Upon further review, the Toronto Blue Jays are not my new favourite team. Or even my new favorite team.

They were, but for only a few hours last week. For those few hours, I thought the Blue Jays were committed to a four-man rotation, something we haven't seen for any length of time since 1995, when the Royals gave it a shot.

	Lidle

Alas, the Jays changed their collective mind, apparently because Cory Lidle -- who would have been one of the four starters -- balked at the notion of occasionally pitching on only three days rest. It's hard to blame Lidle, considering that 1) he's now in the middle of his third straight good season, all of them coming as part of a five-man rotation, and 2) Lidle spent nearly all of 1998 and 1999 on the disabled list, due to an elbow injury. If the Jays had carried through, their starters would have made roughly 16 starts on three days rest from June 3 through July 2, a period during which the club plays 27 games in 29 days.

But the Jays didn't carry through. And like I said, you can't really blame Lidle, who becomes a free agent after this season and stands to make a lot of money if he can just avoid breaking something between now and October. Still, it's frustrating to know that a pitcher with 41 wins in the major leagues was able to stop the most interesting experiment we'd have seen in a long time.

Let's review the history (such as it is) of the four- and the five-man rotations.

The very idea of a pitching rotation is a relatively recent innovation, because until relatively recently, the schedule didn't allow for something so rigid as a "rotation." Teams might play a doubleheader on Sunday, have Monday and Tuesday off, then play another twin bill on Wednesday. There were more rain-outs in the old days, and before teams started flying to most of their road games, travel played havoc with the schedule.

What's more, managers were loathe to give up the freedom that's taken away by a set rotation. Whitey Ford was one of the best pitchers in the 1950s -- perhaps only Robin Roberts and Warren Spahn were better -- but Ford started more than 30 games only once that decade, in part because manager Casey Stengel preferred to save Ford for good teams. For most of baseball history, a starting pitcher -- even a great starting pitcher -- might pitch on two days rest and he might pitch on six days rest. It all depended upon the whims of both the schedule and his manager.

It's been written that the five-man rotation was basically invented by the Dodgers in the early 1970s, but just looking at the games started for teams in the 1960s, it looks to me like a number of teams were then using something very much like a five-man rotation. So the question isn't really, "When was the five-man rotation invented?" because I don't think there was a single moment of creation. No, the question is, when did the four-man rotation die?

And as I wrote last week, I think it happened in the early 1980s. But it's very hard to figure out exactly when, because there are different sorts of four-man rotations. There are four-man rotations where four pitchers account for nearly every start, all season long. These are rare, because over the course of a season, at least one of the starters is going to be bumped due to injuries and/or ineffectiveness. There are four-man rotations where a number of pitchers get the starting nod, but always (or almost always) on four days of rest. And then there's what we might call a "modified four-man rotation," in which four starters get the bulk of the work, but a fifth is inserted into the rotation to prevent any of the top four from having to work on "only" three days rest.

	Zito

In the modified four-man rotation -- actually, "four-and-a-half-man rotation" might be more descriptive -- the top four starters wouldn't ever start on three days rest, but they would start on four days rest whenever an off-day lets you skip the fifth starter. In its perfect form, the front four all start approximately 35 games, leaving 22 starts for the fifth starter. It doesn't usually work out this way, though. Last year for the A's, for example, Barry Zito started 35 games and Tim Hudson 34, but Mark Mulder and Cory Lidle were both limited by injuries to 30 starts.

Maybe the best recent example of the modified four-man rotation was that of the Braves in 1997, when they had four pitchers -- John Smoltz, Tom Glavine, Denny Neagle, and Greg Maddux -- who started 33, 34, or 35 games. That left 27 starts for the fifth starters (Paul Byrd and Kevin Millwood among them), which is five more than optimal. But it's better than giving 32 or 33 starts to five different pitchers, at least one of whom is probably just hanging on to his big-league job by two or three fingernails.

Of course, the argument for the modified four-man rotation is that nobody has to start on three days rest, but the team still gets the maximum number of possible starts from the top four guys. If there's a good argument for the strict five-man rotation -- that is, with even the fifth starter taking his regular turn, even if there's an off-day -- I certainly haven't seen it. I suppose you could argue that the occasional five days of rest is good for everybody, and/or that if you don't give your fifth starter regular work, he'll get rusty and that will hurt you when he does pitch. But I think you'd have a tough time finding evidence to support either argument.

For that matter, I haven't seen any evidence proving that pitchers can't maintain their health working on three days rest rather than four. But for now, it's the modified four-man rotation that the Blue Jays will use, which is good for Doug Davis but not so good for Toronto's baseball fans. On a happier note, there's every indication that Jays general manager J.P. Ricciardi still prefers the true four-man rotation. And considering that 1) Lidle won't be around forever, and 2) Toronto's three other top starters supposedly are amenable to working on three days rest, we shouldn't be surprised if the Jays revisit the subject before long.

Maybe they'll be my favourite team yet.

Senior writer Rob Neyer writes four columns per week during the baseball season. His new book, "Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Lineups," has just been published by Fireside. For more information, visit Rob's Web site.