Perhaps it’ll all work out for the best. Perhaps the money saved by trading Adam Lind, the player with the highest batting average in the Majors against righthanded pitching, for Marco Estrada, the pitcher who gave up the most home runs in the National League, makes sense. Perhaps the .202-hitting Justin Smoak is ready to bust out. Or, maybe, these are just the earliest moves in an offseason (hopefully!) filled with better ones to come. Still, the Lind trade put me immediately in mind of one of the greatest headlines in Blue Jays history:

This story appeared in the Toronto Star on Sunday, December 13, 1980, the day after the Blue Jays sent Bob Bailor to the Mets for Roy Lee Jackson. Bailor put up some decent numbers with the Mets and Dodgers after leaving Toronto, but the Jays didn’t really miss him. As for, Roy Lee Jackson, he’s probably best remembered as a pretty fine National Anthem singer, but he did have better stats than people might recall.

Still, an awful lot of Jackson’s wins came from Jays rallies after he’d blown leads … so much so that where other people might refer to those types of pitchers as “vultures” in my family, we referred to those types of situations as “Roy Lee wins.”

Here’s hoping the donation of Lind works out better!