Elegy for Juice Box
Oh, beady-eyed ogre in Yankee stripes,
How long must I shame-facedly applaud
The sheepish clod among the juicer types?
How long forgive your jerky swing, so flawed?
It’s been three seasons’ parts you’ve fouled my team
With greaseball hair, a vacant stare, and pair
of shrivelled balls. Have I for you such esteem
That I from you can not myself unsnare?
No more! Today I send you on your way,
Take your tattoos and phony bone spurs too.
I do not care to wait for Selig’s say
About your future in a league review.
I’ll miss your homers, but I shed no tear;
I hate you now with conscience clean and clear.
Time for another 30 scale test run.
LaRoche has always been one of my least favorite baseball players— he’s one of these slow league-average lunks who play the game with absolutely no style or joy, the sort of guy who goes to bars every night to drink scotch and sodas and play Golden Tee. Throw in a genuinely mean sense of humor, a bar fight or two and a media diet that consists solely of WEEI and ESPN and that’s what I always assumed who Adam LaRoche was. Basically, your typical asshole, uncreative white guy.
Adam LaRoche is not white: 2 points
In fact, he’s 100% Mexican. His father changed the family name from Garcia to LaRoche when Adam was in middle school. Being secretly ethnic, as Johnny Damon and Tim Lincecum prove, gets you points on the 30 scale.
Using ADD as an excuse for plays in which you did not hustle: 4 points
From Wikipedia:
LaRoche was heavily criticized for a lackadaisical error he committed in a game on May 14, 2006.[citation needed] He shuffled to first base so slowly on a routine groundball he had easily fielded, that Washington Nationals baserunner Nick Johnson was able to beat him to the bag. LaRoche had turned his back to the play and was unaware that the runner had sped up. He was already moving towards the dugout when he saw the runner called safe, much to his disbelief. It should have been the third out of the inning, but instead the inning continued with four runs eventually scoring. The normally docile Atlanta crowd booed LaRoche for the rest of the game and the blunder was replayed repeatedly by local Atlanta media. Manager Bobby Cox even benched LaRoche for some of the next game as punishment. This incident is said to reflect LaRoche’s struggles with Attention Deficit Disorder.
Appearing in hunting videos with Ryan Langerhans: -4 points
terrible.
Being really really ugly: -1 point
I can’t explain why being Julian Tavarez ugly nets a player 2 points but being Adam LaRoche ugly makes you lose a point. There’s just a type of ugly that’s more fun to look at then Adam’s type of ugly, which is an uninspired ugly. Sam Cassell, Gheorge Muresan and Popeye Jones fall into the Tavarez category, but Marco Jaric goes into the LaRoche.
——
He doesn’t get points for anything else, which, in itself, should put him in the negatives. In a league filled with a lot of stiff, bland guys, he is the stiffest and blandest. Only Brett Myers was more boring and joyless. Then Brett went and punched his wife and dragged her around by her hair on Landsdowne Street and suddenly wasn’t so boring anymore.
FINAL VERDICT: 1 point
This blog has turned into a wasteland of broken promises, but to quote the man himself, Rickey need an assessment on the 30 scale too see where Rickey number end up. Rickey speech was very wonderful today, one certainly worthy of one of the greatest player of all time and one of the highest projected 30 scale scorer of all the time.
So, as a teaser, here a start to Rickey’s 30 scale assault, starting with his Coopertown induction speech.
A Cooperstown induction speech can really boost a guy’s total score up by 1 to 2 points. Rickey got 2 points for the following reasons.
Speaking robotically because it was the only way Rickey could tame the inner Rickey:
Really, it was like watching an alcoholic at Thanksgiving slowly and mechanically slug down glass after glass of cranberry juice.
His two story about being bribed to play baseball:
Glazed donuts and hot chocolate was an OK one but the story about being paid a quarter for every base hit, stolen base and run scored and the fact that he could still remember that he had 33 stolen bases in 10 games vaulted him into a new category.
Seeming sheepish about proclaiming himself the greatest base stealer of all-time and coming up with the Muhammed Ali reason:
This hurt him a bit. Rickey don’t need to apologize for telling the truth.
All white suit
it should be clear how I feel about this.
Refusing to use any plural words, including the names of baseball teams.
In the course of his speech, he talked about his career playing for the Yankee, the Mariner, the Padre and the A. He also said he loved all three of his daughter.
Telling Billy Martin that he misses him.
got a bit choked up there thinking about how beautiful a conversation between those two men must have been.
______
Jim Rice, by the way, lost a point with his speech. It was kind of terrible.
In other news, I still love Harold Reynolds. Everything that’s wrong with ESPN can be explained by what left with HR. During his interview w/ Rickey, he said, “Man, I remember when I’d hold you on second base and you’d say to me, ‘I’m going, you can’t stop me,’ and I’d think, ‘man, I wish I could say that to somebody,’ but I couldn’t cause it wasn’t true…”
Nobody other than HR could say that and not sound like a falsely modest blowhard. If someone said that on Baseball Tonight (which would never happen), it would be followed by thirteen red-faced stupid fake-laughs.
this is also LaRoche. Shot right after he and brother Andy starred in “2 LaRoches, 1 Buck.” Don’t worry, the shit on his face is just chocolate pudding that was squeezed out of brother Andy’s anal cavity.
Adam LaRoche, the new ugliest Red Sock. In a rare show of self-esteem, Youkilis just shaved off his snatch-beard. Julian Tavarez is shaking a long finger from the grave, saying, “You may be ugly LaRoche, but you’re not me. Remember that.”
this is Pedroia’s wife. My boy Sully is taking a finance class with her over at Bentley. She drives a Passat with a ski rack and still drinks Long Islands.
