Toronto Blue Jays

Is it possible for a ballplayer to hit his prime at age 33? History would say no, but Marco Scutaro would answer yes.

Scutaro, shortstop for the Toronto Blue Jays, is currently 33 and yet is somehow playing the best baseball of his eight-year MLB career. How is this possible? Well, to figure out how he is doing this you first have to look at what he is doing differently.

With the Phillies heading to (the new) Yankee Stadium for a weekend series against the history rich franchise in the AL East, and since I don't usually blog too much on the weekends, I thought this would be a good opportunity take a look at the 1950 World Series.

Roy Halladay earned his league leading eighth victory this afternoon in a 8-2 victory over the Chicago White Sox, putting the Jays up 3-0 in the four-game set.

The game did not start off well for Halladay, as he gave up a double to speedy leadoff hitter Scott Podsednik and was down 2-0 before the Jays were even allowed to hit.

The Jays were able to get a run back in their half of the first when Alex Rios deposited a high fastball into the left field seats for his fifth home run of the season.

Team (Current Record|Last Week's Ranking)

1. Toronto Blue Jays (25-14|1)

What a team you have when both your offense and pitching are top five statistically. The Blue Birds lead the MLB in runs (223), hits (408), total bases (647), and RBI (211). They're also second in extra base hits (142) and batting average (.290). The pitching staff is also impressive, leading the American League in quality starts (21) and batting average against (.243). Playing at Boston this week will be a test to see whether this team is for real or not.

It's about half-way to the All-Star game, and balloting started ridiculously early a couple of weeks ago. Here's who should be tabbed All-Stars.

I follow the rules (there must be one member from each team and 32 overall players), which is why there are some snubs, who should be All-Stars. An asterisk* denotes injury which usually relegates a player to snub.

Raise your hand if you had Toronto, Texas, and Kansas City as your American League Division Leaders as of May 13th. 

Anyone?

That's what I thought.  We're on the same page, because neither did I. 

Granted, it's only May, and there is a lot of baseball left to be played.  Teams have roughly 125-plus games left on their 2009 schedules. 

But I am already looking ahead to October baseball (is there anything better?) 

The National League has most of the favorites on top.

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Johan Santana, CC Sabathia, Tim Lincemcum.

All three generally considered the best pitchers in the game. But with the Toronto Blue Jay’s major league best 23-12 record, we can finally put Roy Halladay into the true upper-echelon of starting pitchers.

This article is a game recap based solely on what the author has read in the game's box score. If you want to know what really happened, you can go watch SportsCenter and pray that you don't change the channel before they put on the 30 second segment of the game.

Toronto Blue jays 5, New York Yankees 1

In what was claimed to be a regular off day for New York Yankee captain, Derek Jeter, 43,000-plus Canadian conspiracy theorists at the Roger's Center weren't having any of it.

Much like the scene at the OK Corral, Roy "Doc" Halladay stood victorious. He allowed only a single run over nine innings and defeated his one time protégée A.J. Burnett 5–1 at the Rogers Centre.

It was the Jays’ first true test of the season. After going up against the likes of the Cleveland Indians and the Baltimore Orioles, they had yet to meet a team of any importance, specifically the Yanks or the Sox.

As a resident of Toronto, Canada, it has become the norm to see our teams, such as the Maple Leafs, the Raptors, the Argonauts, and the FC having what can only be called mediocre performance at best.

Yet, people have been shocked with the performance from the Toronto Blue Jays.

The point of having a conversation regarding the Jays was to help change the subject from an awkward silence. However, the Jays impressive start to the season, has many people talking instead about the performance of our city's top team.