Quite understandably, lots of folks were pretty excited by some of the words that came out of the mouths of new Jays Josh Johnson and, especially, John Buck, after they heard them on the radio, or read the transcriptions I provided yesterday.
Buck, in particular, earned a lot of new fans thanks to a glowing review of his previous stint with the Jays, and what he described as a full-on, straight-out-of-the-marketing-literature selling of the club to perhaps-reluctant teammates Josh Johnson and Mark Buehrle.
“To play for the Blue Jays– I wouldn’t have said this beforehand, but now that I got to experience and live it– it’s a cool experience,” he told Jeff Blair of the Fan 590. “I said, ‘You know how you’ve got the aura of the Yankees here in the States? Put that with the Blue Jays and times it by a whole country. I’m telling you, it’s pretty cool to have the fan base that the Blue Jays have.”
As fans who fear too many players take the opposite view, it’s a tremendously refreshing thing to hear. And I don’t doubt that he’s entirely sincere, either– though, as a cynic, I can’t not point out that he’s certainly keen enough to know who his audience was.
Unfortunately for the right-thinking among us (or at least those who read the comments here), certain fuckfaces have gotten hold of these comments, and are attempting to hold them up as some kind of validation of Cito Gaston’s insistence on letting Buck play out the string as he headed for free agency in 2010, supposedly hoping to get him to 20 home runs and a better contract in the process.
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