Je Deteste Carlos Zambrano

Like alot of other really hot guys, I’m in a fantasy baseball league. Besides making me even more attractive to potential employers, foreign women, and even myself, fantasy baseball has changed the way I see baseball. Long gone are my allegiances to what ordinary, hardworking Americans call “teams.” No, in particular since 2004—when the Boston Red Sox survived 58 hours in the bottom of a well, a plane crash followed by 72 days on an Andean mountaintop, and a really bad head cold to win the World Series—since that improbable and heroic series of events liberated me from years of hoping against hope, I’ve subverted any and all team allegiances to those concerning my great fantasy team, The Old Americans of the Sneeze League of, uh, the internet.

Well, the league-leading Old Americans suffered quite a blow yesterday as Carlos Zambrano, starting pitcher for second place fake-team Spy Kids (and, in “real life,” for the Chicago Cubs), pitched the sort of game where you don’t allow the other team to get a hit for the whole darn nine innings. Someone somewhere should come up with a pithier name for this feat—especially considering as the Red Sox do it like every 3 or 4 months these days—but, in the meantime, Zambrano’s hit-prevention, combined with his strikeout-getting, combined with his only-one-walk-throwing, gave this other team, Spy Kids, a very worrisome boost in the Sneeze League standings.

I followed Zambrano’s no-hitter (eureka, that’s a good word for it!) pretty closely via any number of media, including, but not limited to: MLB Game Day Audio, peer-to-peer video over the internets, word-of-mouth, carrier pigeon, and, at one point, smoke signal (although I later learned this was just an actual fire). With each passing Astro failure, I cursed Zambrano (which is actually an old Spanish word meaning “spazoid,” I found out) and his gritty grit and what even the prudest of sport’s commentators refer to as his “backdoor” slider. While I actually have sort of liked Zambrano in the past, and would probably really love him were he an SP for The Old Americans, he’s currently the persona with the non-est grata in Old America right now.

This is one problem. Problem number two, which I won’t get into, but which fits nicely with the Zambrano-sitch, concerns Mr. A.J. Burnett, SP for The Old Americans (and, ahem, the Toronto Blue Jays). I’ve just learned, via newswire, that Mr. Burnett will not be facing the Baltimore Orioles this week, as would have seemed logical given his throwing schedule, but will instead take an extry day of rest to face—dum dum dum—the Boston Red Sox. The Boston Red Sox, as you may or may not know, are not out of the woods yet in terms of qualifying for the baseball postseason, and so any Sox fan worth his low-back vowels will be cheering long and loud for a Sox victory. Nor will I be opposed to a Sox victory, as our league quite rightly has dismissed the Win as a meaningful assessment of a pitcher’s performance; however, I’d just as soon see Burnett strikeout every Sox batter for 8 innings, before leaving the game to let B.J. Ryan give up 3 consecutive grand slams. And even though it’s actually impossible to give up three of those in a row, I think you get what I’m saying.