BREAKING NEWS: In lieu light of their recent signing of first basemen Adam LaRoche, the Arizona Diamondbacks are considering waiving left fielder/Panda Eric Byrnes.

The signing will move Conor Jackson to LF and will make Brandon Allen the backup 1B.  It also creates a glut of outfielders with Manny Parra serving as the 4th outfielder.

The move brings a tear to our eyes here at Major League Jerk as The Panda was our first real gimmick.  It was almost two years ago that Eric Byrnes first earned that nickname due to his being so playful, dirty and harmless.  Since then we’ve been there with him as he suffered injury after injury and proved time and again that he is clearly the worst contract ever offered in the short history of the Arizona Diamondbacks.

But now? Now I’m left here with an empty feeling in my stomach as I contemplate the possibility that such a goofy sumbitch might be out of a job. That I won’t be able to share in his minimal triumphs and glorious, glorious failures. That I might never again have the opportunity to point and laugh at him with my son the way fathers and sons point and laugh…as a family. Already I’ve taught my son that not only is it important to be loyal to your team, but it’s also important to jeer the incompetent retards who consistently make the same mistakes over and over again.*

So, dear Panda, your contributions to mediocrity will not go unreported. They will live on in the annals of our website until HostIcan’t erases our content out of spite and late payments.

*Not to mention mistakes no one has ever made in the history of the game. I remember the time the Panda fielded a single to left and, during the transfer, lost the ball in the stands resulting in a 2 base error. He effectively gave the guy a triple on a routine ground ball during a close game. The guy’s a fucking champ!

In a world where scientists kowtow to the Giant Panda lobby which so permeates the research community that they are forced to prop up a species that won’t fuck to save its life, one brave, rogue, nerd who plays by his own set of rules has decided that it’s finally time help Mother Nature put an end to one of mankind’s greatest sins.  Coming this fall, be prepared to watch the Pandas for possibly the last time.

The only bad thing about Eric Byrnes being injured is that there’s no one to spew venom on every week.  The Panda is my least favorite player in the great game of baseball and if he’s not around there’s a Panda sized hole in my heart and nothing to fill it.  So today we can pick on two other, minor pandas: Chris Young and Tony LaRussa.

This weekend during Dan Haren’s brilliant dominance of the St. Louis Cardinals there was a moment when my joy could not be contained.  It was one of those moments where conventional wisdom came up and bit an old baseball man on the ass.  It was the top of the eighth, two outs, men on second and third.  Chris Young was the batter with Dan Haren on deck.  The conventional wisdom here is that you walk the 8-hole batter to get to the pitcher.  And the funny thing is everyone in PHX was thinking: “Please walk Chris Young.  Don’t let him swing a bat.  He sucks soooo much.  I would rather have Dan Haren take his shot in this situation.  Please, Tony LaRussa, please.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you what very well may be the last Panda Watch! of the 2009 season.  You see, yesterday the Panda up and broke his front paw after Scott Feldman hit him on a 1-2 pitch.  From what I hear, it was the loudest applause the Panda has received all year at the plate.

My motivation for watching Diamondbacks games is slipping further and further away.  What’s the point in watching a team that sucks if there isn’t someone on the team on whom you can focus the bulk of your disdain.  Do you have any idea how happy I am when I hear The Outfield overwhelmed by the boos?  It gets me through the evening.

On a side note, The Panda is the kind of guy Steve Lyons would love because he’s willing to get dirty.  Sure he’s downright lousy at playing the game of baseball but every day his jersey takes the longest to get clean.

I’m so happy right now I could weep into bottle and then sell my tears as a healing agent.  It’s almost the two year anniversary since the Panda signed his ridiculous contract extention!!! That’s right, it’s been almost two years since the last time the Panda was relevant, so much so that there were actual, intense discussions about how much he was worth that didn’t end with “…and 12 maple bats, final offer.”  But lo, there has been some trouble in pandadise lately as everyone in the entire universe, besides Eric Byrnes and his kids, regret the contract.

