Welcome Back...

It's fitting, and not just mere coincidence, that my post tonight coincides with the return of George Sherrill to his rightful home with the M's. What's really shocking, though, is that it (at least briefly) comes at Joel Piniero's expense. I'm still baffled by the M's fixation with Thornton (amongst others, too, of course). But if Thornton and Sherrill have to sit next to each other in the bullpen, I suppose I'm OK with that.

Okay, so I "typed" (in Palm graffitti) the above paragraph last night around 1:00 a.m. and had a lot more ready to post. Unfortunately, Blogger had me log in again, and it didn't save my draft. I tried hitting my "back" arrow a couple of times, and that's all I was able to copy/paste into Blogger and save as a draft before my PDA phone threw a "Fatal Exception" screen and forced me to reset. Uggh. I don't know what I hate worse -- Blogger or Palm OS.

Anyway, now back to the meaningful content. I'll try to regurgitate what my brain was churning out rather than attempting to sleep at the wee hours of this morning.

So they're sending Joel down to work with Chaves for a few games. He won't be starting, evidently, but that seems a bit strange. I'm very concerned, actually -- is his injury cropping back up again? That's all we need is to lose another starting pitcher! For one thing, the team feels like they need to separate Moyer and Sele, especially so they don't face the same team in a series. That's probably a good thing. However, it appears that out of a true need for starting pitching, we're converting Mateo into a starter. I'm not so sure that's a good decision. He doesn't appear to me to have the stuff to fool batters more than once or twice in a game. If he makes it through one quality start, I'd be very surprised. Don't get me wrong, I do believe he's a very solid pitcher. I just believe that he's in the best role he could possibly be, and that he's actually much more valuable to the team in that long righty relief role. Especially when we have Sele, Franklin and Moyer as 3/5ths of our starting rotation.

I'm still quite baffled by the decision to keep Campillo in Tacoma. Don't get me wrong -- I'm very excited that Sherrill is up here, and I'm not going to complain about that in the least bit. What I am going to complain about, though, is Aaron Sele still being on this roster. Of course, they could've just replaced Piniero with Campillo, and left Sele in the rotation (instead of the Mateo experiment). But that doesn't solve their desire to have Sele and Moyer's starts be spread further apart. Especially since Campillo is really a cross between the two pitchers (though much more like the Moyer of a few years back than Sele). So, I can see them taking their chances with Mateo in the rotation. I'm just not so sure that subtracting a reliable long reliever is the best approach. It's really going to hurt this team, I suspect.

One other thing that was eaten by the technical difficulties I was having at 1 a.m. this morning was a discussion of my interest in baseball. Thanks to Munchausen's ideology paper (and several subsequent e-mail discussions off the record), my eyes have been opened at how much baseball was controlling my life, in an unhealthy way. My interest in baseball since then has obviously waned. I'm much more able to make the decision not to watch a game than I was last year. Of course, it also helps that the M's are very tough to watch right now (I say this in spite of having taken two of three from Boston this weekend). Even though I've been able to decapitate dandelions several times instead of watching games recently, I'm still a huge fan of the game, and likely always will be. Munchausen has gone much more cold turkey than I have, hence the absence of a recent post from him.

With that stated, I haven't totally made up my mind what will happen with this blog. It's obvious from the comments in the last thread that there is support for my writing to continue. I really appreciate the encouragement! I'm considering a few options, but unlike Corco, though, I won't completely kill this blog without saying a final farewell ;-) I will most certainly keep you all posted.