Better KnowPosted Aug29, 2006 at 05:52 PMSadly, our derivative, six-part series, “Better Know a Blue Jay,” has reached its end. Like the Jays’ playoff chances. Let’s exit with a bang. Drew Taylor Tapping on a laptop at his stall in the Pulaski clubhouse, left-hander Drew Taylor isn’t playing mp3’s or fiddling around on MySpace. He’s working on his application to medical school. “Setting myself up just in case,” said Taylor, who received an undergraduate degree in biology and a doctorate in molecular, cellular and developmental biology at the University of Michigan. The plan is to gain admission for next fall and then defer to 2008. You can only defer for one year, he said, but that still will give him up to three seasons of baseball before he would have to choose a profession. “I figure after three years,” he said, “I’ll have a pretty good idea … if it’s going to pan out for me.” Taylor, who turned 24 this month, hopes to be a surgeon, either in orthopedic, plastic or neurosurgery, but he’s not sure quite what the future will hold. His fiancée, Jennifer Smith, is similarly up in the air with her career plans. A fellow Michigan grad, Smith was an all-Big Ten post player and led the conference with 21.3 points per game in 2003-04, her final college season. She is the program’s second-leading career scorer. Smith sandwiched brief WNBA stints with the Detroit Shock and the New York Liberty around a season with Delta ICP Kosice, a Slovakian team in the EuroLeague. After taking the summer off from basketball, she plans to play overseas after the couple's wedding next month. At 6 feet 3, Smith makes a Brobdingnagian pair with her 6-5 future husband. They will have tall children. Two more random notes on Drew Taylor: • He is one of a handful of Jays victimized by the vagaries of the automated stat-keeping system at www.minorleaguebaseball.com. Mysteriously, Taylor was credited for two scoreless innings that actually were pitched by Kyle Walter. The above stats are adjusted for what is, to our knowledge, full accuracy. • He was purportedly the team’s official blogger this summer, but as far as I can tell, that experiment died after two posts. Clearly not blogger material. |
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