Phillies Recommend Not Filling Void Left by Mike Zagurski with Food
By Justin Klugh
Left-handed people are treated like royalty in baseball. If teams could, they sprout and harvest their own crops of southpaws in subterranean labs, getting them from some organic process that led to fully developed humans being birthed out of a giant gross plant or something. Any righties accidentally generated by this process would be summarily executed.
Seriously. They would do that.
My point is that Mike Zagurski’s left arm is probably why we were forced to believe in him for so long. Now, any confidence-building on Zagurski’s behalf will be done by the “crowds” in Arizona, where he is now employed by snakes.
Last Saturday, Mike was DFA’d. This was part of an intriguing trend the Phillies experimented with this year, in which players who were apparently ineffective were no longer permitted to play for the team. A similar process was initialized when Danys Baez was DFA’d a little bit ago. It’s an interesting concept; one that certainly has a Moneyball-esque cinematic quality, easily translatable into a motion picture starring Daniel Craig as Ruben Amaro and Sam Shepherd as Charlie Manuel.
Mike leaves us with a Almost 7.00 ERA, which is like having a roommate move out and leave behind his dog that you always hated. Also the dog is dead.
In return for his services, the Diamondbacks will be sending us a player to be named later, which is like finding a note on your fridge that says “Hey bud–I moved out. I’ll send you those last three rent checks whenever I can. Thanks for taking care of Rosco LOL!!! P.S. Rosco is dead.”
He is also 28 years old, which, lets face it, is pretty much when baseball players start hearing funeral music on a continuous loop in their heads anyway. “I swear, I’m gonna turn it around,” Mike would always say to us after he’d come home from his latest subpar outing. “Tonight was my last bad appearance. I’m really gonna contribute.”
Oh, please, we’d think in our youthful ignorance. You’re almost 30, dude. Face it. You missed. Then we’d strum our guitar lazily and daydream about what it will be like when our band finally makes it.