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Hey Columbus Sports Fans!

Baseball season is now officially underway.  I’m not sure about you, but my fantasy team is not performing well as of right now.  However, it’s not quite time to panic yet or make any drastic changes because the season still has five more months to go.

It might seem to many like an easy job, but professional baseball can be physically and mentally demanding.  After more than a month of Spring Training, we feel like the season should be half over.  We joke about the fact that we play twenty games before we get our first off-day.  If you think that is bad, after our first off-day we have another twenty games in a row before our next off-day.  However, we just take it one day at a time and carry a grateful attitude for the opportunity that we have been given.

The Blue Jays organization decided to put me at the Class A-Advanced level, which is where I ended up last year. I am often asked if I am satisfied with where they put me, and the answer is yes.  To be honest, I was happy to make a team out of Spring Training. Although I had a good season last year and a good Spring Training, nothing is ever guaranteed, which I found out the hard way after my first year in professional baseball.It was definitely great to see my name on a roster coming out of Spring Training.  It was also pretty hard to say goodbye to some of my old teammates and guys that had become good friends to me who weren’t even fortunate enough to make a team.  I’ve been on that side of things, and it is one of the worst experiences when someone tells you that you are no longer valued in an organization, and that the dream that you’ve had since you were a little kid may now be over. Since this is considered a rebuilding year for the Jays, they decided to bring in a plethora of pitchers into Spring Training.

Once again, eighty or so pitchers had to battle for about 55 spots. Many of the teammates that I had last year are back at the same level, which is very humbling for a lot of them.  We have a lot of experienced players at the AA and AAA levels, which will make things very competitive this year.  Our AAA roster is half-full of players that have already had a good amount of playing time in the big leagues.  Talk about a bad time for those guys to be in a rebuilding year.  Even though it’s a rebuilding year in this organization, the big league club has started off well with good pitching as well as some hitting that is much better than was expected. Like I said in the beginning of this article, there is still a lot of baseball to be played, and it’s not how you start, but how you finish.

Feel free to check out the Dunedin Blue Jays website to follow our team throughout the season… http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/index.jsp?sid=t424

Thanks for reading fans!

Tags: dunedin blue jays, minor league baseball, toronto blue jays