How do I get information about what I can and cannot bring home with me after travelling outside Canada?

What you can bring home after travelling outside Canada:

• A suntan
• A well-thumbed guide book
• Several hundred badly composed and/or blurred digital photographs
• Leftover banknotes in interesting large denominations with faces of people you don’t know on them
• Dirty laundry
• Blank sheets of hotel stationery, which you will toss in a drawer and forget about
• Tacky souvenirs, which you will toss in the drawer next to the stationery
• A really impressive hangover

What you will bring home after travelling outside Canada, whether you like it or not:

• Interesting non-local viruses, which you can share with your family and friends
• A depleted bank account
• A traumatized digestive system
• Sleep debt
• The realization that vacations aren’t always as much fun as you hoped

What you cannot bring home after travelling outside Canada:

• Slaves
• Lizards
• Macaques
• Overripe fruit
• Marijuana – Canada is a serious, work-focused country, and has no time for weed-induced frivolity. Besides, Stephen Harper will put you in prison for life if he catches you with bud on your person.
• Too many stories about how wonderful the weather was, lest your pale co-workers decide to band together and kill you

How do I get information on financial benefit programs?

Jenkins?

Yes, sir?

You may be wondering why I asked you to step into my office.

You’re not planning on right-sizing me, are you, sir?

Heavens no, Jenkins. You’re just the young man I am looking for. You see… I have never had a son of my own, owing to an accident involving the misfire of a small howitzer during wartime basic training. So I am looking for someone to follow in my footsteps, to serve as a repository for my hard-won wisdom, to become my legacy when I am gone. I want you to be that person, Jenkins.

I am deeply honoured, sir. But I have to ask… are there any strings attached?

What do you mean?

I mean – what do you want from me in return, sir?

Nothing, other than… to like me.

Like you, sir?

Yes, to like me. Nobody really likes me, Jenkins. During the course of my business career, I have had to make tough decisions that have adversely affected the lives of thousands of people. It’s not something I wanted to do, but something that I had to do. But that means that I have made enemies. Dozens and dozens of enemies. And not one friend. Will you be my friend, Jenkins?

No, sir. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Oh, well. It never hurts to ask. Here, have a boxed pen set. I’ve got dozens of them. Now get back to work.

The only possible justification for paying a large sum of money to a manager is for his ability to get the best out of the players who play for him. Colby Rasmus is an example: he’s a rare talent – someone who can play an above-average centre field while hitting for above-average power – but he’s rumoured to be difficult to get along with (fairly or unfairly). If Farrell can get him and the rest of the team to perform at their best, he will have earned his salary.

How do I start a business?

For Phil, the simple act of walking home from school required the sort of bravery that is normally only found in soldiers who are trapped in trenches that are under heavy mortar fire.

It wasn’t because he was likely to be beaten up. He had learned that bruises heal after a day or two, and that even the most aggressive of the bullies in his Park Shore neighbourhood would stop short of breaking bones or smashing in teeth. After all, that was the sort of thing that wound up on one’s permanent record.

No, Phil feared the emotional and social humiliation of walking home. He was aware that if the students of Park Shore High School were ranked from coolest to nerdiest, he would rank 705th out of 706. Number 706 was Elbert Hummel, who had fallen deeply in love with Mrs. Granderson, his 53-year-old English teacher. But Elbert was so thin, so tiny and so cerebral that he didn’t really count as a teenager – he was an adult in all but size and age. So Phil was considered the school’s unofficial Head Nerd, and those he passed on his way home did not hesitate to repeatedly remind him of that fact. His shame was almost too much to bear.

Some day, I’m going to show them all, thought Phil, as he scrubbed the mud and gobber off of his pants and erased the rude words from the covers of his notebooks. That resolve, and the collection of electronics textbooks he checked out of the school library on term loan, were the beginnings of what would become the 14th largest fortune in North America.

But even the Las Vegas park’s tendency to help hitters doesn’t completely explain Adeiny Hechavarria in 2011. How can anyone go from batting .235 in New Hampshire to batting .389 in Las Vegas? How good a hitter is he, really?

The reports on his fielding say that it is wondrous, which suggests that Hechavarria could become either the next Tony Fernandez or the next Cesar Izturis. Your guess is as good as mine as to which it will be.

* * * * *

The effect of a player on clubhouse chemistry cannot be seen by us outsiders but can only be inferred. The obvious inference is that John McDonald must be a wonderful guy to be around – what else would explain that not one but two teams have decided to give him two-year contracts, despite not having an OBP higher than .279 since 2005, and despite turning 37 in 2011? Sure, he’s a good fielder, but there are a lot of good fielders out there. It’s a long season; I suppose it’s worth it to have a really nice guy or two in the clubhouse, even if they can’t hit at all.

I will remember two things from McDonald’s time in Toronto (besides his defense). The first was his hitting a home run on Father’s Day. The second: in Toronto, the starting pitchers have their own special bench – nobody who is not in the rotation is allowed to sit there. The only other player allowed to sit with the starting pitchers was McDonald. So there you go.

* * * * *

The most remarkable thing about Yunel Escobar’s 2011 season was that it was so unremarkable. Sure, he got thrown out of a game or two, and he didn’t run out a grounder or two that he should have. But, for the most part, Escobar had a fairly quiet season – he showed up, he batted leadoff, and he had a .369 on-base percentage.

