I think it’s great that more and more ballplayers are taking the opportunity in this age of the blog to communicate on a more direct level with their fans. Apparently, it also gives the fans an opportunity to kiss as much ballplayer ass as they possibly can. Cubs second baseman Mark DeRosa’s fans are something straight out of a Carrie Muskat Mailbag. The highlights are below:
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Today’s matchup of goofy-looking pitchers ended with Sean Gallagher besting Tom Gorzelanny as the Cubs cruised to a 7-4 victory. Who will win in the Fukudome, though?

Gallagher

Gorzellany

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Did anyone catch my press conference before Wednesday’s game? It was pretty awesome, if I do say so myself. Someone asked me if I thought the signing of Jim Edmonds was a low-risk, possibly high-reward transaction. I laughed and said, “Whatever Jim says,” to the delight of the entire room. I still got it. Anyhow, here’s your Roundup.
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Congratulations, Jim Edmonds! You haven’t played a single game as a Chicago Cub. You haven’t pissed and moaned about a single called third strike in blue pinstripes. You haven’t taken a circuitous route and a completely unnecessary dive to catch a single fly ball as a home player in front of the Wrigley ivy. You haven’t molested a single Chicago-born dog. Yet you have accomplished the unthinkable. You have forced a two-way tie at the top of my list of the Bottom 126 Cubs of My Time.
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We here at Hire Jim Essian! like our holidays. Just in the past month we’ve had Daryle Ward Day and Lee Elia Day. We’ve also celebrated Dusty Baker Week and even Armenian Appreciation Day.

So it’s only fitting that we take time to honor a man who will take to the hill later today after becoming only the 8th player in the last 117 years to register 350 wins.

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The nice thing about having some time off of work and spending it with my daughter is getting to take her to her grandparents’ house in the suburbs. This is nice for me, because my parents are still old-time news consumers and, thus, I get a chance to catch up on the three major dailies.

The bad thing about this is that one of those dailies happens to be the Sun-Times, home of the largest collection of clueless, aimless columnists that ever existed in one newspaper at one time.

Ladies and gentleman, today I present to you the lunatic ravings of one Greg Couch.

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It’s been a while since we’ve done a Photoshop, and Thrillho found a great picture of HJE Whipping Boy, Ryan Dempster, so have at it.

If the Cubs do end up signing Jim Edmonds today, as the rumors suggest will happen, there is one (and ONLY one) good thing that will come of the signing. Because of the Edmonds rumors, RV directed me to this gold mine, a St. Louis Magazine article about Edmonds’ restaurant. If you dipped a Muskat Mailbag in chocolate-flavored gold, shaped it like boobs, and served it off a $1,000 bill pulled from Megan Fox’s underpants, it wouldn’t be as good as this article. So, here we go:
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Making the decisions of when to hit-and-run, when to pull a struggling pitcher, and how to construct a lineup aren’t easy, and those decisions are the ones for which MLB managers get paid the big bucks. The actual process of managing, though, isn’t hard. Put nine guys in a lineup in some kind of order. Try to have a pitcher in there somewhere. Make sure the guy who bats ninth in the lineup always bats right after the guy who hits eighth in the lineup, even if you’ve switched the guys around. Not hard at all, really.
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If you thought Daryle Ward’s big weekend was going to go unnoticed at Hire Jim Essian, well, you’re just not reading closely enough. In honor of the big lug’s single-handed dismantling of the “Best Team in Baseball,” today is officially Daryle Ward Day at HJE. Daryle has been putting together good at-bats all year, and this weekend it finally paid off. How about this line for the weekend?

2-2, 1 2B, 3 RBI.

Ward’s batting average went up 72 points over the weekend, and he’s hit safely in the last three games in which he’s appeared. His OBP is at .406, and his OPS is back up to a more Ward-like .823. Welcome back, Daryle. In honor of DWD, I’m eating a giant burrito for lunch.