For those of you that have been wondering what John Danks and Nick Masset have been doing, the short answer is "pitching," which is more than we can say for Brandon McCarthy. The long answer, despite Danks' gem the other night, might include "making the Twins look like Murderer's Row." Danks got into trouble in his second start and was relieved by Masset, who promptly allowed all of Danks' runners to score. Says SouthsideSox, "The Twins had scored just 23 runs in their first 8 games (2.75 R/G), yet managed to score 5 runs in an inning twice Wednesday. Not surprisingly, Masset was involved in both innings." Masset capped off the performance by walking the well-nigh unwalkable Delmon Young and then giving up a grand slam to Jason Kubel. Hey, people, Brandon McCarthy's still got a 0.00 ERA this season!
As frustrating as Ron Washington's in-game management and roster decisions can be, at least he isn't calling out umpires and setting aside a rainy-day slush fund for MLB fines. Hitting and pitching in the big leagues is hard enough without your manager trying to ensure that you'll never get a borderline pitch called. Also, Kenny Williams says that if anyone in the Sox clubhouse is irritated by uber-douche Nick Swisher, he needs to know about it so he can move them on. He says he wants "Nick Swisher times 25." Nick Swisher times 25 would really increase the team hair care product bill, I think. Maybe they could get Bronson Arroyo, pictured here in a press photo apparently done by Glamour Shots, to up the rotation's "Swisher Factor."
As frustrating as the last week has been for Rangers fans, imagine how they're feeling up in Detroit. They've got a worse record than we've got, but they expected to contend this year. Cabrera started the season cold, D-Train's gone off the rails, but at least Armando Gallaraga is proving that any pitcher we trade away is guaranteed to have a solid season.
While poking around over at the Reds' site looking to see if they had anything interesting to say about Volquez or Josh Hamilton, I found a link to this Deadspin piece from a couple of years ago about former Reds reliever Brian Shackelford's match.com date gone awry. A couple of years ago, I was going to write a book about dating and call the chapter about internet dating "You Must be at Least This Tall to Ride This Ride." If you've ever looked at match.com profiles, all the women list their requirements as "at least 6'0", $100k a year, etc.," and I always wanted to send those girls a message saying "Those guys aren't on match.com, lady, they're banging their secretaries." Of course, Brian Shackelford has to go and prove me wrong. Apparently, though, he missed the part of her profile that said "no raping!" On a similar subject, I came across this the other day and wondered if it might have some bearing on a question that Adam asked Kameron Loe at the Newberg Book Release, that being why so many players are already married by the time they reach the big leagues.
Of course, not all the former Rangers out there are lighting the world on fire. Mark Teixeira is slow-starting his way through April in a Braves uniform, of course. Over at Talking Chop, they're linking to an effort to get 20,000,000 signatures on an online petition to get Teixeira to stay. That's kind of cute, really, though the only way 20,000,000 signatures will get Tex to stay in Atlanta is if they're all written on $100 bills.
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