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Cuddyer? I Barely Even Cud-Know Her!

Ah, spring is in the air. And that can only mean one thing.

No, not ‘love‘, ya doe-eyed mushbrain!

It means that it’s one of the two brief magical times of year when the grand sports of baseball and college basketball overlap. Sure, I love football as much as the next guy. And hockey’s fine, and golf’s okay, and holy frostbitten knees, wasn’t that Olympic curling just riveting?

(Answer: No, not so much. I’d sooner scan sumo matches for ‘wardrobe malfunctions’ than sit through another nine hours of ‘Shuffleboard on Ice’. But that’s just me. No Canadian blood, you see.

Not on the inside, anyway.)

My true sporting loves, though, are baseball and college hoops. And when they’re both in full swing and relevant (read: when my favorite team hasn’t tanked their way out of contention yet), it’s truly a magical time. There’s nothing quite so satisfying as filling out a ‘March Madness’ bracket on the same day you draft a fantasy baseball team.

(Where ‘nothing quite so satisfying as’ may be replaced at your discretion with:

• ‘nothing quite so pointless as’
• ‘nothing that screams GEEK! quite like’
• ‘nothing quite so… you’re just throwing your money away, you dumbass — Syracuse’ll never beat LSU in the second round, and who the hell drafts Julio Lugo to start at shortstop? Idiot.’)

Wishful thinking and poor draft strategy aside, though, the last two weeks of March are always a party. It doesn’t hurt that St. Patty’s Day is often stuffed into the first March Madness weekend, either. We’re gonna be cramming beer and bar food down our throats anyway; why not let the Irish take credit for a day? It’s all good.

“Our pocket protectors and taped-up Coke bottle glasses positively shudder in anticipation.”

The toughest thing about this time of year is coming up with yet another flimsy-but-plausible excuse to duck out of work during the first weekend of the basketball tourney. The games start on Thursday, but the weekend doesn’t kick off until Saturday. That’s definitely poor planning on someone’s part. I blame the ancient Sumerians, for coming up with a seven-day week in the first place. What, they never heard of metric? Lousy fricking Sumerians.

This year, I’ll have to be more creative than usual. In the past, when I switched jobs every couple of years, it was easy. I could have my tonsils ‘taken out’ over and over, or keep ‘killing off’ great-aunt Edna. But I’ve been in this office for more than two years now, and they’ve got a policy:

‘Fool us once, shame on us. Fool us twice, shame on us again. But fool us three times, and you’d better update your resume, bitch.‘

I paraphrased a little, from the employee handbook. But you get the point.

So I’m not sure what it’ll be this year. A ‘flooded basement’, perhaps, or a ‘locust infestation’? An ’emergency vasectomy’? ‘Demonic possession of a pet gerbil’? A bout of ‘forty-eight hour gangrene’? We’ll see. Meanwhile, I’ll make my picks and shell out my cash, in exchange for the right to get sloppy drunk and shout at other peoples’ TVs this weekend. That’ll be nice.

And then there’s baseball. True, the season hasn’t really kicked off yet, but this is high times for us fantasy nerds. The calculators are clacking with comparisons of three-year slugging averages versus spring training results against left-handed pitchers on Tuesdays in stadiums named after citrus fruits. Our pocket protectors and taped-up Coke bottle glasses positively shudder in anticipation.

In honor of the drafts in which I’m currently immersed — and to show that love really is in the air — I’ll close tonight by bringing you a fully-loaded, plausibly positioned, twenty-five man roster of:

Major League Baseball’s ‘All-Porn Star Names’ Team

Catcher: Raul Casanova

First Base: Jeff Bagwell

Second Base: Russ Johnson

Third Base: Michael Cuddyer

Shortstop: Pokey Reese

Left Field: Larry Bigbie

Center Field: Grady Sizemore

Right Field: B.J. Surhoff

Outfielder: Nook Logan

Outfielder: Terrence Long

Infielder: Nick Swisher

Catcher: Pete LaForest

Utility: J.J. Hardy

Starting Pitcher: Gary Glover

Starting Pitcher: Rich Harden

Starting Pitcher: Wandy Rodríguez

Starting Pitcher: Woody Williams

Starting Pitcher: Kerry Wood

Reliever: Nate Bump

Reliever: Travis Chick

Reliever: R.A. Dickey

Reliever: Jimmy Gobble

Reliever: Buddy Groom

Reliever: J.J. Putz

Closer: B.J. Ryan

Now if we can just get Bobby Cox to manage the team, Jim Hickey as pitching coach, and Dick Pole as bench coach, then we’ll really be smoking the ball! So to speak. Ahem.

Who knew baseball could be so hot, eh? And this in a sport that has a coach tell you what to do when you reach ‘first base’, then sends you home once you get to ‘third’. Hardly seems fair, does it?