Do you have any details about K-Rod’s altercation with his father-in-law? What was the fight about?
Probably just looked at him funny. You don’t look at Frankie funny. He’ll cut you.
So there was no real cause at all?
No, it was all part of our plan to make the team less nice. All you writers kept telling me we needed to be meaner, so that’s what we’re doing. I told K-Rod he should get in a fight with some family members, maybe yell at his kids in public or something. But he really stepped it up. Gotta hand it to him. Beating up a man 30 years older than you, that’s some big league hustle.
Are you afraid K-Rod might wind up in jail?
Yeah, I’m afraid for the other inmates. He once showed me how you could make a shank using a plastic cup and a piece of dental floss.
He’s really that much a thug?
No doubt. Hell, Mariano Rivera didn’t want to be in the same locker room as him, or so Bob Klapisch says. Just think about some of the skells Mo was teammates with: steroid cheats, wife beaters, vehicular manslaughter enthusiasts…so you figure someone’s gotta be really bad if Mo don’t want nothing to do with him.
So the whole team’s getting a new, mean makeover?
Oh yeah. This is why I really wanted us to trade for Brett Myers, but Omar told me he’s only willing to beat up women.
How is the rest of the team getting meaner?
You saw what David Wright did to his bat last night? That was ’cause he heard the bat was snitchin’. Carlos Beltran’s got a switchblade and couple of throwing stars in that knee brace of his. And Jose Reyes has dropped dancing and taken up krav maga, the deadly Israeli art of self-defense. When you join the team now, you gotta get jumped in. And when we take our next trip to Chicago, we’re gonna have a team dinner where we eat a baby.
You mean a baby cow, like veal.
Nope, a human baby. We’re living outside the bonds of human decency now. We will become the worst humans on the planet, godless fiends, making a mockery of your so-called laws and all you stand for. Your society is nothing but a sham that will crumble the second you meet the hellish likes of us.
Back to the game. Why didn’t you bring in Frankie with two outs in the eighth and the bases loaded as you still clung to a one-run lead?
Because I’m a complete fucking moron.
Jerry, I don’t need to tell you that this year didn’t go the way we planned. But it would help both of us out if the team could play well down the stretch. You know, salvage some of our dignity, and maybe our jobs.
We’re still playing? Sorry, I blacked out sometime in July as a psychological defense mechanism. Besides, I thought you traded you traded your dignity at the waiver deadline a few years back for Luis Ayala.