Phillies Rule 5 Draft Not Fueled by Just Vengeance

So, you’re sitting in the park like you always do in the middle of the day on a Wednesday, and there’s these kids playing with toys while their parents dote on them and/or keep pointing at you and whispering to each other.

Well, these kids are putting their toys together wrong, or they’re not using them to the full extent of their awesomeness.  You don’t want them keeping up this humiliating facade of a play date, so you go over there, politely wrench the toy from their arms, and show them how to correctly get the most out of it.

Then their mom comes back with the cops and its all like “Sir, get out of the sandbox,” and all you were doing was trying to help.

Anyways, that’s like baseball’s Rule 5 Draft.

If a team is clogging their minor league undercarriages with young phenoms, the Rule 5 Draft during the Winter Meetings lets teams reach down the pants of others and steal some of their talent–as long as they plan to use what they’ve stolen on the Major League level.

The Phillies snared Michael Martinez, another one of these Pete Orr-types who plays like every position, from the Nationals, in a weak attempt at misguided revenge.

This is off topic, but do the Phillies need “vengeance lessons”?  And don’t tell me “They probably aren’t trying to get back at people like you always wrongly assume.”

Of course, Tom Jane set the vengeance bar pretty high.

[IGN]

If Ruben really wanted to dick with the Nats he could have asked Mike Rizzo out to lunch and then not shown up. And as Rizzo is sitting there, sobbing into his hands, Ruben runs in, flips the table over, and sets the restaurant on fire.

*Wrings hands together menacingly*

Yeah.  Yeah.

But we disemboweled them anyway, sort of, with the Martinez thing.  He hit .272 in Double and Triple A last year.  So that’s nice.  Taking into account our need for a left handed reliever and a right handed outfielder, we also Rule 5 drafted a right handed reliever (Justin Friend from the Oakland), and a left handed outfielder (Chris Frey from the Rockies).

Now, I better go, because one of my co-workers has brought his four-year-old to the office and his Space Police Undercover Cruiser is clearly put together wrong.