Friday, April 11, 2014

PINE TAR, PORNOGRAPHY, AND PINEDA: A NEW PARADIGM FOR PIFFLE

Buzzy the fly (who knows how to carpet-bomb an email account better than any measly two-eyed hacker) sent us a strange but interesting note passed between several well-known (but who-shall-remain-semi-nameless) muckety-mucks in MLB after the galvanizing game between the Red Sox and Yankees last night:


Gotta hand it to Buzzy: his ability to transmit and receive while flying such elaborately evasive routes (both in real time and in cyberspace...) is nothing short of astonishing.

So what about it? Spelling errors aside (and believe us when we tell you that this is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to such matters...grammar and syntax? Ha!), there's something bracing in the idea that the Yankees and Red Sox would face off more times during the regular season.

What else would serve the high-parochial East Coast shoulder-chipness now that El Mamon (the notorious porn ring that had locked up the Internet sex trade from south Philly to the Hamptons...) has been given its walking papers? After all, we are not competing for people's hearts and minds any more, now, are we? No, we grind out dollars these days by going for the groin...

So, thus. How to get a bunch more games between the dirty Yanks and the filthy Sox? Simple. Exempt 'em from interleague play, with the exception of one (1) home-on-home rivalry. For the Yanks, it would  be the Mets. For the Red Sox, you could (as some have been known to say, under a particular form of duress...) "rotate."

This gets you fourteen (14) more games between the gilded Gold Dust Twins of the Grand Old Game. A baker's dozen (plus a drummer) for the type of Grand Guignol that makes cable stations and their ratings simply explode. (We'll leave the "squealing with orgasmic delight" to those who measure their lives by the OMG-meter.)

And after last night's game, in which Michael Pineda created a stir of passion built around a series of semi-pornographic images of a sticky substance (purported to be pine tar) exuding from his pitching hand--OMG, thank the Lord that it wasn't visible on any other appendage!!--it's clear that when it comes to the Yanks and the Sox, there's no such thing as too much foreplay.

Yep, that's right...they have a
Bobble-Head™ for everything...
Pineda, the embattled young righty whose career has been on hold for two years after arriving in NYC in exchange for Jesus (Montero, that is...not the crazy bowler in The Big Lebowski), looked great last night--if you could keep your prurient eyes off his pitching hand, that is. Finally, someone apparently prevailed upon him to wash that hand, and that was good for a couple of innings worth of additional blather, during which time he became somewhat more hittable.

We'd like to ruminate a bit more on why pine tar is such a lurid topic...on how it has, rather improbably, taken hold of the prurient imagination in baseball over rival substances with so much seemingly greater potential for this role (such as K-Y jelly), but it will probably lead only to other random conundra such as: beta vs. VHS, J-Lo vs. Christina, E. Howard Hunt vs. G. Gordon Liddy, ex-Lax™ vs. high colonics (just to return to the original "region of inquiry"). The mind is alternately a swamp and a mine field, and neither a candy mint nor a breath mint will come close to restoring it to anything remotely resembling freshness.

But let's return to the ostensible subject of that email, shall we? Purists (assuming they haven't already been rounded up and stashed inside a Zip-Lock® compound somewhere...) will argue that such an expanded rivalry will fatally unbalance the schedule. Our reply to that is that they obviously haven't taken a good look at the schedule lately. But the good news is that by dispersing interleague play across the entire schedule, it becomes easier to simply toss in extra "Gold Dust Twin" games like so many additional croutons in a salad.

So--32 games? Hell, why not. Just imagine the scandal if, in one of those expansive years, one of these teams just goes bonkers on the other one and runs up a 26-6 in-season record. Since it is now officially a world where size matters, such an epic performance would become the stuff of instant legend, and would allow the high-parochials to amuse themselves to death at each other's expense.

Perhaps this--along with those metal detectors--can be the last, loopy legacy of Budzilla's reign of berserkitude over beisbol.

Though Buzzy insists that he'll soon turn up definitive evidence that the Pooh-bah of Piffle™ is the kingpin in a holding company that has locked up the entire supply of pine tar known to man. (All the better to grease a slippery slope, no doubt.) Let's all send Bud a copy of Monopoly® as his retirement gift, shall we??