Jeff Kent to the Tigers? I mean, he really warmed my heart first with all his crazy retirement talk, and then his sudden protestations at the end of the season that he felt like a kid again, playing for those late-season miracle Astros, but a man who'll play for Detroit is a man who is only in it, as so many have argued before, for the money.
Also, it won't go without saying that Lance Berkman's knee injury sounds a little too good to be true, a little too strictly within the letter of the law. Consider the details. He was playing flag football, not the regular kind. At church. Perhaps Jeff Kent was washing his truck somewhere nearby and Berkman slipped in a puddle, I don't know.
I have a friend who loves to tell the story of how he was playing football with Adam Dunn and his brother, that is to say, real tackle-type football, when his friend got into an altercation with the brother and ended up, if I remember correctly, either breaking the brother's nose or getting his nose broken. Maybe I am mixing it up with another story of football violence, I don't know, I live in Houston and tales of football violence are legion. In any case, once fists started flying, Dunn, who'd just been drafted a few months earlier, got very nervous and left, knowing that if he got hurt, he'd void his contract.
Don't tell me they don't think about these things. I mean, I have seen Lance Berkman go ass over teakettle on Tal's Hill and not only come up with all bones and ligaments intact, but make the catch as well. I am suspicious, is all I am saying.
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Otherwise, I've been spending my baseball time getting slowly addicted to the Lounge at Baseball Think Factory. It has dramatically expanded since the close of the season, as a nation of baseball geeks have no games to obsess over -- and not a lot of hot stove action, either -- but find themselves powerless to stop logging in.
Count me in their number. Today's topics included how to break up with a girl -- suggestions ranged from just abruptly cutting off all contact to pretending to be into bestiality -- to how to overcome a growing sense that nothing matters and nothing is interesting (make a to-do list and consider taking Wellbutrin, apparently).
Also a discussion of Bush's proposed tax code revisions, which apparently include the elimination of a tax break to employers for providing health insurance.
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Man, I take my cues from the Lounge. Feeling my own vague sense of ennui, I made my own to-do list ("mow grass" is not looking especially promising, with rain in the forecast), figured out how much it would cost to buy my own individual health coverage (a surprisingly reasonable $238 a month, but that is of course before anyone at Blue Cross Blue Shield knows that I am a mere two years into remission from cancer). I did not break up with any girls. Though I did preview a chapter of the recent bestseller He's Just Not That Into You.
