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the look ahead

The record is slightly worse than last season (23-16 compared to 25-14) but the Toronto Blue Jays' implosion that was supposed to happen after losing the first two games of a series to the Boston Red Sox this past week has not materialized like it did in 2009, despite the fact that Aaron Hill can only barely see .200 and Adam Lind is 8-for-65 (.124) in the last two weeks.



We don't know yet how new general manager Alex Anthopoulos will grade out in big-time free-agent signings or even trades, but in the acquisitions of Alex Gonzalez, John Buck and Fred Lewis he has shown he is as good as J.P. Ricciardi at filling in the edges.



Buck is in the middle of an eight-game hitting streak that matches the Blue Jays' season high. The other players with hitting streaks as long? Gonzalez and Lewis.



Acquired from the San Francisco Giants for future considerations, Lewis led the American League in May in hits (23) and total bases (39) going into Sunday's 0-for-4 and has grabbed the lead-off job.



The knock against Lewis has been his defence, but Kimball Crossley, who scouts the Cactus League for the Blue Jays, was "adamant that the concerns were overblown," according to Anthopoulos - who sounds as if he views Lewis as something more than a short-term proposition.



"We just felt last season wasn't a true indication of his ability, but rather 2008 when he was an everyday player," Anthopoulos said.



Lewis hit .282 with 21 steals in 2008, with a .351 on-base percentage and .799 OPS, and his slugging and batting average fell as a part-timer in 2009.

Mundial madness

It will be a fun week in the British papers after the resignation Sunday of the chairman of that country's World Cup bid, David Triesman.



Triesman was secretly taped by The Mail on Sunday suggesting Spain was planning to bribe referees at the World Cup this year with the help of Russia.



Those two countries are campaigning against England for the 2018 World Cup.



The newspaper taped the comments while Triesman was meeting with Melissa Jacobs, who was one of his aides when Triesman, the former general secretary of the Labour Party, was a cabinet minister. Nice friend.



The accusations are red meat with the World Cup already under scrutiny as a result of The Fix, a book by investigative journalist Declan Hill, formerly of the CBC, that purports to detail the influence of Asian gambling syndicates throughout soccer, including at the World Cup level.



Garbage Time: It's in the New York Post so it's gotta be true: Cameron Diaz is dating Alex Rodriguez to get back at Kate Hudson for dating Justin Timberlake … The Sunday Telegraph says Calgary-born Owen Hargreaves was dropped from England's preliminary World Cup roster after Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson button-holed England manager Fabio Capello at last Monday's Managers Association dinner and told him flat out that Hargreaves was nowhere near ready for a call-up … former Major Leaguer Delino DeShields remains one of my all-time favourite athletes to cover and his son, Delino, Jr., was recently rated by ESPN's Keith Law as a late first round or sandwich round draft pick. The younger DeShields is a 5-foot-9, 183-pound centrefielder at Woodward Academy in College Park, Ga., who has been scouted by the Blue Jays and has signed a letter of intent to attend Louisiana State.



Boshworld, a new weekly feature: Actual tweets and other observations about and from the Toronto Raptor, as he endeavours to keep himself important with the approach of free agency:



@chrisbosh "Just saw the Find Your Love video. Drake is doin his thing."



Hmm. We're not big on "Drake" although Ricky Romero likes him, so that counts. Maybe Bosh finds significance in the opening lines of Find Your Love: "I'm more than just an option … Hey, hey, hey … refuse to be forgotten."

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