Rain, pain, back again
Former Blue Jays star Donaldson remembers the Toronto fans and the ‘special teams’
TORONTO — He wasn’t a stranger and it wasn’t a strange land.
But Josh Donaldson knows how to keep his head down, apparently, blend into the maddening crowd. Slipping in and out of town, the Blue Jay passim from Florida who flies north in the winter. Must have some pang for the place.
He has attachments here, a girlfriend from here. Ties that bind, heartstrings that pull.
So he’s been back ’round these parts, long before strolling the streets of Toronto late Monday night, as an incognito Atlanta Brave.
“It’s not like I’ve been too far outside the city too long.”
This was different, of course. This was yet another instalment of hello there old friend, poignant remembrance — Jumbotron salute and all — of a once beloved Blue Jay from glory days, upon their professional return.
Pre-game on Tuesday at the Rogers Centre, a flash of images on the big screen, a warm welcome from the crowd as Donaldson doffed his cap — revealing yet another Viking coif — and returned the affection. Thanks for the memories Part II in his first-inning at-bat, accompanied by a standing ovation and another 360-degree hat-wave. An E-5 in the bottom of the first inning, a two-run frame for the home side, might have been an indication of some nervous sweat on Donaldson’s hands.
By then, formalities over, the heralded Bringer of Rain was just another opposition ballplayer, on his way to a 3-1 loss at the hands of his former team.
Until you pan back, freeze-frame the bigger picture from two celebrated seasons, and recall what a large part Donaldson had been of it. Before the chronic calf injuries, before he became rudely expendable — no qualifying offer extended, no mention of a contract renewal — before the management regime doubled down on its efforts to erase every trace of the Alex Anthopoulos era.
Those 2015 and ’16 Jays ensembles — post-season Jays ensembles — have been scattered to the wind. Only a handful of these Jays, circa 2019, had ever played with Donaldson. Some looked on curiously as he emerged from the visitors’ tunnel to a spider’s nest of TV cameras and a crush of reporters, talking at ease as he’d always been.
Truth be told, it still makes scant sense, even amid a dramatic franchise reset, that the not-so-long-ago American League MVP isn’t a Blue Jay.
That the club off-loaded him for chump change — pitcher Julian Merryweather, still unrecovered from Tommy John surgery. That it all ended so badly.
“It would have been a completely different scenario if I was on the field and I was able to play and they said, ‘Hey, we’re going to change our course of direction.’ I get that. I understand. But for me, I felt like I’d played so hard for this organization. I felt like I had done some things well and I didn’t want to leave on that type of sour note, as far as me not being able to play.
“And that hurt. Because that’s not how I wanted people to remember me as Blue Jay.”
That’s not how the city remembers Donaldson, practically lame in his final season in Toronto and then punted to Cleveland, staring down the possibility of a career going prematurely pear-shaped because of physical travails. Most assuredly the Toronto brass had lost faith in him as he had lost faith in them — and, more specifically — their medical and training staff.
The evidence would seem to support Donaldson’s distrust of Toronto’s highperformance department and courses of treatment. He’s perfectly healthy these days — he attributes that in part to an all-plant diet regimen, ugh — having played in 130 of 134 games, restored to defensive soundness at third base, and having a hell of a season at the plate, like Donaldson of yore, having racked up 32 home runs, 76 RBIs and an OPS of .910.
He has made Alex Anthopoulos look like a genius, the Braves GM signing the 33year-old in the off-season to a one-year, US$23-million deal, just as he’d been prescient about bringing Donaldson to Toronto in 2015.
One has to make a concerted effort, picking at Donaldson’s scabs during yesterday’s media scrum, before he’ll be drawn into the sourness of his leave-taking from Toronto. But he does get there eventually, obliquely.
“I’ve never said they’d done wrong by me. I understand the business. I’ve been traded three times now. It hurts, especially when you’re part of a team that you really loved and you appreciated being with. And to see where the organization when I first got here was at, and then where we had taken it, and the support we were getting at the time was awesome.
“We loved it. I guarantee, you talk to everybody who’s not here anymore, they love Toronto. This is one of the best places to play in all of baseball, especially when the team is doing well The city’s on fire, people love coming out and supporting the team, they love being a part of it.
“It’s some of the best memories that I’ve had …”
He remembers — being to intrinsic to it — that Summer of ’15, how the Jays went on a tear and Anthopoulos pulled out all the stops, took all those future-be-damned risks for the then and now. It hits the sweet spot, going down memory lane with Donaldson.
“From Day 1 that I came to Toronto, the fans here supported me. In 2015, I broke the record for all-star votes. The chants that they had for me. At the beginning of the year, we were drawing around 15,000, 20,000 people,” he said.
“By the second half of the season, we were drawing 50,000. And then we led the league in attendance in 2016,” he added.
“I will forever be grateful for the fans and how they took me in.”
Forever regretful about how it came undone at the end too.
“What probably nags at me the most is how my career finished here in Toronto. Not being able to play. Trying to fight as hard as I could to get back. It wasn’t working out. How everything transpired … it’s tough.
“At the end of the day, you try to separate it as a business, but as a human being, it can be tough. We do get frustrated and we do have emotions.”
But enough remembrance of baseball past. Donaldson is yet again post-seasonbound, with another club, so nothing to pity there.
And he is flashing the dazzle of the Bringer of Rain in his prime.
“We had some special teams here. At the end, we weren’t competing the way that we needed to and things changed. I’m just glad to be able to be back here, part of a winning team, and playing to a high level again to where, when the fans come out today, they’ll be able to see that.”