Jose to City: Drop Dead

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE HOT STOVE.

1. Jose has always thought that being a headline writer must be a wonderful job. Hell, it may even be the best $30,000 a year job in the world.

You get to take someone else’s work, something he struggled, sweat and perhaps even bled over if they are John Stossel covering pro wrestling, slap a label on it, which may or may not have anything to do with the piece, and then have many more people look at your work than the actual authors. Even better, you occasionally get to be incredibly clever and write a headline like the Boston Herald’s “Dr. Doom and Va-va-va-vroom” to describe the 1990 Massachusetts Democratic ticket of John Silber and Marjorie Claprood.

Perhaps the most famous American headline is the one penned by the New York Daily News’ William J. Brink on October 30, 1975 “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

Jose would like to pay tribute to this brilliant, and technically untrue headline (note: Ford never said it, though he did say “things are more like they are now than they’ve ever been”), by writing the following headline some time this year.

JOSE TO CITY: DROP DEAD

As you may have noticed, The Yankees laid out $400 million to just three players in the last few weeks.

In unrelated news, the Bronx Borrowers also recently requested “$259 million in tax-exempt bonds and $111 million in taxable bonds, on top of $940 million in tax-exempt bonds and $25 million in taxable bonds already granted for its $1.3 billion stadium” according to ESPN.com.

Wait a second. That seems incredibly related. The Yankees spend about $400 million on Teixeira, Burnett and Sabathia and suddenly they want $370 million in tax-exempt bonds. Huh. Funny that.

When New York City, where from what Jose understands many wealthy people live, is entering a financial crisis so grave the Mayor Judas Bloomberg, a former Red Sox fan, must, for the good of the people, overturn term limits, does it really make sense to give the Yankees another $370 million on top of the $900 million they already got?

Jose can understand why smaller cities, say Pittsburgh, might feel obliged to subsidize a team—that’s the only way they can have one. But New York? The Yankees were going to flee to Jersey? Sure…

So here’s the thing. At some point, it seems possible that New York City may once again need a bailout; after all, everyone else is getting one. So what will America say? Jose’s simple response echo’s Ford, DROP DEAD.

Get it from the Yankees. Get it from A-Rod or CC or AJ or anyone with initials and a contract worth north of $75 million.

It’s bad enough that the poor, and apparently, incredibly stupid, people of New York are subsidizing this scam, but keep Jose out of it.

Really, paying the Yankees to be in New York? It’s like paying Paris Hilton to be a whore. She’s going to do it anyway, why bother paying?

Cows, milk, free etc.

A message for our times?

2. Jose noticed that Mark McGwire got fewer votes for the Hall-of-Fame this year. Jose wonders if his stats final had anything to do with it. There was a question on the exam in which Jose had to calculate a Z score (note: which Jose knows has something to do with either Carlos or Victor Zambrano, but he forgets which) related to McGwire’s record setting 1998 season.

Of course, Jose couldn’t remember how to calculate a Z-score, so he just wrote down “Jose doesn’t want to focus on the past, he wants to do something positive for the future.”

It had mixed results. On the one hand, for some reason the teacher seemed to think that Jose could not calculate a Z-score and gave him a zero for the problem. On the other hand, Jose has not been indicted, unlike several classmates, who issued sworn affidavits that they could calculate Z-scores even though they couldn’t.


3. Before everyone gets al upset about the Yankees swiping Mark Teixeira from the Red Sox, can we take a minute to think about this linguistically? The first baseman’s name is pronounced Tesh-era.

Did anyone really want to have a Tesh Era in Boston? John Tesh is terrible. Not very good at all. Except for that old NBA music, that was pretty good. Seriously, Jose would rather sign a player named Yanniera. At lest Yanni has a Kevin Kennedy moustache.

I’m Jose Melendez’s, and those are my KEYS TO THE HOT STOVE.

Henry: Red Sox are not X-Factor

According to the Boston Globe the Red Sox will not "be a factor" in the bidding for Mark Teixeira. The Red Sox were long believed to be the favorites for the All-Star first baseman.

Jose isn't exactly sure how he feels about this. On the one hand, if it was really going to take $200 million to sign the guy, Jose is sort of happy to let him walk, at that kind of value he would be far too appealing a target for Somali pirates. (Note: Jose is pretty sure he stole that joke from someone, but he has no recollection of who.)

On the other hand, Jose was looking forward to Teixeira coming here, so he could finally get an explanation for how the hell the "X" in his name makes a "zh" sound.

Of course, this might all be nonsense, as Sox owner John W. Henry sent word by email. Maybe he was just really, really mad about how things were going so he wrote down an angry email, with no intention of sending it, but then accidentally clicked send. That seems at least as plausible as Texiera getting $200 million from Baltimore or Washington.

