Baseball is like a box of chocolates. No sorry, baseball is like an onion. No, baseball is like beer, hmmmm beer.
I love tortured metaphors as much as anyone, but this one, by Buster Olney is just strange (subscription required):
:• The Blue Jays appear to hold the commanding position in the free-agent pitching market that remains, to the degree that Toronto is like a beer vendor inside the Super Bowl site.
If anybody wanted something to drink at MetLife Stadium, they had to deal with the vendors' terms. Similarly, Toronto can just sit back and wait for one of them to agree to its terms. The Blue Jays need a starting pitcher and are willing to pay, and because there are so many free-agent starters available, one of them will need Toronto, whether it's Santana or Jimenez or A.J. Burnett.
I'm guessing what he means is the Blue Jays have told each of the three free agent starting pitchers what they are willing to pay and they figure that one of them is sure to take the deal because there aren't that many teams still looking for pitching. Personally, I suspect that there are more than 3 teams after a starting pitcher.
If we are using the beer vendor analogy, the Jays would get all three pitchers, because everyone buys beer at the park. We might complain about the price but we still do it.
And, of course, the Jays are setting a price lower than what those free agents would like, unlike beer vendors who would be setting the price higher than what we'd like to pay.
Maybe the pitchers should be the beer vendors, pricing themselves like premium import beer and the Jays want them to price themselves like no name brands.
Or maybe we could skip the metaphor. If you have to explain a metaphor, you shouldn't use it.
Anyway, Alex, sign someone so I don't have to keep reading about rumors.