Two Jays

Say this for the White Sox under GMs Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn. When they made a dumb trade (and they made lots), you could count on it being a doozy. Take this one from December 2014. Hahn—or maybe Williams, the former was GM by then, but that never stopped the latter as team president from interfering—engineered a trade of four prospects for ex-Cub Jeff Samardzija and a minor leaguer. Three of the ex-Sox—pitcher Chris Bassitt, catcher Josh Phegley and infielder Marcus Semien—all have had pretty decent (or better) major-league careers. In fact, Bassitt and Semien are both still playing, and come Friday, both can say they’ve been on World Series teams. Samardzija? He pitched one year on the South Side before having five pretty-blah seasons with the Giants. I was reminded of all this last night when Bassitt came out of the bullpen to pitch a scoreless eighth inning while protecting a one-run lead for the Blue Jays. Jeff Hoffman did the same in the ninth, and the Jays beat the Mariners 4-3 in game seven of the ALCS to advance to a date with the Dodgers in the World Series. Three of the runs came courtesy of a George Springer homerun to erase a two-run Seattle lead in the seventh. Ah, George Springer. I’ve never been a fan, at least of his contract, six years at $150 million. At the time of signing, Springer was already 31 years old. I wondered what would happen the last two years of the contract. Well, what I thought would happen, sort of. Springer started 80 games as a DH, which suggests he won’t be seeing much of the field either in the World Series (honesty forces me to admit he took a fastball off the knee in game five of the ALCS) or next season. But, right now, I doubt Blue Jays’ fans care much about that, and I can’t say I blame them.