Well friends.  There’s not much left to say at this point.  The “it’s early” excuse can’t really be applied any longer.  At 10-19, dead last in the AL East, 10.5 games back of first, and better than only the woeful Houston Astros, it might be time to consider the fact that the Jays just aren’t as good as we hoped they’d be.

Are they still talented?  Yes.  Can they turn it around?  Certainly.  Can things get any worse?  I don’t think so.

But are they still a shoo-in for the playoffs?  No.  Are we still guaranteed meaningful games in September?  Maybe…but maybe not.

Have no fear though.

Because 500 Level Fan is here to cheer you up on a Friday with 2013′s first installment of the Fan of the Game series!

For those of you new to the site, the 500 Level Fan of the Game is reserved for extraordinary fans – and by extraordinary I don’t really mean “great” – I mean “strange”.  In the past we’ve seen a grown man licking a cooked chicken breast, a large man that resembled children’s cartoon character Pingu, a Sam Crenshaw look-a-like, and a he/she wearing a gold outfit.  Click on the “FLF of the Game” category to view the history.

Today we unveil a first – a personalized jersey!  Any sports fan knows that personalizing jerseys is a faux pas.  Putting one’s own last name on any team’s jersey is tacky, corny, and just plain wrong.  Then there is a step below that – those who put slogans on a jersey.  Think of Leafs jerseys with the number 67, and above that “Winless Since” where the name should be.  Really?  Like….really??

And then, thanks to @TweetsByRules, there is this from last night:

And to make things better – a moustache!!!

Incredible.

So take heart Jays fans.  No matter how bad the product on the field might be, we’re in safe hands with a Killer in the crowd.

Feel free to send in any strange fans you see at a Jays game to fivehundredlevelfan@gmail.com.

Everybody is excited about the opening of spring training.

But one fan in particular is far more pumped up than most.

500 Level Fan presents my nephew, 2-year old Levi Kuchler, fully engaged watching Brandon Morrow pitch to the Tigers in the first inning of the first pre-season game.

Great touch with the backwards cap and front row seat!

Last Friday I made an increasingly rare appearance at a Toronto Argonauts CFL game.  Despite the loss, the game was actually quite entertaining, the beer was good, and our section had a wonderful late game visit from Pinball himself.

But nothing beat this jacket that we saw upon leaving the dome.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the 500 Level Fan of the Argo’s game:

On Saturday night I had the good fortune to attend the wedding of a very good friend.

He is the world’s biggest Frank Thomas fan, and in his younger days he looked like this:

A few hours into the dancing, portion of the evening, a few dozen drinks into the night, I happened to glance through the drunken haze surrounding the dance floor and see a young woman wearing these:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything better.

Congratulations on the nuptials @JPS_82 and @bextwit!

What a great find by friend of the site @Tburr51, sending in a classic 500 Level Fan of the Game from the August 12th contest against the Yankees.

Ladies and gentlemen, enjoy the Bird Head:

The game was Aug 12.  We spotted the bird head a few innings / beers into the game, one section to our left.

He was an immediate hit with the group I was with.  He was keepign score, swilling back Cokes, and our group was waiting for him to give his bird a swig.

As you can see, he never took his eye off the game, especially as shown by him walking up the steps with his eye on the field after his 6th inning pee break.

He kept the bird head on all game.  It was a foam piece of art, but I never got close enough to determine if it was store bought or home made.  But it was quite the beauty.  He stayed to the bitter end.

What a trooper the Bird Head man was.

Hats off buddy.

Special thanks to good friend @TheCraiger for his wit and photo skills.  Keep up the good work!

Straight down the I-5 about 2.5 hours from Vancouver is Seattle. The drive through the gut of the pacific northwest is beautiful. Lush douglas furs, towering Mount Baker, and the thought of spotting a Sasquatch in the full squat taking a dump is what makes the drive so great.

Safeco field is a gorgeous stadium with an authentic American ballpark feel. Great beer ranging from Coors, Bud and Miller, to a massive assortment of micro brews from the pacific north west.

Seattle has a brutal team, albeit fresh off a perfect game. Thanks to this feat the level of excitement was a bit higher than usual. Roof open, famous garlic fries frying, and of course beer flowing.

I wish I had a drunken story for you. A flashing U of W coed or a pressed ham from a blind drunk stud frat guy would have been terrific.

Rather it is with disgust I give you ‘Curly, Larry and Mo’.

I warm you that there is no central theme to my choice. I just felt this needs to be documented.

Curly, the lady on the left, looks more like an inflated female version of Rory McIlroy than she does anything else. However God bless her. She had her radio, score book, enough peanuts to keep an elephant happy for a month, and of course cracker jacks.

Larry was essentially a 60 year old child. Giggling for no reason, he had a baseball glove on (notice he is a southpaw like yours truly) and even a Hunting-style vest on. However the most disturbing part of this picture was his Bluetooth. He was talking baseball the entire time and made no eye contact with his two partners, so I can’t help but think he was on the phone talking shop.

Finally, Mo. There is a very good chance Mo was a savant, or suffers from autism. So it was weird to watch him crushing beers all night. He was barely able to get a word out, as it looked impossible for him to say what he was really thinking. And this was before the beer!

