Danys Baez Being DFA’d Better News Than Brad Lidge Returning

Mere days after crediting Danys Baez for Antonio Bastardo’s success for some reason, Charlie Manuel and the Phillies said good bye to the usually-terrible reliever through the trusted majesty of DFA’ing.

"“I think the biggest improvement in Bastardo is that he has grown up as a pitcher, being around veterans like Baez and Halladay.”–Charlie Manuel"

Well, that makes more sense.  If we’re talking about growing up and not actual pitching ability, than yeah; I could see Baez teaching Bastardo how to clean out an A/C unit or change the oil in his car or fill out a tax form or shoot gophers to feed his starving family.  These are things a man’s got to know to survive in this world, and because “being alive” is all Baez has been doing for a while, he clearly has the most basic of life skills down.

But if I walked onto the field at CBP and Baez was offering Bastardo some “corrections” to his delivery, I would hit him with a fire hose with such force he’d tumble from the pitcher’s mound back into the bullpen.  But then I would have no answers to questions like “Who are you?” and “What are you doing here?” and have to flee from security and a possibly enraged Antonio Bastardo, all the while dragging the fire hose I somehow snuck in behind me.

Look, the point is, Danys Baez is gone, at least for now, and that’s one more weak spot we don’t have to get up in the middle of the night and throw up about.

Of course with Lidge, we could run into a collection of brand new frantic concerns, but whatever, let’s just bask in these several moments of elation while we still can.  Though let’s not instantly assume Brad won’t be able to contribute.  If he comes in and peppers the plate with an abrasive slider, then suddenly we’ve got four trustworthy arms in that bullpen to do what seems to frequently be two innings of relief work at most.

To think that Brad is coming back to us as some sort of tortured soul, constantly harassed by antagonistic hallucination of team logos is utterly ridiculous.  I mean why even suggest that.

Meanwhile, the Phillies avoided looking desperate for bullpen help by grabbing some other guy who just stumbled out of the desert with a 6.00+ ERA.