HELLO, TAMPA BAY
Stroman leads charge against Rays today as reigning AL East champs start season. Full Blue Jays coverage on
DUNEDIN, FLA.— Marcus Stroman has been getting a lot of mileage out of the lion emoji on his phone this spring.
“Lion lifestyle,” he tweeted with an animated lion’s head last month — alongside a Sportsnet Magazine cover photo featuring him, Josh Donaldson and Troy Tulowitzki — in but one example.
“That’s a clubhouse thing,” he told the Star regarding his apparent adoption of the king of the jungle as the team’s spirit animal. “It’s just about having that strong mentality. There’s more to it that I can’t preach on, but that’s the gist. Lions are fearless, they’re absolutely fearless, and that’s how we are when we play the game.”
Stroman, who will make his first career opening-day start Sunday, said the lion also speaks to the hunger with which the Blue Jays enter this season — the 40th in franchise history — as they set out to defend their division title.
“We’re ready, man, we’re excited,” he said. “We’re motivated and we’re extremely hungry and ready to go this year.”
Bold pronouncements are emanating from just about every team’s training camp this time of year, when everybody is in first and optimism reigns. But there is a distinct sense in the Jays’ clubhouse that they believe it more than most.
After a tumultuous off-season wrought by the arrival of team president Mark Shapiro and the subsequent exit of GM Alex Anthopoulos — who was celebrated as the club’s emancipator after more than two decades in the playoff wilderness — the players are eager to build on last season, when they came within two games of reaching the World Series.
“Expectations are definitely raised around here,” said Donaldson, who won the franchise’s second league MVP award last season. (George Bell won the first, in 1987.) “Last year we left spring training a little unsure of where we were at — kind of putting our pitching together on the fly — and this year we feel like we have more depth. We feel like we have guys who are little bit more established now.”
Then Donaldson pauses for effect. “And we’re returning the best offence in baseball.”
That offence, which outscored the rest of the league by a wider margin than any team since the 1931 Yankees, could be even better this year with the inclusion of Tulowitzki for a full season.
The five-time all-star, who tied for the team lead with four homers and 10 RBIs in Florida, agreed with Donaldson that expectations are higher this year, as they should be.
“It’s a room full of talent,” Tulowitzki said.
“We were so close last year. At the same time you can’t control injuries, you can’t control things like that, so you just never know. But we definitely have a good team.”
“I think we’re at a place where we would feel disappointed if we didn’t supersede what happened last year,” said R.A. Dickey, the 41-year-old knuckleballer who last year made his post-season debut after nearly two decades of professional baseball. Getting a taste makes you hungrier, Dickey said, but it also gives you a “measuring stick” for understanding what it takes.
“You can have people come in the clubhouse that have been on other teams that have been to the playoffs and talk about it all day long, but until you’re actually in it you don’t really get it. Now that the bulk of our team — 95 per cent of our team — has experienced it, it fevers you up for wanting to at least duplicate it, if not go beyond it.”
Jose Bautista, who as a pending free agent is facing the possibility of this being his last season in Toronto, said the clubhouse doesn’t feel any differ- ent coming into this year.
“But as a group it’s in your subconscious, and it’s probably in your brain that you’ve accomplished more things than you had in the past,” he said.
“Talking about what you can do and the potential and how good you are on paper is one thing, but actually having accomplished things together as a unit is different. “It’s our experience now.” Bautista described losing to the Kansas City Royals in the AL championship series as “part of the growing process and part of the learning curve and the experience that’s hopefully going to help us this year.”
Catcher Russell Martin, who has missed the post-season just twice in his 10-year career, said there are fewer question marks heading into this season.
“I feel like the young guys that were the question marks last year established themselves and now, you know, they believe in themselves, we believe in them.”
After what the Jays did last season, he said, it’s natural to expect the same, “but take it one step further and finish what we kind of started.”