Dear Fantasy-Baseball Expert:
As a loyal fan of the Detroit Tigers, I must know: how will Pudge fare in Comerica Park? Also, will our young pitching staff get a boost under his tutelage? Bonderman will only lose, what, like fifteen games this year? Will Matt Anderson make the twenty-five-man, or be reduced to paying off hookers in Toledo?
W/R/T Peter Gammons: yes, he is wonderful. But nobody is more worthy of a man-crush than his partner, Harold Reynolds. Harold fills out the ESPN standard-issue four-button suit coat quite well, thank you very much. No fool; he plays the celebrity softball tournament to win.
Take that, Mark McGrath!
—Iain Cartwright
Someone got bit by the curious bug, didn’t he?
How Pudge fares in Comerica Park really depends on only one person: Pudge himself. Well, two people, I guess: Pudge and his steroid provider.
If Pudge begins to use steroids, and the steroids have a muscle-building effect rather than a death-inducing effect, then he will hit better. If Pudge follows his own trend of never taking steroids or showing interest in taking steroids, then there is no way he can have as good of a season as last year. Allow me to explain.
In the past few nights (while quite drunk, mind you), I have been collecting arbitrary numbers from I-Rod’s career. Numbers such as:
Hit by Pitch, 1994: 7
Ground into Double Play, 2001: 158
Groundball-to-Flyball Ratio, 1991: 1.78
The above stats, along with a few others chosen at random from the back of his baseball card, were used. After developing a system of multiplication, subtraction, adding, and multiplication again, I have made an Excel spreadsheet charting how his season will unfold this year. His Arbitrary Statistical-Changeling-Inducing Numeral Quantity? 428.
That might seem like a lot, but not when you consider his ASCINQ last year was 928. And this sure ain’t golf, pal.
As to your other Tigers-related questions, let me answer them all with either a “Resounding yes!” or “No, (gasp!) are you insane?”
On to your manly affections toward H.R.: He may be able to leg out a double on MTV’s Rock ’N Jock, but Gammons got jowls.
If I have to choose between heart, charisma, personality, and knowledge on one side or jowls on the other, jowls wins hands down. Every time.
Dear Writer,
About that Expos dig in your McSweeney’s article: lame. Really, really lame.
Wait for the Expos to surprise everyone yet again …
Put any city through what we have gone through in the last decade and they would draw even less than us …
You should be ashamed of yourself …
Paul Berry
Montreal, Canada
The first, easiest, last, and greatest written cutdown will focus on your inability to finish a sentence: you, sir, are a shame to the Canadian educational system!
The period does not care about your race, your religion, or your baseball affiliations. He’ll love you just the same. All he asks is that you use him wisely and frequently, mostly when finishing sentences.
Note: Looking at the Expos record this season, I feel it would be wrong to discuss trivial matters such as wins and losses, rubbing salt in that wound you have by being an Expos fan. Keep fighting the good fight, my Brother to the North!
If the Cubs go 161-1, how can the Cardinals ever get twenty games up on them in the standings? Just wondering …
—Jason Lovelace
After assembling a small team of quantum mathematicians to conduct the necessary logarithmic research and analysis in order to answer your thoughtful query in terminology easily understandable, they have crunched the numbers and carried the one to conclude that the party asking such a question (Mr. Lovelace, in this instance) is indeed one clever douche bag.
The staff has also learned that according to a known Internet porn-name generator, your new adult moniker is Doctor Nekkid, D.D.S. Go get ’em, tiger!