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This is now what life has become for the Toronto sports fan: Just when you come to admire an athlete, watch him daily, enjoy his talents, appreciate what it is that makes him special, he is gone.
With Chris Bosh, there was at least seven years lead up time and all kinds of warning. It happened too soon with the second Alex Gonzalez to play for the Blue Jays. He didn’t say much. We didn’t know him much. But for his four months as a Blue Jay, all he did was make a difference.
He hit more than anyone expected. He played shortshop like almost no one in this town — and that probably includes Tony Fernandez — has. He won ball games for a team that wasn’t supposed to win much of anything.
If we have any hearts left, those of us who follow the Maple Leafs and the Blue Jays and the Raptors and the Argonauts, then they were broken again by the trade that sent Gonzalez to the Atlanta Braves in a surprising deal Wednesday afternoon.
“I can’t say enough about Alex Gonzalez, the person and the player,” said Alex Anthopoulos, the boy GM of the Blue Jays. “He was a tremendous teammate, a tremendous leader, not an easy guy to part with.”
But now gone.
And there’s one less Blue Jay to cheer for, care about, today than there was yesterday: That’s not an easy position to take for a team searching to find its fan base.
Gonzalez wasn’t ancient by baseball standards. He is 33 years old and probably having his best all-around big league season, and now the Blue Jays take a deep breath and hope and pray that the shortstop they brought in to take Gonzalez’s place, the shortstop they sacrificed a smoking double-A lefthanderd reliever for, the shortstop who is supposed to have attitude problems and be occasionally difficult, can become what he was last year and the year before.
One of the best in baseball.
Yunel Escobar, last year, was like Adam Lind and Aaron Hill. The kind of player you build around. That was then: This is now.
Hill is having a horrible season, Lind is equalling that, and Escobar makes it a Three Amigos of Hope for Anthopoulos.
If their future is their past, that’s great for the Blue Jays. If their future is the present, then the deal Wednesday will do nothing but disrupt the feel-good days to come. At this point, it’s impossible for anyone to know what’s what.
Jim Fregosi, the assistant to Braves general manager Frank Wren, watched enough of the Blue Jays in Philadelphia and Cleveland recently to realize that the first-place Braves need more than Escobar was providing and have a chance to do something special this year: Gonzalez is all about this year.
Escobar is about anything but this year, even as the Braves insisted they had no intention of trading him.
Bobby Cox, in his final season as Atlanta manager, isn’t known for giving up on talent. That never has been his M.O. The fact Cox is signing off on the trading of Escobar has to be a little unsettling for Toronto fans. Last year, Escobar was a home-run hitter and Gonzalez wasn’t: Now the opposite. Both can do more than play the position.
Anthopoulos made a Jose Bautista comparison in making the deal. He had heard things about Bautista before the Jays picked him up. Questions about him. And all he has done since he has been here is deliver. Anthopoulos talked to Bautista, who knows Escobar, before making the deal. Anthopoulos, it seems, talked to everybody, which is what he does.
He came away happy he could pick up a young part at a key position who will be a Blue Jay, if they want him, to 2013. This is his guessing game.
“I talked to Paul Beeston about it (before I made the deal). I talked to Cito about it for a long time. We know Escobar is an accomplished big league shortstop having a very weak first half of the year ... We want to get him back on track.”
They had better get him back on track. In this town of the trampled-on fan, we are running out of hearts to break.