1/09/2004 07:50:00 AM by Rob

Right off the bat

On my Yahoo! Cubs News, this was part of the first article, which in turn is from Indiansinsider.com:

..the man can hit.

As it turns out, though, the other thing Todd Walker can do is irritate the bejeezus out of his teammates and front office. His reputation is normally expressed as a colloquialism for "anal sphincter." And it's pretty much universal: it's not like Kelly gave him a bum rap that unfairly stuck. No, Todd Walker apparently earns every bit of ill will he can conjure forth. One imagines the scene in which Mark Shapiro makes Walker the $2.4M offer, mildly secure that he has started the bidding and will bow out after showing good faith effort, when other GM's call him up and whisper, "Mark ... no one else will offer him that much ... he is a colloquialism for anal sphincter." Thus Shapiro rescinds his offer, because he realizes that, Good Lord, pretty soon Walker's going to figure out that that's gonna be the best offer he's gonna get. and he might actually take the sucker. See, I think Shapiro may have fallen into the trap we Virtual GMs stumble over, which is he made an offer commensurate with the numbers without enough regard to the fact that the human being generating said numbers is pretty much universally reviled.

This isn't good news to me, if in fact it is true that Todd Walker is an asshole. Could this be sour grapes because he signed with the Cubs for less than he was offered by his team? I sure hope so.

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