It’s my Parting Shot for my Monday Musings…..

It seems as little as a year ago, the knock on the Toronto Blue Jays’ pitching staff was that they didn’t get enough swing and a miss outs – or strikeouts period! Fast forward to opening weekend of the Major League season and the Jays and their pitching staff are in the baseball record book after 50 Athletics hitters while sweeping the three-game series. If you like symbolism or co-incidences, the 50 Ks on opening weekend comes in Toronto’s 50th season of existence! Of course, opening weekend doesn’t a season make. There are still 159 more games to go, so it’ll be interesting to see how the Blue Jays’ pitching staff continues on!

There was a lot of grousing from Saskatoon Blades fans after yesterday’s 4-3 overtime loss in Edmonton as visual evidence, albeit grainy and not in the best angle to know for sure, showed the Oil Kings entered the Blue and Gold end of the ice offside about 25 seconds before the winning power play goal was scored in O-T (pictured). Alas, it’s those lack of good camera angles along the bluelines in ALL W-H-L arenas that led to the offside challenge being scrubbed about three years ago! So, human error is alive and well in the W-H-L, but boy did the humans get exposed in Major League Baseball over the weekend – I’ll get into that more in this space tomorrow!

Opening weekend of the W-H-L playoffs saw home teams win 14 of the 16 games played. In other words, six of the eight favoured teams held serve in front of their partisan fans with only the Bridge City Bunch in Edmonton and the Regina Pats in Medicine Hat finding a way to earn a split on the road! Both of those are big surprises compared to which teams I thought would win at least once in their opponent’s rink, only to fall twice!

And, I just about fell off my chair in the broadcast booth yesterday when my sidekick on the road, Saskatoon Blades’ Director of Communications Tanner Chubey informed me that Vegas had fired Bruce Cassidy as head coach with eight games remaining in the regular season – replacing him with John Tortorella of all people! Torts is back in the N-H-L with his sixth team as head coach. That has to be a directive from Golden Knights’ ownership because I can’t see the pride of Plenty, Saskatchewan, Vegas G-M Kelly McCrimmon pulling that off – but what do I know!!

That’s my Parting Shot. I’m Les Lazaruk…and it turned out nice again!