At any rate, it was a great game with a win for the home team on a chilly night at a lovely ball park.

@TheCraiger

This was sent to the 500 Level Fan headquarters in the 5th inning of this afternoon’s game from friend of the site @TheCraiger.

Though the fan of the game is intoxicated man in the forefront, don’t forget to feast your eyes on the mustachioed gent in the background.  What a delight!

From @TheCraiger:

“A coward is born every minute. This man is living proof. Not only because he is getting married in 2 days, but because he is who he is. Make no mistake about it, @bsaunders33 is a coward.

My 500 level fan of the game, is ‘the man of new found marital status, and continued cowardice’.

His heckles are lame, his hat is square like John Farrell’s and he keeps farting. What a quack.

Due to alcohol consumption, this is all I got.

Thanks”

The Washington Nationals are a great young baseball team.  They have stars such as Stephen Strasburg, Bryce Harper, Ryan Zimmerman, and Gio Gonzalez, and are having a fantastic season.

By all accounts, Nationals Park is a beautiful stadium, one that I’d like to visit.

And now, thanks to friend of the site @TheCraiger, we can be assured of another thing: the Washington Nationals have wonderful fans.

Wonderful, drunken fans.

I had the pleasure of attending the Washington Nationals/Tampa Bay Rays game at Nationals Park on Wednesday evening. It was a perfect night for baseball. The stadium itself is nice because it’s outdoors, new, and well manicured. It’s always nice to watch a game when you are surrounded by fans who care, and will make comments about anything that is on their baseball minds.

But let’s get to what’s important- the 500 Level fan of the Game. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m proud to announce ‘the redneck with a fuzzy upper lip’.

For ease of description, let’s call him ‘Jeb’.

Jeb was a redneck. The skin on his neck was weathered. It was wrinkle-laden and perma-tanned from years of abuse and complete disregard for the true benefits of sunscreen.

Jeb was a drunk pedestrian. He was drinking light beers all night, so I felt I owed him the benefit of the doubt. Boy, was I wrong. He must have showed up to the park half cut. When he turned back and looked in my general direction I became worried. His eyes looked like a road map of Europe – so red and veiny. They were glazed over like an Easter ham and I’m positive some of his vision was compromised. I’m not a doctor, but I’d bet a few bucks on the fact that he had cataracts. This serious eye condition or not, he was well on his way to blindness.

Jeb was a working man, his nails were filthy and long.

Jeb had a duster. This was the icing on the cake.

He didn’t scream, make strange comments, or make a scene. The only meaningful peep that came from this intoxicated mouth was a genuine chuckle when someone screamed at Bryce Harper “that’s a clown question, bro’. Jeb was a drunken man who was fully immersed in his surroundings, and was approaching a modest level of paralysis.

Thanks Jeb for giving me a peek into your world.

@TheCraiger

Is there much more that needs to be said?

St. Louis Blues cap.

Pure black clothing – shoes, socks, shorts, shirt, cap.

Socks pulled to the upper shin.

Pasty white skin.

Intense focus.

He didn’t care that Toronto was getting thumped on its way to a sub-.500 record.

He was having a blast.

Godspeed sir. 

Godspeed.

A beautiful night at the dome last night – not too hot, not too cold, just perfect.  The action on the field was pretty good too, with the Jays knocking off the Orioles for the second straight day.  Despite doing their absolute best to blow an 8-1 lead, Toronto held on for the 8-6 win to regain some momentum after the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week that was.

Even though it was a nice night, the action in the 500 Level was slow.  A lot of empty seats surrounded me, even though I was joined by two of Toronto’s most renowned young musicians – Misters Davis and Kelneck. 

There was one fan, however, who made up for all the empty seats.  She made the noise of hundreds, drank the beer of dozens, and danced like her feet were on fire.  She started in the second inning, and – like the Energizer Bunny – just kept going, and going, and going, and going…..

Ladies and gentlemen, the 500 Level Fan of the Game for May 29th is the Dancin’ Lunatic.

Clad in a Colby Rasmus t-shirt, one would have expected her biggest ovations to be held for the CF.  But it wasn’t the case.  She cheered equally wild and aggressive, for EVERY member of the Jays, from Cooper to Davis, Bautista to Romero.  I have a sneaky suspicion that she had no idea who was even batting – player or team – at any point.  But she didn’t care.

The blue and white pom-poms were also a nice touch, and they never stopped moving.

The photo is a bit blurry, but you can see two people in the seats beside her.  At first glance, we thought they were with her.  But as the innings progressed we noticed more and more that not only did they not speak to her, they kept slowly moving away from her.  Who knows if she even knew them at all.

But then, just as quickly as she started, the Dancing Lunatic suddenly stopped, put down her pom-poms and left.  She paused briefly for a short solo dance a few rows down, but after that she simply walked away, gone into the night.

Post game, as we walked away from the dome talking about riveting subjects like dead squirrels, the Beatles coming to America, and country street parties, the unthinkable happened: the Dancing Lunatic reappeared.  She looked to be heading to Union Station, but in as crooked a line as possible.  Staggering left and right, the Lunatic walked directly into at least a dozen people – and that was just what we could see.

I trust she got home safely, and I can only hope that one day this season we can all be so lucky as to share a section with the Dancing Lunatic again.