When looking at his stats, it’s actually not that surprising that Escobar was quietly consistent. If you throw out 2010, his numbers have remained startlingly steady over the years:

2008: .288 BA, .366 OBP, .401 SLG
2009: .299 BA, .377 OBP, .436 SLG
2011: .290 BA, .369 OBP, .413 SLG

If you don’t mess with him, you know pretty much what you’re going to get. Which is pretty good. I think you can forgive the occasional half-hearted effort on a routine ground ball if you’re going to get this in return. The only real downside of having Yunel Escobar as your shortstop is that he is going to miss a few games with injuries – his career high in games played is 141.

I think that the Blue Jays are trying to win. Honestly. If they weren’t, they would not have signed Hechevarria and they would not have re-signed Bautista. But their problem is that they are competing against owners that aren’t running their teams like a business. These owners have enormously deep pockets and enormously large egos, and are running their baseball teams as an exercise in personal gratification. Sometimes this doesn’t work out well for the team’s fans – look at the Baltimore Orioles, for example.

Still, I sometimes wonder whether somebody at Rogers has run some sort of cost-benefit analysis and has determined that an 83-win team yields the maximum profit (ticket sales plus advertising fees minus salaries and costs).

As for the front office: if you’re a Blue Jays fan of a certain age, Alex Anthopoulos and Paul Beeston’s current plan for the Jays should seem familar, as they’re using the approach that Pat Gillick and Beeston used in the 1980s. In particular, they’re following these guidelines:

• Don’t waste money on expensive free agents. The best players don’t want to come here (Beeston has mentioned this repeatedly), and it’s not worth it to overpay for mediocre players, especially when the farm system is likely to produce somebody equally as good very soon.
• Pay to keep the players you have, unless a better alternative exists in the system. Jose Bautista, Ricky Romero, Adam Lind, and Yunel Escobar are examples of this.
• Spend more on scouting and player development. The Jays expanded their scouting department when Anthopoulos was hired, and are aggressively pursuing international talent.
• Be patient.

This strategy eventually worked for the Gillick-era Jays, but it took a long time. The team first seriously contended in 1983, but didn’t win a World Series – or even appear in one – until 1992. (They were a bit unlucky in 1985, when they had what I believe was the best team they ever assembled. And let’s not talk about 1987, thank you.) A typical Blue Jays season during the late 80s was something like 87-75: a good team, but not quite good enough. This means that Jays fans might have to wait a little while longer before meaningful September baseball is played in these parts.

• demoted April 9
• promoted April 15
• demoted April 17
• promoted April 23
• demoted May 7
• promoted May 21
• demoted May 22
• promoted May 28
• demoted June 23
• promoted July 3
• demoted July 28
• promoted August 15

For those of you keeping track, that’s six separate demotions, each of which was followed by a subsequent promotion. I’m reasonably certain that, by the end of it all, various airport personnel got to know him by first name.

Despite all of the yo-yoing, McCoy got over 250 plate appearances in the big leagues this year. Unfortunately, his batting average was .198, and this is the number that people tend to notice first. It wasn’t as bad as it looks, though: he walked quite often, stole 12 bases in 14 tries, and played anywhere in the infield or outfield that he was asked to play. And you have to wonder whether he might hit a little better if he was given the opportunity to play baseball for the same home team for a period longer than, say, three weeks.

I was curious, so I looked up a couple of other people who are good base stealers to see what their percentages were. Brett Gardner, who was 49 for 62 in steals overall, was a respectable 9 for 13 against lefties. Matt Kemp, who was 40 for 51 as a base stealer, was 8 for 10 against lefties. And Michael Bourn, who stole 61 of 75 bases, was 18 of 25 against left-handers. So either Davis was very unlucky, or he just isn’t as good at stealing bases against left-handers as other fast runners are. And if you can’t hit righties, and you can’t steal against lefties, there’s not much you can do.

Still, I can’t help but think that Davis was born too late. In an era where teams carried only 9 or 10 pitchers, and had room for more extra men, Davis could have been the 25th man on the bench, inserted only in situations that best suited his abilities. And it’s not like he can’t do anything: he’s one of the few men fast enough to be able to steal a base even though everyone in the ballpark knows that he’s going. He would have done well with an Earl Weaver team: Weaver would have kept index cards that would have told him exactly what pitchers Davis could hit, and Davis would have thrived. Oh, well – some things are beyond human control.

Dr. George Gallup recently revealed in his polls that an astonishingly high percentage of the nation’s university graduates no longer reads books. The reason is obvious: just because of their educational advantages, they usually occupy positions where they are busy, busy,  busy always! As a result, many of them feel they are stagnating intellectually by missing the stimulation and broadening of interest one can get only from books. Books Abridged is a sensible service directed straight at the cause of the problem: lack of time. The books are always in the authors’ own words; and they are shortened, never rewritten, by a staff of editors who have had more than fifteen years’ experience in this field, and who have never failed to satisfy the authors themselves.

Which leads me to wonder: how satisfying would it be to spend fifteen years shortening the works of other writers? I suppose it’s better than telemarketing.

Consider: Teahen spent most of his 2011 time with the Jays sitting on the bench quietly, not being noticed. When called upon, he played first, outfield, third base and DH or pinch-hit, and did so without fanfare or complaint. That strikes me as a stereotypically Canadian thing to do. Welcome, Mark – you are truly One Of Us.