Jimmy Rollins Deal Reportedly Close, as if That Means Something

So how are the contract talks going with Jimmy Rollins?  Great!  So great that nobody has signed or offered anything yet.  But we can assume they’re going wonderfully because apparently no one wants them to end.

Have they been sitting across a conference room table for weeks, sliding a piece of paper back and forth?  Did they forget to write a number on it?  Is everyone too distracted by Dan Lozano’s sporadic sinister chuckling?

Lozano is, of course, the guy doing half of the negotiating from J-Roll’s side.  With such a caring, charismatic player in his Rolodex, this Lozano character has got to be a real stand-up guy, so it’s not like we have to worry about a cackling, odious weasel trying to make a deal with a guy who watched negotiations with his closer hit only a slight snag and reached for his iPhone.

But hark!  What is this on the horizon?

Why, it appears to be other teams, seeing how long this process is taking and wondering how Jimmy would fit into their own needs.  One of them is the emotionally compromised Cardinals, who just saw their own Dan Lozano-repped superstar shipped off to Anaheim.

In fact, that’s the main one.  The Brewers were asked to please to stop calling, leading us all to believe that Jimmy and Ruben were standing nearby, gazing whimsically into each other’s eyes.

But no!  Thanks to Albert Pujols’ millions of dollars, the Cardinals have the money and the need to find a shortstop who can do a thing.  With Reyes plucked by the Fish, that leaves our boy.  And as previously stated, it’s not like Lozano’s the kind of guy who doesn’t pick up the phone if somebody wants to talk about giving him money.

Yet, everybody left the Winter Meetings under the assumption that J-Roll was ready to be a Phillie again.  Whether competition gets him a better deal from the Phils or not remains to be seen, but hopefully everyone can go about this in a way that leaves all egos intact.

But at the end of the day, everybody’s got the motivation to get this thing done–Ruben needs a shortstop, Jimmy needs us to love him, and Dan Lozano needs money for back payments on hookers from 2003.