On paper (or perhaps pehper) the Toronto Blue Jays should be the team to beat in the American League East this season. With the core of the New York Yankees – Curtis Granderson, Alex Rodriguez and Mark Texeira – already injured and expected to miss significant time, the Bronx Bombers should be in for a down year. Additionally, the Boston Red Sox are coming off an unusual last place finish, which leaves the Baltimore Orioles and Tampa Bay Rays as the main threats to the Blue Jays’ divisional hopes. And thus ends the strangest paragraph I’ve written in several years.

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Jays outfielder Jose Bautista is already psyched and energized to get the season underway, so he took to Reddit yesterday for an Ask Me Anything session, through which he answered some of the hardest questions that any athlete could ever answer – namely, what’s it like to play with Colby Rasmus’ goofy-looking ass?

Oh, and it also helped that Bautista was promoting MLB the Show. I’d certainly be excited if I were featured in a video game, and hopefully it would be called “Asslevania” and I play a vampire slayer who hooks up with Kate Upton. If anyone from Konami is reading this, I’m willing to write that plot.

Anyway, Bautista answered a ton of questions and seems like a generally great guy, so here are some of the better, more insightful answers for people like me who think Reddit threads are ridiculously confusing to navigate. That’s not a dig at Reddit, mind you, I’m just old and easily confused.

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"F*ck this, I'm outta here."

When it comes to the Canadian National Anthem, I know approximately two words and they’re both in the title. Because of that, I don’t bill myself as the kind of person who is qualified to sing the “O Canada” before sporting events, although I could offer a righteous air guitar and/or beatbox performance sans lyrics if the right lingerie football league team requested it. I’ll leave that up to them, though.

Not knowing the lyrics to “O Canada” didn’t stop singer Jeff Fuller – the tenor, not the former NFL receiver – as he showed off his pipes before yesterday’s Spring Training game between the Houston Astros and Toronto Blue Jays in majestic Dunedin, Florida. Fuller knew several more words to the official jam of America’s hat, but not enough to actually finish the song. So instead of honoring Blue Jays fans, he did a fantastic Tracy Jordan/Frank Drebin impression.

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If you’ve been spamming the Rush message boards trying to find out what the band’s frontman thinks will happen in baseball this season, spam no more: MLB.com spoke with him about the 2013 Toronto Blue Jays. Well, they either spoke to him, or the bad guy from The Crow, I have trouble telling them apart. That’s him on the right. Photo credit to Geddy Images.

If you don’t want to watch the video, Geddy thinks that the Blue Jays will do well this year because they got Baseball Assets (Canadian slang for “Marlins players”). They might even reach the universal dream. But, Geddy warns, those who wish to be [contenders] must put aside the alienation, get on with the fascination, the real relation, and make sure Jose Reyes doesn’t hurt himself 40 seconds into the first game.

Can MLB.com find out whether or not Tim “Ripper” Owens thinks the Cleveland Indians will finish near the top of the central? This is important.

If I’m making a list of things I love and have to constantly defend, “baseball” and “Final Fantasy games” are at the top of the list. I’m a diehard Cleveland Indians fan who has had to justify every crummy “rebuilding” season of fire-sale trades, and I’ve had the “NO, FINAL FANTASY IV IS THE BEST ONE” video game hipster conversation more times than I’d like to admit. I mean, VI is better than IV, but I rep IV.

What I’m saying is that this preview of the 2013 Toronto Blue Jays season in J-RPG form is relevant to my interests.

I swear to God I played this game as a child. I think it was included on some Nintendo 90 games on one cartridge collection.

At the time it didn’t make sense, but now it’s crystal clear.

There’s a lot of gold to be found in the clip (Reyes being weak against artificial turf is especially choice), and while it might not live up to the epic Final Fantasy joke execution of lasagna using Merton in that one episode of Lasagna Cat, it’s what I like to see in my MLB parody videos. Spoiler alert: if you sleep at an inn with Colby Rasmus in your party, you can see one of four dreams about finishing in third place.

[h/t to Sportress]

Remember earlier this year when a dozen or so Miami Dolphins fans showed up to Joe Robbie Pro Player Sun Life their stadium to protest the ongoing employment of general manager Jeff Ireland and everyone was like, “Awwwww, those poor fans think they can make Stephen Ross make good decisions”? Well, Miami Marlins fans just made those Phins fans and their “Fireland” signs look like the million man march.

With news today that the blockbuster trade between the Miami Marlins and Toronto Blue Jays has been finalized, fans of South Florida’s embattled baseball franchise flocked to their year-old stadium to express their disdain with owner Jeffrey Loria for trading away half of their team for a group of players that doesn’t even include the Blue Jays’ top prospect. And as anyone would have expected, you could count the Marlins fans protesting on one hand.

But commissioner Bud Selig ain’t care, because this trade is in the best interest of something, apparently.

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If you didn’t see enough of it last night as the news initially broke, you’re going to see plenty of columns, editorials and fiery rants today about how Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria is a scumbag because he is willingly killing his second baseball franchise because he’s horrible at what he does. And many of them will be great – I like this effort by Yahoo!’s Jeff Passan and this more subtle rundown by Deadspin – because as much as writers, analysts and experts love to argue about every little meaningless thing in sports, hatred for Loria runs deep within the majority. Jeffrey Loria destroyed the Montreal Expos and now he is destroying the Miami Marlins. That’s pretty much all you need to know.

So why? Why did the Marlins trade Jose Reyes, Josh Johnson, John Buck, Emilio Bonifacio and Mark Buehrle to the Toronto Blue Jays for Yunel Escobar and several prospects that don’t even include Toronto’s best? Was it a brilliant move to clear money? Was it an admittance of mistakes in even signing Reyes and Buehrle in the first place? Was it just the same old fire sale that we’ve come to expect from the Marlins? Or is it more likely the story of a man under investigation by the SEC for allegedly fleecing the city of Miami in the construction of a new baseball stadium that he couldn’t even fill with a stable of stars because he already created a product so tainted within the community that people refuse to buy in until his stink is washed away?

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