4/19/2004 08:53:00 AM by Rob

Discouragement, disappointment, bitterness, resignation

Kerry Wood gets his ass thrown out of a tight game.

Everyone talks and talks about Sam-Me passing Ernie Banks on the all-time Cubs homer list, like that's an actual award.

The bullpen, in a word, sucks.

Greg Maddux, in a word, sucks.

Dusty Baker is desperately stretching my faith, and Mark Prior is no closer to pitching for us than he was in March.

Most of you blasted me for being so depressed and so disappointed last week, and when I suggested a trade, I got called a knee-jerk reactionary. So I'm NOT going to harp on it anymore, except for this: you HAVE to run Maddux out there every turn, now. You're committed. Remlinger should be in the pen, Mitre should be in the pen, and Prior should be in the rotation. Instead, you had Andy Prattfall, you have Michael Worst, Francis Beltaround, Cap'n Tightpants seems to have found his 2002 form in what is proving to be another episode of an "odd number year good, even year bad" career, and Joe Borowski finally appears to have settled his bet with Satan, and he has turned back into...plain old Joe Borowski, Mexican League long man.

If Prior isn't back, soon, forget it. The vaunted farm system isn't going to save us.

Let's look at one baseball related thing before we go. Reports out of the Denver Post state that injured Rockies OF Larry Walker was out riding his ATV over the weekend on his property, when he found a dead guy, who apparently has been dead for quite some time. Walker is NOT a suspect or anything, but he basically said that he has a lot of property, and he hadn't been that way in a while.

First of all, I wonder if the dead guy has any of Kobe's DNA on him.

But more importantly, Walker makes, like, $15M a year. Most of us can't imagine what $15M is, we just basically call it "fuck-you" money, and leave it at that. But as Mike Greenberg on ESPN Radio this morning suggested, THIS is a good of illustration of what F.U. money is that there ever will be.

Many of us have taken advantage of the recent warm weather to do some winter damage assesment of our yards. I found a patch of dirt to the "air-conditioner" side of the house that needs some patch-up work done. Well, Walker was doing the same thing, no doubt, with his yard. Did he find some patchy grass, a fallen tree limb? He found A DEAD GUY!! A corpse which is lying so far away from Walker's home that it wasn't bothering anyone, and if Walker wasn't hurt, and was at his job, like he should be, would STILL be lying there for months, maybe YEARS, to come.

That, my friends, is F.U. money.

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