DUNEDIN, Fla. – There are 50 states in the union. Then there's the 51st state. That would be the state of suspended animation in which you currently find Mike Sirotka.
|  | | Mike Sirotka dons a Blue Jays uniform on the first day of spring training, but how long will he be wearing the blue and white? |
Is he a member of the Blue Jays? Is he a member of the White Sox? Is he neither? Is he both?
Who the heck knows? Mike Sirotka sure doesn't.
He's renting an apartment near the Blue Jays' camp in Florida – "but I guess," he laughs, "I could always get out of it."
He's getting to know his new teammates. Except he isn't sure if they're actually his teammates.
And he comes to work every morning at the Cecil P. Englebert Complex, spring home of the Blue Jays. But if you ask him how sure he is he'll still be there on March 1, it becomes readily apparent that in this saga, the word "sure" doesn't apply to much of anything.
"I can't really say," Sirotka answers. "I think ... well, I believe I will. But if I step back and look at each team's position from all the different angles, I can definitely see the possibility of me not being here."
Will he? Won't he? Hard to say.
This whole mess – the increasingly complicated deal that sent a hurting Sirotka to Toronto in the deal that delivered David Wells to the White Sox – is all in the hands of the commissioner's office now. Or at least it will be once the statements, notes and legal affidavits have arrived on the desks of Bud Selig and Sandy Alderson, first thing Tuesday morning.
It's been quite a soap opera, all right; a soap opera spiced with intrigue, finger-pointing, cortisone shots and MRIs, not to mention two general managers who are so steamed that they have yet to speak about their differences face-to-face (or even cell phone-to-cell phone).
And for the moment, at least, it's a soap opera that has just about obliterated all other story lines at either team's camp.
So as the Blue Jays held their first official workouts Sunday, GM Gord Ash never did get a chance to watch any of his 30 pitchers throw. He was, however, spotted walking around with a legal pad, obviously working on either his brief for the commissioner's office or a new script for "The Practice."
"I'm developing a lot of legal expertise these days," Ash says, "and a lot of medical expertise – without going to either law school or medical school."
These days, of course, much of that expertise concerns Sirotka, the American League's fourth-winningest left-handed pitcher over the last three years (with 40 wins) and the centerpiece of the most eye-opening trade of the baseball winter.
No one disputes that there is something wrong with Sirotka's shoulder. Not the White Sox. Not the Blue Jays. Not the doctors.
No one disputes, either, that there was already something wrong with that shoulder when the White Sox traded him last month.
Beyond that, though, there are disputes about practically everything, with the possible exception of how to spell S-i-r-o-t-k-a.
White Sox GM Kenny Williams implied last week that Sirotka has no more serious shoulder damage now than he had in two previous spring trainings with the White Sox, when he missed time with early spring shoulder stiffness. Sirotka, on the other hand, begs to differ.
"The biggest misconception," Sirotka says, "is that Kenny thinks I have the same thing I had the last couple of springs. But this is definitely not the same problem. If Kenny had just spoken to me instead of asking the doctors, if he'd just asked me, I would have said, `Kenny, it's not the same thing.' But he never asked. And that's what's frustrating to me."
That question – how serious Sirotka's injury is and how long he has had it – is central to the eventual decision in this case. But there continue to be no clear-cut answers.
The White Sox still insist this deal should stand as is, on the contention that they supplied the Blue Jays with enough medical information to keep the entire med school at Northwestern hopping for a full semester.
That's an argument, however, that is being greeted with some serious head-scratching in the Blue Jays' camp.
"My family's got a car dealership," says reliever Paul Quantrill. "So I know that if somebody went to that dealership and bought a used car and then it blew up three days later, we'd take it back – because that's the reputable way to do business. If something's wrong, you fix it. You make the customer happy."
All that seems logical. Yet mysteriously, there are a number of people in baseball who seem to believe that the Blue Jays went into this with their eyes open, that Sirotka's physical problems were common knowledge. So why, goes that theory, should they get anything?
Yet think about this logically. Would they ever have traded one of just four 20-game winners in the whole sport for a fourth outfielder (Brian Simmons), a set-up man (Kevin Beirne) and a complete set of attractive Mike Sirotka MRI prints? Of course not.
So it's hard to comprehend why they wouldn't deserve some sort of compensation. Maybe not Jim Parque, but something.
"We've heard various doctors give various percentages on whether or not Mike will be able to pitch this year," Ash says. "We've heard 50-50. We've heard 90-10 that he'll need surgery. But put it this way: If, back on Sunday, Jan. 14, the day we made the deal, we'd been told there was anywhere from a 10- to 100-percent chance that the player we were dealing for would need surgery, would we have made the deal? I don't think so."
The White Sox' position in all this is, essentially: The Blue Jays knew Sirotka had a problem. So buyer beware. And "buyer beware" is indeed a time-honored principle that has kept many a previous deal from being altered or rescinded.
But should the same rules apply in this case, in a trade of this magnitude?
"Oh, it's buyer beware to a certain point," Ash concedes. "But when you ask a specific question about a player and the answer you're given doesn't turn out to be the case, I don't know how applicable 'buyer beware' is."
Ironically, one of the other pitchers the Blue Jays got in this deal – minor-leaguer Mike Williams – also has a serious shoulder problem. And the White Sox already have offered to substitute another pitcher for him.
"So if it's 'buyer beware' with Sirotka and we shouldn't get any compensation for him being hurt," wonders one Blue Jay, "why would they offer us compensation for the other guy? Because he isn't as good a player? That doesn't make sense to me. If they think there should be no compensation for one, they should think there should be no compensation for the other. I don't think that helps their case too much."
Regardless, Ash says he isn't accusing Kenny Williams of "intentionally misleading" him about Sirotka's health. He's just saying that "what they told us they were getting is not what we got."
What they thought they were getting was a 29-year-old pitcher who was eight years younger than Wells, who actually had a lower ERA than Wells last season (3.79 to 4.11) and who had averaged 206 innings a year over the previous three seasons.
Instead, they got the most famous labrum of 2001. So the battle is on.
And the man in the middle of the war – the man responsible for all those legal briefs, the man who says he feels "like a ping-pong ball" – has turned into just another cannon ball in this modern baseball Gettysburg.
"The hardest part," Sirotka says, "is that I'm the guy who has to do all the rehab. I'm the guy who has to worry about my health. The two organizations will survive, regardless of the outcome. The only way this benefits everybody is if I'm OK."
Sirotka says he feels for both sides, that he can even "definitely see both arguments." What he doesn't know, he says, "is how you settle it."
To which we can only say: Hey, welcome to the club.
It appears the commissioner's office will have the power to do anything from denying the Blue Jays any compensation to deciding they deserve another player and actually picking that player. But because league presidents handled these types of disputes in the past, no one is sure how much previous precedents apply.
So as the lawyers typed and the doctors looked over those MRIs one more time, Mike Sirotka spent the first day of spring training in a place he never wanted to be – limbo.
"To be honest with you," he said afterward, "today wasn't so tough. But April 1 – that would be real tough."
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