My 25 Man Roster.....

The Man With The Golden Arm has asked his troops to put a post together building their 25 Man Roster.

So here’s mine.

I’ll begin with the starting nine as that’s the easiest to put together.

First Base: Lyle Overbay, as much as I’ve harped on about trading Overbay, let’s be realistic, camp starts in less than a week and he’s still here. So unless the Boy Wonder pulls something out of a hat, he’s going to be our starting first basemen.

Second: Aaron Hill, well duh. That’s the easiest to name on this team.

Shortstop: Alex Gonzalez, ugh…this guy is supposed to be better than crowd favourite Johnny Mac? He’s a few years younger, but is he really that much better?

Third Base: Edwin Encarnacion, our only real day to day option until he gets traded and you aren’t riding my bench for almost 5.2 million a year.

Catcher: John Buck, haven’t heard too much about this guy. I know I know, in this baseball crazy city how can that be? It would appear that you’re looking at our number 8 hitter.

Left Field: Travis Snider, this kid deserves a full time shot at the big time. I’m guessing the Boy Wonder and The Cito are going to go back and forth on discussions about “The Future” Travis’ time is now.

Centre Field: Vernon “I can buy the Skydome for how much money I make” Wells, The second easiest man to pencil in. Because really, what else can we do with him? God knows we’ve tried to move him along.

Right Field: Jose Bautista, everything I’ve read seems to point to this wonder child and his .349 on base percentage leading off for us. Overbay was .372, why isn’t he leading off? But that’s another discussion (line up discussion posts coming?) for another day.

DH: Adam Lind, his name has been moved in and out of spots all off-season, but we’re looking at our starting DH this season.

Bench Spots:

Backup Catcher: Raul Chavez, he signed early December, let’s go with he wants to be here?

Backup Infielder: Johnny Mac, this guy puts up with a lot of crap when it comes to playing time but does anything and everything asked of him.

Backup First Base/DH: Randy Ruiz, God I hope we can find a way to get this guy some serious at bats. I really want to see what he can do.

Backup Outfielder: Joey Gathright, I like this guy to give Vernon the odd day off and I like to see this guy as the late innings replacement a steal a much needed base since speed is something that this team is lacking.

That’s the hitters and that’s supposed to be the easy part, now on to the pitchers: Let’s start with our starting five. Ugh. Here we go, can you tell I’m stalling?

Shawn Marcum, Ricky Romero and Brandon Morrow are my given starting three and I’d think that’ll be the order in which we see them. All though the Jays depth chart would flip Marcum and Romero around, this is my team today and I’m throwing Marcum out to the opening day wolves.

Tallet: Again, whatever we ask this guy to do, he does and he looks like Tim Robbins from Bull Durham.

Eveland: Throwing a serious wild card into the mix. The Boy Wonder must have seen something he likes about this guy to go out and get him. So there is my starting 5, Cecil, Mills, Purcey, Ray, Richmond, Rzepczynski go on back to the minors and work on your stuff. We’ll see you in a couple months to build up operation Rotation 2.0.

Now on to the bullpen, God this is getting tough…I’m having to take notes on a piece of paper at this point.

Frasor as our closer is a given at this point isn’t it? Remember in the 80’s / 90’s when we had Duane Ward in the 8th inning spot and Tom Henke in the 9th spot? We basically had two closers working for us, all we had to do is get through 7 innings and the game was over. I’m thinking that for this year. Fuck trading Downs. 8th inning role, if you need a lefty call in Downs, if you need a righty bring in Gregg. Solid.

Let’s bring Carlson in for some long lefty relief and let’s hope Cito doesn’t throw the bullpen on Jesse’s back again this year.

Now I’ve picked three lefties in the starting 5, so I’d like to see a few righties in the pen to mix things up after a starting lefty starter. So here I’ve got Valdez and Camp as they’re both out of options. The kids can “season” in the minors.

So that last spot can go to Janssen and his funky delivery. Something about Janssen I like, I can’t figure out what that is, but I’d like to see him up here for a bit to see what he’s got.

So that means going back to the minor for that seasoning is: Yikes, Accardo (we really need to trade this guy so to give him a fair chance somewhere) and Roenicke, Richmond can go to the DL or the minors, I really don’t care as I don’t like him for some reason.

Of course McGowan and Hayhurst will start the season on the DL.