So, it seems one of the most common things during the first month of baseball this year is slow starts of teams that have what would appear on paper to be All Star teams. Now my home team, the Blue Jays, is one of the teams most put under such scrutiny for lack of performance up until, so much so that fans have really started to loose their shit. R.A Dickey was booed after his 6 innings of scoreless ball this week, and today I read an article quoting Jays broadcaster Gregg Zaun saying that the fans are becoming more and more obnoxious. Now I may not be able to go to games currently and see how bad it is, but from listening to the broadcasts or watching on MLB.TV I can see that the fans are definitely being a little over the top.
Anyhow back to the topic at hand, the main purpose of this is to let fans of teams that are off to a slow start, whether it be the Jays, the Angels or the Dodgers, to calm down. It's only the first month of a 6 month long season of baseball, there is plenty of time to make up for lost ground, not to mention that when you bring in so many new players over a year, like the Jays and Dodgers did, it'll take time for everyone to click as a team, unfortunately you can't just throw a bunch of all stars onto a field and expect them to win games if they can't compliment how the other plays. Now instead of bashing your own team for not playing at the level you think they should be, you should be looking more at their progress.
For instance over the past few games the offence for the Angels has started to light up, Mike Trout has started running more and has hit some big situation hits (such as his recent grand slam). The Jays have been improving as their last 2 games have been only lost by 1 run, and in both cases they were facing a pretty potent Baltimore offence and their pitching was pretty good, just unfortunately a couple errors really cost them the games, but again there is more than enough reason to believe they can come back from this.
Then with the Dodgers, the main problem there is similar to the Jays, their offensive core hasn't been producing (especially Matt Kemp), but do you REALLY think that someone like Matt Kemp is going to fall flat on his face with no explanation at all? Can you tell me when thats ever happened before? In addition to this Kemp it seems is calming down from the homerless streak, which in my opinion is the first step to breaking it, forget it's happening because thinking about it is just gonna drive you mad. But on the other hand, Kershaw has been fantastic, Grienke is likely to be back sooner than expected because they got his shoulder surgically prepared instead of just letting it heal normally and Ryu isn't turning out to be that bad of an offseason acquisition either. Not to mention if shit really hits the fan the Dodgers can call up Yasiel Puig who just ripped Spring Training a new asshole this year.
So overall fans of teams off to a slow start, hang tight, keep a cool head and focus on the positives. If you only focus on how bad part A or part B of your team is doing you'll only make yourself go nuts.
-Eric
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