As anybody can tell, it's been just about a complete and total group effort for the team's abysmal failures thus far. The blame is too diffuse to do any good. You saw me on Saturday, I was too scrambled with the misery to keep a coherent train of thought. Everything looks bad, so we're just spinning our wheels here and any complaint will seem valid but ultimately futile. There are too many elephants to eat, regardless of how many bites we start off with. So what I propose instead is that we just narrow our focus and blame to one individual. We need a scapegoat.
Okay, I know a lot of you want Clint Hurdle's blood, a few wouldn't mind Dan O'Dowd or the Monforts, or players like Jorge de la Rosa or Yorvit Torrealba, but that's not how scapegoats work. It's got to be somebody who we can blame for all the team's failures so the guys who really are failing (everybody else) can feel better about themselves and then get back on track. In other words, it's got to be somebody relatively blameless for this season. Aaron Cook? What are you kidding? We can't give up our best guy. Jason Hirsh is relatively blameless, I mean he hasn't even played this season, but then the Rockies -who let's face it- have had some religious issues in the past, might not want to deal with the ramifications of blaming the Jewish guy. So Hirsh is definitely out.
Spilly? I probably ruined that possibility myself last year when I thought he was Jewish too, but it turns out he's just Belgian. Let's just not go there, because it's sort of embarrassing for me and besides, he's our second best player right now. Really, we need all the help we can get.
Okay, so by my count, that leaves us four candidates for a worthy scapegoat. All are young, pretty decent but not spectacularly enough where they're too valuable to exclude themselves from consideration for bearing the burden of the team's miserable play in 2008:
- Chris Iannetta
- Ian Stewart
- Seth Smith
- Taylor Buchholz
I'm going to put their names in a hat, and draw one out for the Official Purple Row Scapegoat of the Week. If anything goes wrong with the team, it's that guy's fault. Yorvit Torrealba GIDP's, you blame the scapegoat. Glendon Rusch gives up two three run bombs in the first inning, you blame the scapegoat.
Everybody clear on this? Good, I feel much better about the team already. I'll have the name of the OPRSW by tonight's game thread, so if there are any objections to the candidates, come up with them quick.