Now that Jason Bay has signed with the Mets, I can report that the Red Sox were never really interested in him. You see, Boston gave him an MRI midway through last season and discovered he had some knee issues, thus rendering him useless as a cog in the Sox’s grand scheme.

Why didn’t the Mets’ doctors see the same issues when they examined him? Because they couldn’t have, and neither could any other team. You see, the Red Sox are at the cutting edge of all aspects of the game: scouting, sabremetrics, proper allocation of resources, and medical equipment. They have a state-of-the-art MRI machine that can not only diagnose ligament and deep-tissue injuries in split seconds, but can also cause them!

But this machine doesn’t cause injuries immediately. It implants a special subcutaneous chip that resonates to a very special frequency that only the Sox’s MRI machine can emit. If the Sox sign a player after examining him, they remove the chip. If not, they emit the frequency and cause maximum damage.

In the case of Jason Bay, the Sox plan to be as benevolent as possible. They will not evoke their right to destroy his knees by mysterious remote waves before the first 18 months of his current contract. After that, all bets are off. The Sox also won’t say whether they will simply cause Bay’s ACL and MCL to deteriorate slowly, or if they will make all three knee ligaments blow out simultaneously and catastrophically.

As for other players the Sox have examined but not signed, they would not say how or when they would be crippled. However, it is highly suspected that if Jon Lackey hadn’t gone with Boston, they would have given him a torn labrum, and possibly mad cow disease.