worried about was winning. And when you worried about winning and playing the game the right way, you usually play better yourself.”
He made a good start of it Wednesday night.