Antibiotic Resistant Baseball

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

1. DJ Dru is not a problem.

He’s not. Sure he’s batting .262 with 6 HR and 45 RBI on August 21, but he is not a problem.

No, he is THE problem.

Everything going wrong with the Red Sox is DJ Dru’s fault. The lack of scoring? Dru’s fault. Mediocre right field defense? Dru. Papi’s torn meniscus? Dru’s fault. Somehow. Rococo Crisp getting hit by a moose? Dru was probably in the costume. It’s all his fault.

Imagine the Red Sox right fielder, for a moment, as an antibiotic. Dru was signed to his prodigious contract because the old right fielder, Mosey Nixon, was basically amoxicillin. Sure he was terrific back in the day, a nice moderate spectrum right fielder, who did a lot of things, but not everything, well, but he had become completely useless due to overuse and adaptation by his adversaries. So what did the Red Sox do? In the words of Hubert Lewis, they wanted a new drug. So with old, inexpensive Amoxicillin Nixon rendered all but useless, they chose to throw a lot of money at the expensive new broad spectrum antibiotic, the ciprofloxacin that is DJ Dru. He was supposed to be far more effective, good at everything, and damn it all if he was so expensive that insurance wouldn’t cover him.

So we swallowed hard and took our cipro exactly is directed. We only used it at designated times; we were so careful. And then… it didn’t work. Despite all of the expense and the side effects, the so-called five tool antibiotic didn’t get the job done. DJ Dru didn’t hit for power or average, he didn’t steal bases and he didn’t do particularly good work with the glove. Jose supposes his throwing arm has been fine. So where does that leave us? That leaves us with cipro effectively treating our most minor problem a metaphorical urinary tract infection but leaving our pneumonia, syphilis, septicemias, legionellosis and atypical lycobacterioses, all robust and expansive. In other words, it leaves us completely f*cked.

DJ Dru, like cipro was brought in to address a whole host of nasty problems, yet he has solved almost none of them. We get no power from our right fielder, we get no five hitter, we get no big hits, we get ho hum defense. And when a team, when a body, is giving so much and getting so painfully little, things can deteriorate quickly.

So what do we do? Do we try another cycle of cipro and hope to God it works or do we cut our losses and shell out a ton of money for vancomycin the antibiotic of last resort, which will cost a ton, and will probably work, but still might not? (Note: Not that Jose knows who that would be. Andruw Jones?)

Medicine, they say, is as much an art as a science, and so too, it appears, is player evaluation. All of those statistics, all of those numbers said Dru would flourish in Boston, despite what former fans and managers had said about him. But in the grinding art of player procurement, that small chance of morbidity is still infused with painful statistical significance.

2. As long as we’re talking about bacterial infections, Jose would like to commend SoSHer pedros hairstylist for coining the term Gagnerrhea, a wonderful way of describing painful and embarrassing condition that has been Eric Gagne’s Red Sox career thus far. Jose plans on appropriating this outright and is preparing a whole routine of STD related nicknames. So far he’s got Claymydia Buchholz (note: because when he’s going it feels like he’s on fire), Joba(cterial vaginosis) Chamberlain (note: absolutely filthy) and of course Nongonoccal Urethritis Clemens.

3. Not only have the good people of Red Sox Nation lost all the glory that was Wily Mo, they have lost access to his myspace page as well. The Nationals slugger set his myspace page to private after sources including Jose and later the harpies at the Herald’s Inside Track posted the address.

Of course, Jose wasn’t the first to post it. No blogger Dan Lamothe of Redsoxmonster found it a good few weeks before Jose and the Track and then wrote a smarmy little letter to the harpies accosting them for failing to cite him.

It is exactly these kind of petty, self-promotional nonsense that Jose… applauds and commends. Time and time again Jose has gotten what the PR pros call “earned media” by sending snippy little letters to people who have in even the vaguest and most unrelated way used an idea that sort of resembles his. Remember Jose getting in Eric (K)neel’s ESPN column by complaining like Paul O’Neil after a call third strike down the heart of the plate about the use of the term “Balki Arroyo.” You see, in the internet, as in baseball, petulance pays.

Ergo, in order to simplify further complaints, Jose is going to offer a few phrases that he considers proprietary even though he has no trademark whatsoever, makes no money from this blog and doesn’t really care.

• It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.
• I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.
• Curt Euro.
• Rococo Crisp
• J.D. Drew is the worst free agent acquisition since Matt Young. No check that, he’s the worst free agent acquisition ever. He has no power, he doesn’t hit for average, his defense is worse than advertised and he eats like a pig. He probably smells bad too.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.