Whoops

Poor Joe. Poor, poor Joe. He has to have surgery after a whole lot of stinking like warm Limburger which, not coincidentally, was accompanied by a whole lot of elbow pain, then he misses a season and a half before he finally gets to pitch again and he's okay but not great in his first start, which involved a scary number of walks, and then...

...and then he goes out there for his second start and he looks a lot like the Joe Mays who went to the All-Star Game before the sucking and the surgery, and he pitches seven innings, giving up one run on one lone not-so-hot pitch, walking none, and he's only thrown 72 pitches, and he's just gotta be thinking 'complete game!', and sure it's tied at 1-1 but all he has to do is hang on a little longer and the Twins will score and he'll get his first win since the Reagan administration.

They pulled him, Dear Readers. They did. I do not know why.

They pulled him and they put in JC Romero, whose name when spoken in my home gains several syllables the FCC won't allow on prime time, but who to be fair had pitched pretty darn well so far this season, and JC gets up there and he gets himself a groundout, and I start to relax a little, even though I really should know better.

The groundout is followed by a single, which is followed by a popout, and there are two outs and a runner on first and I am not grinding my teeth because the inning is nearly over and it's all going to work out. But the popout is followed by an error at third, which is followed by some heated aspersions being cast on Cudderror's ancestry, which is followed by the top of JC's head blowing off, only no one knows it because he was wearing a titanium cap and the smoke doesn't start seeping out around the edges until it's far too late.

Deprived of a cranium, JC walks the bases loaded, which occasions much cursing and the throwing of couch pillows at the television and the fleeing of the cats who had been sleeping on those pillows, and then...

...and then Travis Hafner crowds the plate a little bit and JC forgets that the bases are loaded on account of his brain being splattered across the inside of his titanium cap, so he beans Hafner and the tie-breaking run comes in for the wrong team and certain aspersions are cast on JC's ancestry, too, and that's that except for the Twins going down 1-2-3 in the top of the ninth to a guy with an ERA over 10.00.

Poor Joe. There's only one thing he can do now: take a page out of Koskie's book and pull some really horrible practical jokes on JC Romero. Something involving Nair, I think.