Carlos and Larry discuss dinner plans (AP photo)
Fun at the ballpark doesn’t get any funner than this weekend. Sweet Lou Piniella apes his managerial heroes, tells Milton Bradley what he really thinks and suggests that Milton go home. Not go in the clubhouse, but change into civvies and go home mid-game. Which he does.
Next day, the Manager apologizes and Milton and Lou share some tearful man-love in a closed-door meeting (somewhere along the way, Lou lost his copy of the Billy Martin playbook).
Milton agrees to meet with the press, claims that he has no friends on the team, especially now that Gerald Perry and Joey Gaithright are gone. Clearly, someone found Milton a dog-eared copy of the Adolfo Phillips playbook (in a legendary TV moment, Cubby outfielder Phillips cried to Jack Brickhouse and, in broken English, ’splained that Tony Taylor, his only friend on the team, had been traded to Philly).
Left unsaid is that it’s always about Milton, who just happens to be the last guy to arrive for a game, the first one out the door afterwards. And that, most days, he’s not particularly approachable.
Pitching coach Larry Rothschild, who has become Lou’s Bobo, runs around telling people that it’s his job to find the ‘rat’ in the clubhouse.
Soriano (who misplayed balls all weekend, never fails to get a poor jump, and has now defaulted to playing deep and out of position), stood up for Bradley before the press. With Fukudome (who doesn’t speak English), the three of them compose the worst $200M no-trade-clause outfield that money can buy.
The beloved, orphaned one, Mark DeRosa, who got a standing O from Cub fans when he returned this year as a Cleveland Indian), was dealt from Cleveland to St. Louis.
Big Z. did a public reading (for the benefit of the press) of pitching coach Don Cooper’s major league record (one win, six losses) from the White Sox media guide, noting that Coop never pitched a no-hitter. Then the 4-3, self-proclaimed Cy Young-candidate Zambrano went out and had his usual emotional breakdown, threw a wild pitch on a suicide squeeze, hit the next batter, handed the ball to Lou, then looked for something to destroy in the dugout. He was restrained by the Bobo.
I listened to all of Sunday’s 6-0 fun while stuck in the traffic surrounding Chicago’s Gay Pride parade, which made for what the French call ’son et lumiere.’ Especial thanks to the women on the Vespa wearing matching Catholic-school-cum-grindhouse plaid skirts and knee-high fishnets.
