What made baseball fun this week: The Ballad of Joe Dirt…Girardi
By John Buhler
Joe Girardi embraces his inner Joe Dirt and hates that ump’s plate. Joey Votto owns that dumb troll and every else that made baseball fun this week.
We’re at the end of May and baseball is kind of fun right now. Except for the Philadelphia Phillies. They are most definitely not having themselves a good time. When you’re the worst team in the worst division in baseball at 15-29, you’re bound to have a bad time or 17.
Only the Phillies, the Miami Marlins, the San Diego Padres and the San Francisco Giants are more than 10 games back of the division lead. Those four teams in the National League have had a terrible spring, so why would their summer be any better? Surprise! Y’all are going to summer school. Teams like the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Colorado Rockies and the Washington Nationals are going to continue to own you because it’s just not your year.
Looking slightly ahead to what I’m going to try to talk about this week, if you don’t like the New York Yankees, which most of you don’t because you’re secretly super insecure and jealous of historical dominance, this is not going to be a fun ween in baseball for you. Besides having Bill Brasky in right field doing whatever he does, New York is owning baseball right now, so don’t you go cry about it or something.
This week will also be slightly NL Central centric. If you’re team has been around since the Rutherford B. Hayes administration, then you can stroke your hipster beard and ‘state combo to your liking forever, or until beards go “out of style”.
Pssh. I don’t want to play for the Yankees anyway. There’s not enough Dollar Shave Club sponsorship money for me to a razor to my face. I also don’t want to be recruited for the third installment of 23 Jump Street? So beard on, dudes and let’s see what made baseball fun this week.
The Ballad of Joe Dirt…Girardi
I’m dead serious about this: baseball needs more managers getting ejected. While the replay things are making sense in theory, when you grew up in Bobby Cox’s world, you know you NEED ejections to get through baseball season. There’s nothing quite like a 50-to-65-year-old former ball player yelling at a dude while basically wearing pajamas on a random Tuesday in San Diego.
Like R. Lee Ermey in the cinematic classic Saving Silverman, that ump was no good. If you toss a pitching coach all willy nilly and stuff, you better believe a skipper’s fuse is lit to get fired up. Yankees manager Joe Girardi had enough of that ump. So he put all the dirt in the world on that porcelain pentagon in the middle of Juicebox Park in the middle of Old People Country.
It’s like lights for bugs, like, you watch Girardi do the dirty work with the dirt and you end up quoting Christopher Walken in Joe Dirt! Clem was a good dude and the best janitor the bayou has ever seen. He might have had that mob connection, but he seemed like a swell dude from Kansas.
Just remember one thing, if you tell Joe Dirt Girardi that Def Leppard sucks, he’s gonna pour some dirt on your plate and then try to light you on fire because of Pyromania! The problem with that is Cowboy Wayne only like snakes and sparklers…
Joey Votto: Baseball’s on-deck troll slayer
Joey Votto never did anything wrong in his life, except 100 percent intentionally ruining your fantasy baseball season because you drafted him ninth in 2012 in your roto league and he got hurt. The truth hurts, man, and that’s why I don’t play fantasy baseball.
That being said, I would never a.) pay for tickets to be behind home plate because Chop Houses are the best houses when you’re just not ready to press the button and magically get a Rocket Mortgage. NO, Dan Gilbert I’m not paying you. You can’t un-diss LeBron, but he’ll still come home.
Any who. Some dudes with smart phones decided to troll Votto while he was in the Great American Ball Park on-deck circle. The phone guys said Votto “used to be good and what happened”. Votto flipped it around like in an Snapchat and said “you used to not be fat, what happened?”
Though he’s technically Canadian, props to Votto for calling those phone dudes out. He made them look pretty stupid. No, we didn’t need to see their face, as Votto is baseball’s No. 1 troll slayer. Like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, they were already dead the whole time and Votto just burnt them to a crisp. I hope he bats .600 the rest of the season. He earned it after that complete evisceration of those stupid phone dudes.
Kyle Schwarber should never hit leadoff again
You know what was a stupid idea? Making Kyle Schwarber hit leadoff. Congratulations, Cubs. You why you’re probably not going to win back-to-back World Serieses? It’s because you let Joe Maddon magically think it was cool to put Evan Gattis, 2.0 in the leadoff spot. How’d you think that was going to go?
After meticulously removing the particles from the lenses of his hipster frames, Maddon saw the sign and it opened up his eyes. Let’s just not bat Schwarber leadoff and see what happens. What happens is that he disemboweled whatever worthless offering Johnny Cueto of the Bay Area Giant Jokes and sent it to, I don’t know, Portugal.
Portugal is just Portuguese for Sheffield Avenue or something. We should be glad for the rest of the month that Schwarber overcame getting hurt all of last year and that dumb idea to make him hit leadoff by embarrassing Cueto in front of all Wrigleyville. This is why you don’t bat Gattis 2.0 leadoff EVER.
Jacoby Ellsbury made a heads up play, but then hurt his head…
Jacoby Ellsbury loves at least two things: playing baseball for money and getting hurt while playing baseball for money. He was incredible in college for the Oregon State Beavers and a promising player for the Boston Red Sox.
Then he went all Johnny Damon and took all the money that the Yankees could give him. Once the ink dried, he started falling apart. But the Yankees can rebuild him. They have the technology. While Ellsbury made a crazy cool catch that made the entire Bronx cheer for him and not boo him, the dude got a concussion while making a heads up play.
In a span of like two seconds all of Yankees Nation went through the entire emotional roller coaster of the Ellsbury contract. When he made that catch, Yankees Nation is kind of proud that a Steinbrenner signed him. Then he grabbed his noggin and then it was just kind of more of the same.
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“Not again” could have been said in many houses in the five boroughs. More proof of this is why helmets need to be worn at all times in life, as you never know when you’ll bang head making a catch in centerfield for the Yankees. It could happen, but no, it can’t because you trouble with the curve.