Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Overdrive, hour two. Jeff O'Neill with Brian Hayes and Jamie McLennan. Just want to give some feedback on my goodbye with Kelly McCrimmon. My buddy Navi said, great job, O-Dog. Need to tighten it up a little bit. I don't know, he said great job. And this guy wrote, Mark, a jerk wrote... What a goodbye from Odog92. He sounded like a CEO firing all of the staff on a Zoom call.
Hashtag Humber College Broadcasting.
Thanks, Mark. Yeah, I wouldn't go that strong with my review. I thought it was actually a really smooth, great exit. I had no issue with the, hey, Kelly, it was great catching up with you. It was perfect. The thing is, like, you reset, man. That's like kind of audio 101.
Let me just explain this to you, my thinking. We just talked to the guy for 35 minutes. Do you think you need a reset at the end saying, oh, by the way, the guy, it's on the thing. It's on the tag. Yes, it is. That says Kelly McCrimmon for 30 minutes.
Right. Do you realize we have a large audio listening community? Fan base. In their cars. In their cars. Listening, streaming, listening on the podcast.
Okay, well, we're going to talk to a heavy hitter right now, the CEO of the Blue Jays. And at the end of it, we're going to say, there he is, Mark Shapiro. Thanks.
Some guy's going to be driving around saying, thanks, Hayes, you idiot. I just listened.
Yes, because you never know when people are tuning in. That's the point. You never know, and it's professionalism. I'm sure Mark appreciates it. He wants his name out there. Why wouldn't you want your name out there? Your team's 3-0, right? Yeah, I thought they did a phenomenal job on Friday night with the 50th anniversary stuff. Coming off a World Series Game 7 loss, but they got there.
The buzz is immaculate right now. The stands are full. I think Mark Shapiro's a pretty happy guy right now. Why wouldn't you want your name blasted out? Here he is, the president and CEO of the Blue Jays, Mark Shapiro. What's going on, Mark? How you doing?
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Chapter 2: What insights does Mark Shapiro provide on the Blue Jays' season outlook?
what it means to be a good teammate, you know, and how much they care about each other. And you could see that in the dugout from Kaz's home run to the way, you know, Gause and Cease and Scherzer were on the top rail, you know, cheering on Lauer yesterday. You could just see it.
These guys care about each other and are pulling for each other to the toughness and resilience that it requires to handle what will come. And I promise you, you know, we're coming at a good moment right now, but there will be tough times. That's the nature of 162 games.
Right. Well, and the attention to detail, you guys are striking the right chords right now. And obviously that coincides with winning. We talked about this last hour, and we've talked a lot about it the last few months, you know, to the arrival of the 26th season.
You know, you guys, if you won 78 games and missed the playoffs last year, it probably would have been a different vibe on Friday night, needless to say. But the attention to detail... Maybe a different person on air. Possibly a different person. I don't know. Do you want to answer that? Did you feel like you had to win last year, Mark? No, I'm just...
I was trying to make a joke at my own expense.
I hear you. I'm with you. But the attention to detail and striking the right chord with the fans. You mentioned it was a half an hour pregame, but I spoke with a lot of people, a lot of Jays fans who said they really thoroughly enjoyed it and felt like you guys are really connecting with the fan base on that front. How much time and effort goes into that? How much of it is organic?
How do you strike the right chord and how important is that for you and your operation?
I'd like to think that that is a longstanding effort to identify the right players, acquire the right players, develop them by rewarding certain attributes and values. And some of it's just... You know, we're fortunate to have guys that legitimately show joy playing the game. You know, Vladdy, as our best player, you know, comes out there with so much joy.
Ernie Clement wrote an incredible article, you know, talks about just the joy he tries to bring to the field. And I think. In addition to the joy, the level of care that they've got for each other, which is authentic. It's off the field, too. It's not just on the field. And that has translated year to year with some guys changing over.
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Chapter 3: How does Mark Shapiro view the culture within the Blue Jays team?
This is my 35th season in MLB. But to have people come up to me and say, You know, my grandmother, who's never watched baseball, watched every game down the stretch last year and loved it and was pulling. To me, that means that they're falling in love with the players. They're falling in love with the team.
And to me, that means that they're appreciating their values and their attributes and their character. And so, Brian, I'd say that to you, that, you know, that's on purpose, like the character, the toughness, the resilience and the love of being a good teammate. That stuff's not by coincidence. That stuff's on purpose.
Mark Ponce is taking them out tonight. He's got to be thinking, like, what the hell is going on around here? Like, what kind of standard are these guys setting?
I'm going to strike out, like, 10 guys. More, more, 15.
Like, after that pitching performance on the weekend, he's got to be saying, okay, this is how we do business around here. But it goes back to that character and caring where it's like, we talk about it all the time, culture and holding your teammates accountable and kind of setting a standard. It's almost a good thing for him to say, you know what?
I've got to be great, and that's got to be a positive thing for any athlete.
I agree with you, and you guys know that as athletes. There's two pieces to that. One is to know those guys are legitimately pulling for you. There are professional environments where guys are more focused on their own performance. It just happens. thinking about how much money they're going to make. They're thinking about their own stats and performance. I'm not seeing that in this group.
