The start of Major League Baseball's off-season hot stove is just around the corner and it seems like the perfect time to announce the return of the Baseball Blog to the TheStar.com.

It has been a few years since the blog had a prominent spot on The Star's website, but that's about to change. Starting now, and carrying on throughout the off-season, there will be regular posts about the Blue Jays, Baseball Canada and various topics from across the league.

There will be plenty of activity here throughout the week and I would like to make it as interactive as possible. Tuesday will feature the weekly mailbag where you can submit questions to bluejaysmailbag@gmail.com but I also want to hear from the readers about what types of topics you would like to see discussed.

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This is going to be a place where fans will get to pull the curtains back a little bit and gain a better understanding of the Blue Jays, MLB and the journalism industry as a whole. Get involved by reaching out to the email address above or be sending a message to me on Twitter via @GregorChisholm.

To kick things off, I thought it made sense to circle back to a piece I wrote on Saturday. The topic centred around head trainer Nikki Huffman's decision to leave the organization to pursue other opportunities. In that piece, I explained that while the Blue Jays considered her departure a loss, it was probably the best move for all parties involved.

I'm not going to rehash the entire article. If you haven't read it yet, you can find it here. But the column generated some buzz on social media, and it prompted a lot of follow-up questions from readers. For the debut of the blog, I'm going to run through a list of commonly asked questions to give everyone a better understanding of why I wrote the piece and what it means for the future of the Blue Jays.

Unlike the weekly mailbag, I'm not picking specific questions from readers. Instead this is a synopsis of common themes readers were talking about after the piece. That's why we'll call this segment, frequently asked questions, instead of the mailbag. With that in mind, let's get started:

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Why report on Marcus Stroman and Aaron Sanchez's friendship and how it relates to the high-performance department now, instead of back in 2017-18 when most of these issues were taking place?

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That's an excellent question and one I have been asked a few times in the wake of Saturday's column. Since joining The Star in late May, I have written about the high-performance department on a semi-regular basis. In July, I reported on the club's issues with transparency and providing accurate injury updates to the media, and by extension, the public. A few weeks later, I outlined the issues that Sanchez and Josh Donaldson had with the medical staff.

Working a beat is sort of like putting together a puzzle without knowing what the final picture is supposed to look like. Through multiple interviews over a long period of time, more pieces are put in place and the final product becomes clearer. It doesn't mean we know the entire story, but it does mean we gain a better understanding of why certain things took place. The corners begin to take shape.

When you start reporting on the internal machinations of an organization it almost always leads to follow-up conversations. Maybe somebody on the team didn't like what you wrote, maybe they want something clarified, or sometimes they simply become aware you've been told pertinent information from an undisclosed source and as a result they are more motivated to talk. Each situation is unique.

In this case, I had known for awhile that Sanchez wasn't happy with the medical staff. He also had plenty of on-the-record quotes backing that up, everything from a botched surgical procedure on his fingernail to how the club was treating his blister. When Donaldson returned in August and talked about some of his problems with the club's high-performance department, it served as a perfect time to revisit the topic.

The article on Donaldson and Sanchez led to more conversations from people both inside and outside the Blue Jays' organization. When new information matched up with other things I had been hearing over the previous couple of years, it was clear that another piece to the puzzle had been identified. Sanchez had a lot of issues with the medical staff and I can confidently report that Huffman's close ties to Stroman was one of them.

Was Huffman good at her job?

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I honestly don't know, and I don't think there's a single journalist who would be able to provide a definitive answer to that question. Reporters don't have access to the training room, there is limited access to the medical staff and all we really must go on are the first-hand accounts from players and front-office personnel.

Not surprisingly, there wasn't one universal opinion about Huffman's work. She was praised by many and criticized by a few. That's probably no different than what the reviews would be for a family doctor. I won't pretend to know with any level of certainty how effective Huffman was, but it is my duty as a journalist to report on both the negative and positive stories that come out of the clubhouse. Huffman, like most trainers, was involved in both.

Would this even be a story if Huffman wasn't female?

Absolutely. Huffman's role as a pioneer of sorts -- she was the second woman to serve as head athletic trainer in any of North America’s four major professional sports leagues -- potentially makes it more newsworthy, but this a storyline that would be followed regardless of gender. Being a woman has nothing to do with it.

In 2014, then Blue Jays head trainer George Poulis was thrust into the spotlight after Adam Lind was diagnosed with a fractured foot, which the club previously labeled as a bone bruise. When the injury didn't improve, he was eventually sent for an MRI. The ailment wasn't noteworthy, but Lind's comments sure were: "My mom wanted me to get an MRI, which I hadn't yet, because it wasn't getting any better."

The quote prompted a lot of "mother knows best" jokes but the result was egg on the face of the organization. The Blue Jays' front office and training staff were incensed that Lind went public with his gripes and it took months for those hard feelings to blow over. In some ways, that's not so dissimilar to what happened with Donaldson and Sanchez. This doesn't have anything to do with attacking a regime, it's about balanced coverage. Poulis' work was reported on and so was Huffman's.

What really happened between Stroman and Sanchez?

I honestly don't know. I've heard multiple versions over the last few years but none of them have been consistent enough where I would feel confident in reporting with any degree of certainty. Instead, my main takeaway is that it doesn't really matter.

I think all of us can relate to this in some way. Almost everyone has been close friends with someone they had a falling out with and often people don't understand why it happened. I'm not using these examples because of Stroman and Sanchez, but instead about friendships in general: Sometimes a new relationship gets in the way, a misunderstanding gets blown out of proportion, or people grow apart and there are hurt feelings as a result.

We've all been there and if you were to ask others why the relationship fell apart there will be a lot of different versions told of the same story. Who is friends with who isn't a story and the only reason this became one was because these two ultimately went public with their beefs by unfollowing each other on social media and taking occasional shots at one another through the press.

Is this a sign of bigger problems inside the Blue Jays' clubhouse?

Not at all. All the prominent figures in this storyline -- Sanchez, Stroman, Donaldson and Huffman -- have moved on and there has since been a complete overhaul of the roster. Yesterday's baggage doesn't necessarily carry over into today and the Blue Jays seem well positioned to have a fresh start with a new young core.

It's also worth mentioning that I think clubhouse chemistry is overrated. This isn't basketball, hockey, or even football. This is baseball, which arguably is the most individualistic of all the team sports. It's a game based entirely around a series of individual matchups and doesn't require much chemistry to succeed.

Would it be a better environment if everyone got along? Of course, but that's no different than the average 9-5 job. It's always nice to be friends with people at work but it's also not required and there have been plenty of teams who hated each other and went on to achieve great success.

A perfect example of this took place in 2016. I've been covering Major League Baseball since 2007 and during that time I have been inside a lot of clubhouses -- both the Blue Jays and that of visiting teams -- and I've never seen a more dysfunctional group than the Toronto crew that made it to the AL Championship Series in 2016.

Now that was a clubhouse filled with inner turmoil. The players hung out in cliques, there were a lot of beefs behind closed doors and everyone seemed on edge even at the best of times. There was conflict with the media, which included photographs of two local columnists on a bulletin board with an X across their faces, to forbid players from talking to them.

Did any of that impact the level of play on the field? It's doubtful. The Blue Jays limped into the postseason but ended up defeating the Orioles in the Wild Card game and then sweeping the Rangers in the AL Division Series. Baseball is the one sport where you can dislike the guy sitting beside you and not have it directly impact the play on the field.