Mr. Blue Jay

I’m a little late on the news that Tony Fernandez has been elected to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame - The Tao and DJF already have good posts up about it - but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it.

When I was a kid, it seemed Fernandez at short was a constant for the Jays, an infield fixture who played defense with a kind of awkward elegance, whose seemingly endless arms gobbled up ground balls and flipped them in a lazy arc that never failed to beat the runner. At the plate he was all knees and elbows, but he rapped out a near .300 lifetime average for Toronto (and strangely never fared as well during any of his forays elsewhere). Though the brass ushered him out of town time and again, he never failed to find his way back into Toronto’s lineup, and when all was said and done, he played more games as a Blue Jay than any other player. He was, in a sense, our own Mr. Blue Jay.

Congratulations, Tony. Well deserved.