It's not that they don't expect to get paid. They are getting paid very well. But I see guys that are legitimately pulling for guys and have so much happiness when they do well. And I think Cody feels that, you know, again, he's had an interesting journey. All of our guys have had interesting paths. You know, they're they're A few of them are blue chippers, but not all of them are.
Many of them have overcome quite a bit to get where they are. I talked to Spencer Miles. Unbelievable story. The guy got the win for us on Saturday. Just an incredible story. I mean, he was not recruited out of high school, didn't get any scholarship offers, walked on at Mizzou, had to battle his way. Then he had a stress fracture in his back. Then he gets drafted late as an afterthought.
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Chapter 4: What challenges is Bo Bichette facing in his new role with the Mets?
How much closer are you and Ross and maybe John and the whole staff watching and trying to get a read on the new guys compared to the veterans who have been here for a while, early in the season anyway?
I think our jobs are to be more supportive and to not read in anything too quickly. You're looking for signs that what our baseball operations group identified in each guy is still present, that the opportunities we thought for them to be even better are being utilized and those resources are being utilized. But our jobs as an organization are just to put these guys in position to be successful.
You know, it's to to allow them to be in an environment where they can relax as much as humanly possible in a game that has so much anxiety built in and stress built in and expectations built in. So to put them in an environment where they feel like they're supported and relaxed and to provide them with the best resources in all of Major League Baseball.
mentally physically and fundamentally to compete to prepare to recover information coaching everything else and so we're more focused on our part of that deal right now than we are on evaluating them i think we you try to withhold evaluations till the 40 game point and just look at are we doing everything possible to put these guys in a position to be the best they can be
So, Mark, how hard is it with how close you were to winning to just set the standard again this season? Because obviously the expectations are very high for your organization and the players within the clubhouse. But you've got 159 games still to get there and to try and do that. So is it on John Schneider to make sure the temper, the guys, and keep them grounded?
Or who is it fall on to make sure that you go through the process and try and give yourself that opportunity again?
I mean, Schneid set that tone with his talk when the guys first got into spring training, but I really feel it's veteran players. Veteran players understand. I mean, think about Max Scherzer and all that he's been through, how many world championships he's won, but how many times he's fallen short as well. Our guys, I think, just basically understand that, you know, listen, it's...
They've got a long journey ahead. It's not going to be easy. Things are going to come up that no one is expecting or no one is prepared for at this moment.
And how we handle that adversity when it hits, how we handle that first six games in a row we lose skid, is more determinant of who we are as a team and how far we'll go than how we handle going 3-0 out of the blocks and kind of celebrating last year's championship. So there's a big respect there. for the schedule, which is the toughest one in all professional sports.
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Chapter 5: What are the key moments from the Blue Jays' opening ceremony?
Yeah. And like everybody else I mentioned, there's a good story there, right? We're his third organization. He was, you know, designated and kind of given up on by two teams, two major league teams before us, good teams, you know, in Cleveland and Chicago. Oakland when he was in Oakland and came here, kind of went up and down in the minor leagues and embraced who he was.
And the floor for Ernie is that he's an elite defender and a very good base runner. That's a really good floor. And then he has started to bring his bat to ball skills, you know, in line with the other. And that's that's a ceiling. And he's been a guy that's come through with some clutch hits because he's He can hit just about anywhere the ball is pitched.
You've seen him hit home runs on balls over his head. You know, he can take a ball off the ground and hit that too. So it's not conventional. But the toughness piece, the commitment to playing hard, I think when we're at our best, And Ernie's style of play is really what stands for who we are, which is every team knows they have to play their best to beat us.
I think about what are we at our best? We execute defensively. We run the bases well. We're really, really tough outs up and down the lineup. And so to beat us, it's not that we can't be beat, but to beat us, a team has to play their absolute best. That turns the pressure off. on the other team, and Ernie is a player that applies pressure to whoever we're playing against.
So in a lot of ways, he's a tone setter for this group.
We have Mark Shapiro, Jays, Rockies tonight down at the Rogers Center. You guys announced a couple weeks ago, I believe it was, the Hall of Excellence is coming up. to the park, and you've announced Buck Martinez is going to be included in that. Was this always the plan?
You guys have done so many renovations, and obviously this has been ongoing, the renovations, the pre-planning, the building, the kind of staggering over a couple of years. Was that always the vision from the start, or is it something you've adjusted with on the fly?
Well, when we sat down and said the things we need to accomplish to change this from a stadium multi-purpose 1980s concrete circle, you know, to a true ballpark, you know, that's meant for baseball and in a modern sense kind of provides best-in-class fan and player experience, too, by the way. History was a piece. You know, we didn't feel like we had...
done a good job of incorporating history into our building, particularly that allows our fans to connect with the teams of the past. And we identified the 50th season as being that benchmark season that gave us a platform to do that.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of Linus Ullmark's absence for the Senators?
I can go back to just thinking about baseball and not worrying if we're going to get projects done, major capital projects done by OT day anymore.
