The Blue Jays are the world champions (of service time manipulation)!

Ted Berg writes the Morning Win newsletter for For The Win. Yell at him on Twitter at @OGTedBerg or via email at AskTedBerg@gmail.com

Go crazy, folks! They did it! The Toronto Blue Jays pulled it off!

Canada's only MLB team announced Wednesday that Vladimir Guerrero Jr., the consensus top prospect in all of baseball and the most hyped young player since Bryce Harper, will join the club Friday and make his big-league debut against the Oakland Athletics.

Guerrero's promotion concludes nearly a full year's worth of speculation over whether the Blue Jays could triumph over public sentiment and successfully keep a guy with a beautiful swing and some downright astonishing minor league numbers off their big-league team long enough to manipulate his service time and ensure they'll be able to keep him through the end of the 2025 season.

It got dicey there for a minute. Teams like the Padres, Mets and White Sox caved to angry internet mobs in late March and put top prospects on their opening day rosters to buck common baseball business practice and avoid the need to insist all those guys needed a few weeks - but only a few weeks - in Class AAA ball to iron out defensive issues or some other vague concerns.

But glory in sports never comes without a good deal of good fortune, and the Blue Jays caught a break in spring training when their 20-year-old mega-prospect and future face of the franchise suffered an oblique injury that sidelined him for a few weeks he might have otherwise spent dominating the Grapefruit League and showing fans he had no business whatsoever returning to Class AAA Buffalo for half a month. When the commemorative magazines and history books look back upon this day, they will recognize the muscle in Guerrero's side as one of the true heroes in this illustrious achievement.

The son of the Hall of Famer of the same name, Guerrero Jr. finished his minor-league tenure by hitting .360 with a 1.069 OPS in seven 2019 games at Class AAA before his promotion. The infielder showed preternatural contact skills and plate discipline throughout his time in the minors, drawing walks as often as he struck out despite advancing through the system at an extremely young age.

Many fans somehow hold him in higher regard than the Nationals' Juan Soto - who's only half a year older and already an All-Star caliber Major Leaguer - and projection systems expect Guerrero Jr. to hit about exactly as well as Bryce Harper did last season, except with a higher batting average and fewer walks. He is not expressly a home-run hitter, but he has massive power.

And now, thanks to magnificently keeping Guerrero in the minors until this day, Blue Jays can rest assured that they will maintain his services for an extra full season beyond what they would've if they promoted him on opening day. Is that fair? Oh, heck no. Major League Baseball very glaringly needs a full overhaul of its financial structure, even after some teams capitulated to human decency - presumably for PR reasons - and allowed rookies on their rosters to start the season.

But the Blue Jays didn't have to! Thanks in part to that strained oblique, they successfully manipulated the service time of the best prospect in baseball. Congratulations to the new world champs of doing this one shrewd but still generally lousy thing!

Wednesday's big winner: Nastia Liukin

It shouldn't be all that surprising that someone with five Olympic medals in gymnastics can pull off a front-flipping ceremonial first pitch before a Cardinals game, but a) it still looks awesome and b) it's cool that this is just a thing Nastia Liukin does now after retiring from competition in 2012. She has also thrown out acrobatic first pitches at Cubs and Angels games. And in addition to various business and charitable interests, she's been on The Price Is Right, Dancing With the Stars and American Ninja Warrior and served as the grand marshal for the Indianapolis 500. Nastia Liukin's interest in going to cool sporting events and being on TV is extremely admirable in my eyes.

Quick hits: Warriors, Murph, Lillard

- The Golden State Warriors had a 3-1 lead before losing Game 5 of their first-round playoff series against the Clippers, so lots of people made the same joke. I think probably people are too quick with the trigger on that joke - it basically comes up every time the Warriors lose - although I guess repetition is part of the appeal of memes.

I do want to give a shout out here to my Warriors fan uncle-in-law for offering up one of the most ill-fated sports takes of all time back in 2016: My wife and I spent time with him the day after Game 3 of the NBA Finals - Golden State's first loss of the series - and he said he was OK with the loss because he wanted them to win the championship at home that year after they did it on the road in 2015. To be fair, he had no reason to believe the Warriors wouldn't win that series after they took the first two games, but when fans start getting picky about how and when the titles are won, it's a good indication that the team has flipped from a likable powerhouse to full-blown villains. He's a great guy, he's very likely reading this, and he's also a Mets fan - so he has taken more than his fair share of lumps - but he should understand that I will never let him forget that one.

- Daniel Murphy returned from the disabled list to play his first home game with the Rockies and immediately got the scare of a lifetime at the hands of a giant running tooth. I can't stop laughing about his freakout. If he's never played a home game there before, he would have no reason to expect a giant, racing tooth coming at him full bore the moment he stepped out onto the field. Murph missed nearly half of last season with injury and is presumably trying to avoid doing the same thing in 2019. It looks like an overreaction, but this man almost got bulldozed by a smiling, 7′ tall tooth. Nightmare stuff.

- Yesterday's newsletter made the case that Damian Lillard is the hero the NBA playoffs need, and nothing Lillard did in its wake disproved that. I also got a nice email from an NBA spokesperson letting me know that Lillard is one of 10 finalists for the league's Seasonlong NBA Cares Community Assist Award for his charitable work with high schools in both Portland and Oakland. So that's cool.

- Joey Zanaboni is a D-II baseball announcer with jokes and jokes and jokes. Like I wrote yesterday, there's way too little joy in baseball broadcasts. Baseball is for fun.