Jon Morosi Wrote a Thing About the Blue Jays

Bullshit season is in full swing, and fucking Trolololosi is up to his familiar tricks.

Sigh.

As is Jon Morosi’s style, his latest for MLB.com is an attempt to generate screaming headlines and grist for the talk radio mill while providing almost nothing resembling substance.  In it he corroborates information that should be obvious to anyone with a pulse, which was first reported by someone else — “multiple executives around the Major Leagues expect the Blue Jays to be sellers at the 2017 non-waiver Trade Deadline, as first reported Tuesday by ESPN’s Buster Olney” — and twists it into a piece that basically ends up with Josh Donaldson on the St. Louis Cardinals.

If you’re not watching closely, you might not see the trick.

The title tells us that Morosi’s “sources” are saying that the Jays “could be big sellers.” Right away the word “could” is problematic, and makes the whole exercise pretty well fucking useless. Tigers dressed in tuxedos could be about to jump en masse off the Empire State Building. COULD THEY? WELL, THEY COULD.

Also worth noting about the title is the fact that the word “big” isn’t actually used in the piece, though I think it’s obvious where it’s meant to lead — a direction reinforced by the video clip of Donaldson at the top of the page.

Sure, “big” doesn’t necessarily imply Donaldson. Morosi could credibly argue he (or his editor, the person usually responsible for headlines) meant that the Jays could be big sellers by moving Bautista, Estrada, and Liriano — all of whom are also discussed. However, making that argument would seem kinda dubious, given the LOL-worthy way that information is presented to us in the piece:

Sounds like somebody’s sources are really in the fucking know, eh? And that last clause really gives an air of seriousness to a throwaway quote, doesn’t it? “If they aren’t available already, they will be soon”? If the source here isn’t Jon Morosi wearing a fake moustache, it certainly could be that he was just being lazy and didn’t even make the effort of putting it on, sources indicated to BlueJaysNation.com on Wednesday.

Like, maybe that’s a newsworthy tidbit, but it sure comes off like somebody’s guessing. And if the source doesn’t know whether or not those players are available now, why the hell should we believe what they’re saying about whether they will be soon?

Of course, the Jays will absolutely entertain the idea of trading their free-agents-to-be, so this flimsy reporting is easy enough to get away with. What I can’t let slide, though, is what happens next. From Olney’s information (and Morosi’s “sources'” “corroboration”) we go to an aside on the difference between simply selling and full-on rebuilding. Then, before you know it, it’s all trade partners for Donaldson and Mark Shapiro’s relationship with Cardinals GM John Mozeliak (or whatever his title is).

Why the Cardinals? Not because of anything Morosi says he’s specifically hearing about the two clubs, but simply because “the Cards want to add an impact bat before Opening Day 2018.” OH, OK THEN!

Morosi himself admits he has no idea whether the Jays will deal Donaldson, calling him and J.A. Happ “bellwethers” and saying (emphasis mine) that “if Donaldson and Happ truly become available, then Toronto is on the precipice of a rebuild.”

Well, yeah.

It’s like Morosi has already done the work of the poor Sportsnet employee forced to listen to his radio interviews and cobble his musings into a breathless and utterly fucking useless “Morosi Reports…” piece. He sees that the Jays could sell, he sees that moving Donaldson means they’re rebuilding, he sees that the Cardinals need a bat. Slap on a serious-sounding title, toss in a few sources saying things that anybody paying the slightest bit of attention could have told him, and — voila! — John Q. Dipshit’s takeaway is that the Jays are considering trading Donaldson to the Cardinals and kicking off a full-scale rebuild.

HEY, AND WHAT’S THIS? HERE TO TALK ABOUT IT IS THE MAN WHO BROKE THE STORY, NEXT ON TIM AND SID!

Ugh.

“It’s noteworthy that Shapiro and Cardinals president of baseball operations John Mozeliak have a good history of consummating trades,” Morosi writes.

No. No, it is not.

Shit, at this point it’s barely even noteworthy that Morosi has produced cynical, manipulative trash.