Victoria Day Tidbits

On a long weekend where fireworks will be prevalent in the sky, the Toronto Blue Jays continue to produce fireworks on the field.

First off, congratulations to Edwin Encarnacion on his future American League Player of the Week honours. EE had one hell of a week – 6 home runs, 11 RBI’s, and all but one of his hits this past week were home runs.

Not far behind of course, is Jose Bautista. He cleared the fence for the 14th time this season and is now tied with Paul Konerko for the major lead league for home runs. Bautista was featured in Buster Oley’s latest article, unfortunately you have to be an ESPN Insider to read the rest of the piece.

Now that the Bautista Appreciation Society is picking up steam, we might just have to create a legion of appreciation for Edwin Encarnacion too.

Besides, if these guys keep up even half of this pace until the trade deadline, it could leave the Blue Jays in a very interesting position to trade them – especially with Bautista on the hook for about half of his modest $2.4 million dollar salary.

Yesterday the Blue Jays cut Dana Eveland loose and called up David Purcey from Triple A Las Vegas. Eveland came out guns blazing to start off the season with a 2-0 record and 1.93 ERA through his first three starts, but then things got really ugly near the end. In his final three starts, Eveland only lasted 9.1 total innings, giving up 17 earned runs.

David Purcey was really the only viable option to bring up from the Las Vegas 51’s, as Jesse Carlson is still having a tough time finding his groove, and Marc Rzepczynski and Jesse Litsch aren’t quite ready to be called up just yet.

Cito Gaston will probably enjoy having another lefty in the bullpen, and that gives a little more versatility to the pen which has been comprised of mostly one-inning guys. I can see Purcey being stretched out into a two-inning reliever if need be.

That’s all from Blue Jay land – have a great Victoria Day holiday!