The other possibility is that the Yankees have suddenly jumped into the running. This would make sense. As usual the Yankees can exceed any cash offer the Red Sox might make. Also, unlike the Red Sox, the Yankees have an open Senate seat to offer.

Oh, Jose just though of one other possibility. Maybe the word "factor" in the statement is a clue. As Jose recalls, in the early days of the comic X-Factor, the original X-Men joined together and pretended to be a group of vigilantes called X-Factor that captured mutants. After they seized a mutant, they would secretly train him and take care of him. Maybe the Red Sox have a similar plan. They are going to pretend to be anti-Teixeira, and then will capture him and secretly train him to play catcher, thereby allowing Mike Lowell and Kevin Youkilis to remain on a team including Teixeira.

Come on, it's at leastas likely as the guy actually wanting to play in Baltimore.

Building Up an Immunity

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

1. Do we have to play the DRays?

Now?

This is not the right time for the Red Sox to go into Tampa. Jose is rooting for a weekend of rainouts. Wait the DRays play in a dome don’t they, so that will involve some holes being cut in the roof, but whatever it takes.

The Red Sox are playing great right now. They just took three of four on the road from an excellent Cleveland team. Manny, Lugo and Crisp are hitting. Papi is back. Lester, Mr. Matsu and St. Josh a Beckett all pitched beautifully. Why in God’s name would we play Tampa right now? Everything is great, we don’t need Tampa right now.

Playing Tampax Bay this weekend is like slurping antibiotics when you’re healthy. Tampax Bay and tuberculosis don’t share initials without good reason. In both cases, they more you attack them the stronger they get. If you take antibiotics when you don’t need them, when you actually do get tuberculosis, you’re screwed. Similarly, if you play Tampa when you don’t need to, you might find that you struggle when you play them later in the season after a four or five game losing streak.

Actually, never mind that’s crap. Tampax Bay is nothing like tuberculosis because they never get stronger no matter what.

Rather Tampax Bay, as the name suggests, is much more like a tampon. If you have one when you don’t need it, no harm done, but if you do need it to stop the bleeding after a few bad days, it’ll absolutely do the trick.

Okay, so Jose is pretty sure he used that line all the way back in 2004, but you know what. He doesn’t care. Why should he stop? It still works doesn’t it? Still gets the cheap laugh, right? The bottom line is that if the people of Tampax Bay want Jose to stop making tampon jokes, they should change the name of their city/region, or at least their “baseball team” to something that doesn’t make it so easy. For instance, if they changed the name of the team to the St. Petersburg Trojans, then Jose wouldn’t make tampon jokes anymore would he? No, then he’d say things like “playing the Trojans is a lot like using a Trojan, they both stop bad things from happening.”

2. After a great deal of thought, Jose has decided that he is completely in favor of the Red Sox acquiring Mark Teixeira, even if the costs are high.

There are a lot of reasons not to go after him. He’s been injured this year, Scott Boras is his agent and the Rangers are asking for a ton. But there are two big reasons to go after him. First, he’s a 30 home run, 130 RBI sort of guy with a pretty slick glove, which is nice. But far more importantly, his name can be phonetically broken down into Te-She-Ra, which is Spanish for “Your She-Ra.”

For all of his skills, Kevin Youkilis has never lent himself to anything much better than Jewish jokes, and Mike Lowell has peaked with missing testicle humor. Picking up Te She-Ra, by contrast, would open up an entire line of She-Ra/He-Man universe related references that have thus far been almost completely untapped by this humble feature.

A good fit for the 5 hole?

Consider the opportunities:

• During a prolonged slump, Te She-Ra, could be called “Princess of Power.”
• Jose always thought “By the Power of Grayskull was a reference to Terry Eurona’s head anyway.
• She-Ra’s arch enemy Hordak is an acronym for K A-Rod H. (Note: Jose’s got no idea what to do with that H.)
• Synergy as Te She-Ra and Man-E-Faces Ramirez go back to back it order
• She-Ra has a healing touch. David Ortiz could totally use that.

3. In encouraging news Curt Euro pitched five scoreless innings for the Paw Sox as they battled Maxwell Klinger’s beloved Toledo Mudhens. The successful rehab start came even as Euro generated more controversy with a scathing attack on steroid users in a conversation with Bob Costas. Euro suggested that user Rafael Palmeiro should be stripped of his 3,000th hit and that Jose Canseco should be required to return his MVP award.

But the timing could not have been worse for Euro. The news came on the same day the Boston Globe did a feature on his life as an online gamer, including a photo of a curiously buff Euro in the game Everquest. Canseco used the opportunity to attack the Sox pitcher’s credibility.

“Curt Schilling (sic) is a liar and hypocrite,” said Canseco. “I admit that I used steroids. But when is he going to admit that his Everquest character is digitally enhanced. I have never used a computer to increase my skills or improve my physique. Can he say the same?”

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