With Mark Shapiro, now, I don't know if you worry about the future of baseball in terms of the upcoming CBA expiration. And that's been well documented that there may be a battle between the owners and the players, and maybe both sides are starting to dig in. How has that uncertainty in the future affected the way you're doing your business on a daily basis moving forward?
Yeah, I'll answer that like very honestly, which is obviously I'm aware of that. And when I go to owners meetings, it's a large part of what we're talking about. But I my message to myself and my message to our organization, because obviously a lot of people here from our minor league staff to our scouts to.
People that work here around Rogers Center, they have a lot of questions about what it's going to mean because they love the game. I'm a big believer in controlling what I can control and what they can control. Maybe more than anyone in all of Major League Baseball, we have an exciting season of baseball ahead of us.
And I want us to focus squarely on that on the season ahead at the right time, maybe throughout the season or at the end of the season. Myself, Edward Rogers, we will be involved and we'll provide input and feedback and do the best we can to kind of get through that, you know, as fast as possible.
But right now, I want us, our fans and our players, by the way, to focus on this year because I want it to be a special one and we expect it to be a special one.
Well, and obviously, you know, you guys got games tonight, and you got games throughout the week, but we're big litmus test guys on this show, and I'm sure this is not a surprise to you. When the Dodgers roll through town, we're probably going to highlight that series a little bit more than the Rockies rolling through town, with all due respect to Colorado.
It's going to mean a little more.
A little bit more.
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Chapter 7: How do the Eastern Conference standings affect playoff predictions?
That's the bottom line.
Well, there was, I guess, a story circulating down at the park today that Steve Kerr had left John Schneider a note after the World Series and kind of admired the way he was managing and dealing with the platform and the spotlight. Anyone reach out to you, Mark? Any letters hanging around down at the park that we should be aware of or what?
Actually, I know Steve a little bit from my friend Danny Ferry. They were teammates in San Antonio and close friends throughout their lives. So I've actually been out to dinner with Steve a couple of times when they were in San Antonio. But no, I've got... The nature of these jobs are you build friendships. I've got friends, you know, R.C.
Buford with the Spurs is one of my closest friends, you know, in the world. And so him, Scott Pioli, was the GM for the Patriots during multiple Super Bowls and then with the Chiefs after that. He's a lifelong friend of mine. Shared great stories. He was here with me during the World Series. So he was by my side for that.
Sean Casey was with me, you know, longtime big leaguer in the suite with me. So those two guys were with me in the suite. It helps that people around you. Sam Presti with Oklahoma City is also a friend. So it helps that people around you who know how you feel. It's hard. It's hard to explain to an everyday person.
you know, fan who care deeply, but when you work 35 years and it's been your life's work, you know, it's, it's a little bit, your level of investment, uh, is even more different. So it does help to share it with those people.
And those people have been great sources of, um, perspective for me of, you know, support and, uh, and, and along the way, along my whole career, you know, Mark, we got to fly, but I'm going to give you a,
A bit of advice. Just be careful whenever you're doing these interviews with whiteboards with stuff written on it behind you. Because it's 2020. I'm well aware. Okay, good. Because it's 2026. Those are just quotes.
Okay. We're past the days of the boards. It's all digital now. We're past the days of the boards in the background. Okay. I'm just making sure. Okay. Listen, I'm old as hell. I've made every mistake there is to make, and I've had that moment before.
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Chapter 8: What strategies does Bryan suggest for FanDuel Best Bets?
That's a great answer. That's the way to play the game right there. Don't cower. Don't say, I didn't even hear him.
Oh, I don't listen to them. You're right. That would be the wrong thing to do is say, I don't care about the fans or what they say. I'm here to play baseball. Then you've got a problem on your hands.
Big time. Yeah. That's the way you handle it right there. I thought it should have come earlier. I didn't like my at-bats either. Brilliant answer. That's a great answer by Boba Shett. But he was right.
He was honest. The truth is he hasn't had a great start, but I think he's a great player, and his game will round into shape. But, you know, I agree. I respect his answer. To me, that's honesty.
Speaking of the Mets, two of the greatest things that I've seen in sports, and I've seen a lot of stuff, like I've seen Tiger hit golf balls on the tee at the Masters. Me and my wife went to a Mets game, and we were sitting down low, and we watched a Grom pitch live. Well, obviously live. We were there. It was so sick, that guy. He was dialed in in his prime. Jacob deGrom, dude.
That guy threw smoke. That was outrageous. And in the same city. I got to sit courtside and watch Kevin Garnett in his prime, and that was a performance. That guy was like a man-child, and he was so much bigger and better than everybody else. I'll never forget those two individual performances in the city of New York.
There you go. Yeah, DeGrom had a three- or four-year run before his arm fell off.
He was nasty, dude.
Yeah, so, so nasty. And listen, the Raps, there's a chance they play the Knicks in the first round. Oh, good night. And they have not played New York well, obviously, for the last few years. But they're jockeying for position with them in Atlanta. You know, Philly's still in the mix. They beat up on Orlando yesterday. They had a 31-0 run.
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