Sober Reflection

Mitch Fountain

22 Oct 2026 • 7 min read

If you were dying to give me $26 OR if you are one of those people who don't give a fig whether the Blue Jay win or lose, then this weeks' offering is probably not for you. Sorry bout that.

Ghost is an absolute pig of a CMS if you can't do your own code injection. There are plug and play options for my paywall but being able to see how your changes will be displayed on the site will be as much of a surprise to me as they will be to you. I will try for next week.
We are not dyed in the wool baseball fans but we certainly caught fire last year when the Jays made their huge playoff run. We had hoped for a similar result this year (perhaps with a happy ending) but like million of other fans, were sorely disappointed. It's easy to say there were lots of injuries, but I think it went deeper than that? Off we go!

You Can't Fire The Whole Team

That's the old adage when a sports franchise just doesn't seem to be performing as they should, and ownership wants to send a strong message. It didn't take a lot of rummaging down the old Google rabbit hole to find people who agree with me that the Blue Jay manager, John Schneider has got to go. A nice enough likeable guy, but to take a world series runner up from there, to missing the playoffs the following year is just not on. They didn't have $126 million to give Bo Bichette so they saved that money and moved up Gimenez. As a result, they lost 18 RBI's and gained about 20 stolen bases. Pretty much a wash, so don't blame Bo? I lay it at the manager and his coaching staff's feet. There were a number of structural problems with the Blue Jays this past year:
1) Injuries - These are professional athletes. If one runs into a wall, or gets hit by a bus, you can expect a trip to the hospital and some time off. That's not what plagued the Blue Jays last year. These were strains, inflammations, soreness, pulls, tears and hangnails. Thirty-six times, players were placed on injured reserve. The coach and his staff are reponsible for daily training regimens. Stretching exercises, targeted workouts, protective gear and moment to moment managment of player health. These are very expensive thoroughbred race horses! The Brewers and the Rays both have reputations for "prehabbing" every player, every day, before they take the field. They evolve individual training plans that are tracked and enforced. They capture stress management metrics for every joint in every players' body and invest heavily in biomechanical tuning. The result, insanely low injury rates. What are the Jay doing? A Peloton subscription for everyone?
2) Basic Baseball Smarts - These guys have all been playing since they were five years old. There are some basic rules that the casual observer (me) doesn't necessarily know ... but as a longtime fans, we know they are there. Two out, man on second, ball hit to the shortstop, where does he throw the ball? Nobody out, single, hit to the left fielder, where does he throw the ball? Same thing applies to base running. You are on second, you take your lead and the ball is hit near the gap between the 2nd and 3rd base. What do you have to make sure happens, before you start for third base? These are not errors where some shortstop throws the ball over someone's' head, these are lapses in either in training or focus. That falls on the coaches.
3) ABS Challenges - Boy, they suck on this front and even the announcers had had it with their ineptitude. There are places where it makes strategic sense to challenge a call. Of course, wishful thinking and pride notwithstanding, the pitcher or batter or catcher make a challege when they think the umpire got it wrong. It's just sometimes, it is simply wrong to take a chance on making that challenge. You only get two of them and having them available for that high leverage moment can change the outcome of a game. How many times, did Kirk lose a challenge in an early inning, with nobody on base and two out last year? That should never happen! Once, last year, he famously tapped his helmet on a ball that was six inches outside the strike zone. It is up to the coaches to set rules for engagement and manage that process. With extreme prejudice if required. How would two or three extra wins have looked at the end of last season?
4) Pulling The Starter - Probably the hardest thing that a manager has to do, is manage his pitching staff. People (like me) second guessing every bad decision that a manger makes is a time honoured tradition in baseball. My problem was John spent half the season complaining about his injured pitchers and how hard it was to manage what was left. WIN THE GAME YOU ARE WINNING, would have been my suggestion. You have a three nothing lead going into the sixth. First batter gets a single, second batter, walks. Your starter has never gone more than 80 pitches, and he has thrown 77. Pull the pitcher? I don't care if you have to use ten guys from the bullpen and the guy selling hot dogs in Section 10. You are leading this game. Win this game? Time after time, the following night, they are down by five runs and have to blow through the bullpen anyway. Win the game you are winning.

Jays fans packed that stadium with 40,000 people day and night, weekdays and weekends ... all season long. It was instructive in the rundown to the end of of the season to see all the half empty stadiums where playoff contenders play every day! Someone needs to manage a forty man roster drawing $270 million in salary. I no longer believe John Schneider is the man for the job.

Our Optimum Week

I found myself at No Frills and Shoppers a couple of times last week. My Zehr's had a Manager's Special on SWMBO's cream, but none in stock, for days. That pisses me off and sent me to Harvard Rd. I like the veggie section in that No Frills. Then Shoppers came out with back to back points offers so I struck gold twice on those. This week, the flyer was OK, Offers were a notch below OK but if you can, try and hit that pork and poultry Offer before the 28th? Here is your list:

Never Again

AfD stands for the Alternative für Deutschland (Germany). In the state of Saxony-Anhalt, the party, won that local election with 44% of the vote. It now sits on the cusp of becoming the first far-right nationalist party to govern a German state since the end of World War II. This time, at the first sign of a swastika or some goose stepping soldiers in brown shirts, we should just nuke the entire nation from space. Two world wars and sixty million dead are enough.

We Are Watching

The Toronto Maple Leafs (mostly) - The new kid is a phenomenon. Matthews looks like his old self. Raddysh and Marchenko are fitting in nicely and helping us forget that Knies was traded. Nylander is off to a blazing start and even bumped into an opposing player once? Whatever is next?

... and finally

Ain't It Funny How Time Slips Away
I don't know if it's me or the funny weather we had this summer. We never seemed to get that two week, blazing hot, tree toad singing stretch is August that sets you up for the fall (figuratively and literally)? Now suddenly, the leaves are past maximum and I am seized by a feeling that the whole year has slipped by without very much being accomplished. I suppose a few health issues contributed to that but now, I am having a hard time getting motivated again? This feeling that time moves faster as you age is a real psychological and neuroscientific phenomenon and it's pissing me off. So I did some digging:

The Holiday Paradox

When you are a child or young adult, almost everything is new. Your brain records these fresh details in rich, high-definition detail.
As you age, your days become more familiar and routine. Because your brain already knows what to expect, it does not need to waste energy storing deep new memories.
When you look back at a year filled with routine, your brain finds very few distinct "memory chunks" to mark the passage of time, making the whole year feel like it flashed by.

Janet's Law

French philosopher Paul Janet in 1897, proposed that each year passed becomes a smaller fraction of your entire life.
To a 10-year-old, a single year is 10% of their whole existance. To a 50-year-old, that same 12-month span is only 2% of their life. I don't want to do the math for a seventy year old?

I guess my point is that I am always telling folks, when you have enough ... for god's sakes ... retire. You do not need as much as you think you do and you will NOT be missed. Trust me. To that, I now need to add that those years you save for yourself (and your family) are going to fly by. When I passed 60, those last five years before I retired, seemed to take forever. In just a few short months, I will have been retired for five years. It feels like fifteen months. Find fresh adventures. Seek out new life and new civilizations. Boldly go, where you have never gone before.