Carlos Beltran is no longer in the running for the division’s best center fielder, because Carlos Beltran is no longer a center fielder.  As the story goes, Carlos decided his bat was really the only important thing when it came to his contributions, and he could still use it while playing right field and not having to move around so much.  Slap-happy Terry Collins agreed with the idea, and the next you knew, the Mets started their next Spring Training Game against the Nationals with Carlos in right and Angel Pagan in center.

Radical changes like this could be the antidote for the Mets’ baseball poison they’ve been guzzling for several years, so you almost want to give Carlos props for bringing the issue up himself.

“He’s one of the best center fielders out there and I want to try to be like him,” Pagan announced after the switch had been made.  He would go on to lose a fly ball in the sun and allow a triple and the game’s first run in the first inning. (more…)

I mean, damn.  The guy comes to work with a hatchet murderer’s beard and seems to get a hit for every time someone says he looks like he just got back from another successful human organ harvest. (People say that all the time, you just have to travel in the right circles).

But free agency is going to hit this man like a truck.

A truck specializing in the collection of magic star poopers.

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But they can’t get the equipment down from the northern cities because the snow just won’t let them. The Phillies’ trucks were supposed to leave this morning, and I’m sure they are planning to at least try, but a lot of this snow is now black-and-mucus-colored from the attempts of motorists to try and plow right through it without the aid of a… plow.

Heh, heh, heh. You ain't goin' nowhere, pal.

You ever see a panicked hamster run way too hard in his wheel, thinking somehow, it’s getting him further and further away from his cage, when in reality we know he’s not going anywhere until the end of the world or he blows his tiny hamster brains out?

So, it looks like this is the year the equipment just doesn’t come.  Instead of baseballs we’ll use snow and instead of bats we’ll use bare fists.  It will be a return to a simpler time, when the winter meant staying warm by the fire and praying to god that you weren’t the next one on the wagon train to contract hypothermia and/or gangrene and get one of your limbs cut off with the same meat cleaver they used to slaughter the last of the oxen.

Good luck, Phillies equipment truck driver.

Hey, the Braves are offering a deal to Johnny Damon!  Great.  Now the Yankees are bleeding into our division, too. Damon wants a two year deal, but the Braves have offered him one for one year, and because Damon’s agent is the adorable Scott Boras, he may be advised to etch a crudely drawn middle finger on the deal and send it right on back. This would leave him as prime meat for the Rays, another team looking to court the 36-year-old.

So this lion is technically a "sucker," killing her own zebra.

If he did wind up in Atlanta, he’d be batting leadoff, and more than likely show up to wreak havoc for the Phillies as he did in some World Series some time.  The respite here would be the Braves lineup isn’t nearly as powerful as the Yankees, so its more possible that Damon would be writing checks the eight guys behind him can’t cash.  Hopefully.

And Carlos Beltran might retire if he doesn’t get the sweet deal from the Mets that he wants, but honestly, is anybody even reporting on the Mets anymore?

The last two headlines on CNN.com are “Snowfall to ease for blizzard-weary mid-Atlantic region” and “Kenya rounds up zebras for starving lions.”  What I would give, eat, or kill to be a lion right now, in the boiling hot African sun, having god damn zebra meat brought to me. By humans. Damn it.

UPDATE: And then I would eat the humans.

And lastly, get that shit out of here.