Auditions

Late in a game with an outcome no longer in doubt, David Purcey emerged from the Jays bullpen to mop up against the stellar Rays of Tampa. Sure, the Rays looked like they needed to catch a bus, but hey, his stuff was good. Purcey missed some bats, threw some smoke and generally did his bit to end the game in respectable time.

Glancing quickly at the Gameday Pitch F/X data, it looks like Purcey might messed around with this change and curve again; getting away from the streamlined approach that afforded him so much success in the spring.

Please Cito; use this fine two inning performance as a springboard to higher leveraged appearances. A little at a time, like Brandon League last year. Give Purcey a change to earn your trust and a chance to get used to warming up in a hurry or whatever magic spell relievers use to be effective 4 out of 5 days.

Bandit Auditions

As someone who lives blogs a few games a month, I can say the 2010 Jays are a god send. Not only do they seem to play a lot of close games, they do it in a hurry. The Jays reckless offensive abandon coupled with their pitching and defensemore pitching run prevention strategy, the Jays sliced a cool 12 minutes off their average game time.

According to Baseball Reference and my sweet Excel skills, the average Jays game in 2010 checks in around 2 hours and 49 minutes. While not the brisk pace of a popless NL West tilt, it is down from 3:01 last year, according to Joe Posnanski.

What does it mean? Not much, other than an extra quarter hour to spend waiting for the other Clarence shoe to drTOO LATE.