Blue Jays Show Sense Of Whimsy; Scathing Racism

The Toronto Star employs 4 baseball writers, all of whom contribute to the paper's Blue Jays blog. Sunday's effort was light, breezy and more than a little odd. The byline read Richard Griffin, but to me it read more like one of Hunter S. Thompson's twilight sports columns.

There are several disjointed sentences about Frank Thomas, a couple bouts of onomatopoeia, references to OJ Simpson, ospreys and machine guns, and, strikingly, this Archie Bunker channeling blind item:

At the end of the morning, the highlight was Alex Rios bringing his five-month-old hobby out onto the field -- a four foot long, gasoline-powered, remote control helicopter. As Rios set up, refueling his impressive looking machine on the warning track in front of the bullpen, one of his teammates remarked jokingly, "I'm staying away. I don't trust a Puerto Rican with a sharp object in his hands." This was just men being boys.

This paragraph raises more question than it answers. Why is the remote control sharp? Who is the hilarious teammate and why does he go unnamed? It's all very confusing, but if Richard Griffin starts calling himself Doctor and goes on a peyote binge with Cito Gaston, you heard it here first.