His Room Was Always A Mess As A Child

Adam Lind doesn't like hitting fourth. He's OK with any other spot in the order, apparently, but he refuses to be the cleanup man.

That's hilarious.

Here we are admiring a young baseball player who has broken out all of a sudden with 35 HR, 114 RBI and a .932 OPS, a 26-year-old left-handed batter who isn't awful against lefties, who can hit with 2 strikes, who has the patience to draw a walk and a swing that hits for average and power.

And he reveals that he doesn't like batting fourth.

It's bizarre because no matter where you're hitting, the idea is pretty much the same - try not to make an out, and if the pitcher gives you an opportunity, hit the ball hard. I mean it's not like he's talking about lacking protection here - he stated that he'd be fine hitting 6th. The guy in the 7-hole on the Jays isn't usually a guy who'll offer the most protection.

No, it's a psychological issue that he's apparently always had. If he never gets over it and settles into a 5-hitter who can put up a .900 OPS each year, there's not much to complain about. I just hope Cito doesn't incomprehensibly decide to make John Buck his semi-regular cleanup man this year, the way Millar was last year.

As for who's going to slot in around him, I'm not going to spend too much time speculating now. However, I will say that I do like Aaron Hill hitting third. The guy in the 3-hole often comes up in the first with 2 out and none on, meaning a quick ding-dong would do a team a lot of good, both psychologically and scoreboard-ically. And he'll have lots of opportunities throughout a game to hit with runners on, assuming that the top 2 guys have the ability to get on base, and use that power. I think that seeing him as a lock for 30 HR year in and year out is a little foolish, but there's no question at all that he has the power to be consistently near that mark. What I think he will end up doing is being a little more conservative with his swinging. In his rookie season, he walked 34 times while having 361 AB, a far better rate than his 42:682 last year. Seeing as how players tend to become more patient as they mature, there's no reason why he can't get back up to a respectable walk rate. All this will mean is that by chasing fewer bad pitches, Hill will make fewer outs without compromising his power numbers, as those are fueled mostly by hittable pitches.

I don't know if that will be the long term plan for him but I won't worry too much. They Jays seem to have good options in Snider and Wallace (maybe even Encarnacion and Wells, if they get back to doing what they've shown in the past) to fill out the rest of the heart of the order and it's a certainty that Anthopoulos isn't done looking for more pieces to help round it out. This is a comfort rarely experienced in the past few years with the Jays and makes it really easy to poke fun at Lind's phobia.