Sure, Ted Rogers is paying huge money to have two relatively unproven arms pitch for his attempt at making the Toronto Blue Jays truly competitive for the first time since they won the World Series in consecutive years in the early 1990s.  Does he need to?  Of course.  I don’t necessarily agree with what JP Ricciardi’s doing to sign these guys, but I can realize a few things:

• Professional athletes (hockey players being the exceptions) tend to be afraid of Canada unless they either get drafted way before they should by a Canadian team (see Rafael Araujo and Charlie Villanueva, and you all thought that I forgot about the Raptors) or get baited by a ridiculously large amount of money compared to anybody else, as Ryan and Burnett did get.
  
• A rotation of Halladay, Lilly, Batista (who wasn’t coming back as the closer no matter whether we signed one or not), Chacin, and Towers is not able to interfere with the upper echelon of the AL East.  Neither was their bullpen, with the likely combo of Jason Frasor and Justin Speier to get the last six batters.  Now, Batista’s either on the way out or the 5th option in that bullpen (behind Ryan, Speier, Frasor, and Schoeneweis) until the inevitable arm injury to Halladay, Burnett, or Lilly.  That’s a much better option than the enigmatic Dave Bush replacing a member of the non-Burnett five.
  
• Yes, they still do need a bat, and Carlos Delgado (who I would’ve spent every penny of my money to get) is again off the trading block (but returning to Rogers Centre (nee SkyDome) June 23rd-25th!), but they’ve still got players to offer, from realistic bait (Hudson, Hillenbrand, even Batista) to some reaches (Hinske), and some solid bats are still available, such as Mench, Overbay, and the ultimate reach, Bobby Abreu.

Rickey Henderson and John Olerud put the Jays on there, but can BJ Ryan and AJ Burnett bring them back? Source: mplate.com

I’ll try to save most of my thoughts on those moves, however, until the new year.  Remember, this roster’s nowhere near set yet, and we might see a big trade by the end of the week.  The main moral of today’s piece: The Jays are trying to compete again, and if you can make the playoffs in baseball, you can win the World Series.  That made yesterday a very fitting day for two Jays that keyed their last championship run to retire.

Most of my memories of Rickey Henderson don’t involve him as a Blue Jay.  He played for just about everybody, and was quite simply a guy who didn’t want to leave the game behind him.  I remember watching Tony Gwynn’s last game on October 7th, 2001, the same game when Rickey got his 3,000th hit.  This would’ve been the perfect time for Rickey to retire.  His career had pretty much already wound down; he wouldn’t overshadow Gwynn’s retirement, as Tony’s a legend in San Diego, much more adored by the media, and the increasingly rare player who stuck with the same team for his whole career (Rickey played for nine, plus an extra stop in San Diego and three extra stops in Oakland); and 2001 seemed to be the season where the old passed off to the new, with Gwynn, Ripken, and McGwire all retiring, and with the World Series-less Mariners and Diamondbacks threatening to face each other in the World Series.  Rickey just wanted to keep playing, though.  He wasn’t around for the money, he just loved what baseball gave him in life and wasn’t yet ready to give it up.  After toiling in the independent minor leagues for almost three whole seasons (save for a 30 game stint with the Dodgers in 2003), Rickey finally decided that he’d had his farewell tour.  He’s going into the Hall of Fame undoubtedly on the first ballot.  There will never be another Rickey Henderson.

As for John Olerud, I remember checking the Toronto Star sports section every day during the 1993 season simply for the “.400 Watch”, a simple graphic that showed how close Olerud and Andres Galarraga were to becoming the first since Ted Williams to hit .400 in a single season.  Olerud ended up finishing with a .363 average, but that didn’t matter too much in the big picture.  Olerud still led the Jays to the World Series, and probably had the best Blue Jays hitting season of all-time.  He then moved on to Queens and Seattle, having numerous great years there before finishing his career in the thick of the Yankees/BoSox rivalry.  If it seems that I don’t have much to say on Olerud, I don’t.  He was simply a remarkably consistent player, and another one that baseball will miss.

The fact that the two retired on the same day allows me to recall one of my favourite baseball stories, the infamous tale of Henderson, during his brief stint with Seattle, approaching Olerud about the helmet that Olerud wore on the field.  Olerud explained his condition to Henderson, prompting Henderson to mention that he remembered another player with that condition during his stint with Toronto seven years earlier.  Olerud’s response?  “That was me”.  In the words of Rickey, that was Rickey being Rickey.