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Casey Janssen closes for the Toronto Blue Jays, the most hyped team in baseball.

He’s a fan of the most hyped team in another sport.

“Let’s just hope we don’t have the Laker drama this year,” the smiling Southern Californian said Wednesday morning.

“They’re too talented to be doing what they’re doing, but they’re starting to pick it up. They’re starting to gel. Hopefully we’re taking this time to gel and we’re ready to go when the season starts. They had a little mess at the beginning of the year.”

I saw no such messes Wednesday, while visiting the Blue Jays on their first official day of workouts. True, baseball seasons come with crises baked into the crust. Elite teams lose more than 60 games. So there will be turbulence, particularly with Toronto’s baseball hopes higher than at just about any point since Joe Carter’s drive cleared the left-field wall 20 years ago.

But these Blue Jays won’t turn out like the '12-'13 Lakers — or the dysfunctional '12 Miami Marlins, despite inheriting four players from that very team: Mark Buehrle, Josh Johnson, Jose Reyes and Emilio Bonifacio.

The Blue Jays are deep, talented and professional. They seem unbothered by reporters’ questions about how they will handle the burden of expectations. From the 2012 season-opening rotation to this year’s projected group, the Jays have swapped Joel Carreño, Henderson Alvarez and Kyle Drabek for Buehrle (four-time All-Star), Johnson (two-time All-Star) and R.A. Dickey (reigning National League Cy Young Award winner). Among the important external factors, the rival New York Yankees are less intimidating than they have been in over a decade.

Another advantage: While Ozzie Guillen distracted and embarrassed the Marlins, the homespun John Gibbons is back for a second tour as the Jays manager.

“He keeps it loose, just lets the guys play,” said Janssen, who played for Gibbons in 2006 and '07. “He’s approachable, laid back, one of the guys at times, doesn’t have an ego.”

Could anyone say that about Ozzie at this time last year?

“It’s different,” Johnson said, when I asked if he might apply what he learned in Miami. “We had a new stadium, new manager … Well I guess there’s a new manager here, too … Different manager, I would say. There’s just a whole different situation this year. We’ve got a lot of veteran guys on this team, sprinkled in with some really good young guys. It’ll be fun.”

It was 9 a.m. ET, and Brett Lawrie was clutching his first -- and quite possibly not last -- Red Bull of the day. And he was doing something he's going to have to do countless times in the coming weeks, talking about the excitement in the air as the revamped Toronto Blue Jays prepare for the year ahead.

"It's just a whole different situation in here," Lawrie said. "You look at the guys we brought in, and it's obviously a bigger deal and everybody's treating it like a bigger deal. There's more talent and there's more energy."

The spaces between words, it should be noted, are simply a matter of devotion to proper grammar on my part. Because Lawrie talks like he plays -- at 150 mph -- the spaces were non-existent in his actual speech.

And the energy to which Lawrie referred, it should be noted, is no morning Red Bull creation. It is a natural byproduct of a winter in which the Blue Jays went from American League East afterthought to international attention-getter.

Little wonder, then, that a media mob scene preceded the Blue Jays' first official workout of the spring Wednesday morning at Florida Auto Exchange Stadium -- an appropriately sponsored home site for a team amplified by the winter swap market. We crowded around new additions R.A. Dickey, Josh Johnson and Mark Buehrle. We asked all the obvious questions about chemistry and expectations and excitement, etc. And come tomorrow and the next day and the next day, the next round of cameramen and national scribes will show up and do the same thing.

This is the reality that comes with becoming one of baseball's "it" teams, and, for now, the Blue Jays wear the label well. Like most modern-day athletes, the members of this club are well-schooled on the caveats and cliches that must be offered up whenever the subject of expectations arises, as it often will.

"On paper," Buehrle said, "we look good. We've got to stay healthy, but that's the same with any team."

The Blue Jays didn't stay healthy last year. Not by a long shot. They lost three starting pitchers in one four-day span. Even by the standards of one of the more fragile positions in professional sports, it's difficult to do.

Beyond that, they lost Jose Bautista, Lawrie, J.P. Arencibia and Adam Lind from the lineup just as the offence was starting to reach its peak potential. And so a team that looked like a legit AL East sleeper candidate going into the year instead needed a franchise-record 32 pitchers and a ridiculous number of disabled list days just to get to the finish line.

It would seem reasonable to anticipate a little more luck in the health department in 2013. But even if that's not the case, general manager Alex Anthopoulos has assembled a club that should be better-positioned to sustain the inevitable injury blows.

Ricky Romero, due a bounceback from a horrendous 2012, goes from Opening Day starter one year to back-end option the next. J.A. Happ, a worthy rotation candidate, is on the outside looking in. And as far as the lineup is concerned, the Blue Jays will have a versatile, veteran bench with Maicer Izturis or Emilio Bonifacio (the two are competing for the starting second-base duties), Rajai Davis and Mark DeRosa. Davis and Bonifacio, especially, give the Blue Jays tremendous late-inning speed potential.

The expectations, then, are appropriate -- perhaps moreso than they were in 2006, on the heels of the A.J. Burnett, Lyle Overbay, Troy Glaus and B.J. Ryan acquisitions.