Eric Byrnes is about halfway through his three-year, $30 million contract extension and the Diamondbacks outfielder is hitting .220 this season, .214 the past two seasons and .223 since the day the deal was announced…

This was not what any of them had in mind – not Eric Byrnes and certainly not the Diamondbacks, who thought they were locking up a vital player but instead agreed to a deal that, because of its ramifications, might go down as one of the worst moves in franchise history.

Let’s just clarify a statement real quick: this is sort of what Eric Byrnes had in mind, right?  Play like a crazy person during a contract year and then reap the benefits regardless of the fall out?  Isn’t that why players perform better during contract years?  So…yeah.

Oh and let’s look at some of the worst moves in franchise history:

1. Gave away Curt Schilling for a bucket of balls to the Red Sox (Thanks, Arizona!)
2. Giving away Carlos Quentin for a bucket of balls.
3. Losing Dan Uggla in the Rule 5 Draft.
4. Traded away Brad Penny before he started amounting to anything.

I’d say it’s somewhere between 1 and 2, right?  I mean, giving away a future hall of famer for nothing is hard to top.  But signing a Panda to play left field (and then paying that Panda $30MM!!!!) is pretty crazy. Read the rest of this entry »

Bottom of the second, Diamondbacks down by one, the Panda leads off with a bloop single: a bloop single that would have been caught by any number of right fielders who are not as slow or as lousy a defender as Jay Bruce.  This was the kind of bloop single you have to yell at to get down because it’s such a can of corn but somehow, by some grace of God, it drops for a single.  The reasonable thing to do here is to thank whatever deity you happen to worship for one more dying quail that might prevent you from getting benched by the new manager who isn’t taking anybody’s shit.

But no.  Instead, the Panda tries to leg out a double on a ball that lands three feet from Jay Bruce.  I’m not kidding, Bruce has the ball in his glove as the Panda hits first base.  The ball reaches second about 25 feet before Byrnes does.  And Byrnes tries to do a flailing slide with extended arms (see above picture) that might, maybe, possibly knock the ball loose.  It doesn’t and he looks like a douche the whole way back to the dugout (where he’s later seen smiling and laughing).

To make things worse, in the next fucking inning on a grounder past the shortstop into left field, Byrnes lazily reaches down for the ball as Brandon Phillips hustles around first, sees the Panda half-assing it and hustles into second easily.  It was everything the Panda wasn’t: smart, aware, athletic.  You should have seen the look on Byrnes’ face afterwards.  You know when you’re playing with a big dopey dog who just wants to chase a stick or run around the yard and he’s fun and he’s playful?  But all of a sudden, something happens.  Maybe he thinks he hears an intruder coming into steal his favorite play toy; maybe there’s a cat eating his food; who knows.  But all of a sudden the Panda had this look of determination on his face that can only be described as laughable.

God I hope someone plants drugs on this guy soon.  I’m so tired of watching him screw up baseball games.

This is the first post I ever wrote making fun of Eric Byrnes.  Since then I have written no fewer than 324 posts mocking that pile of douche.  This was originally published on May 6th but it lives in my heart forever.

Bottom of the 6th inning, Dbacks down 5-1, and I get this message on my phone from that Phillie Asshole Gonzo: “is that fairy music when Byrnes comes to bat? Jeez, I can’t stand watching that swing of his and this is the first time I’ve seen him. I can imagine it driving you nuts the whole damn year.”

So many things to discuss in that one message, I’ll tackle them one at a time. Yes, that is fairy music that Eric Byrnes enters to every at bat of every home game. It’s actually by a band called The Outfield (get it? because he plays in the outfield? on a baseball team!). Imagine listening to that song 4 times a night, 81 times a year. No really, try to imagine that hell. Oh, and the reason the video is not of the actual band is because they don’t want people to profit off of their copyrighted material. Sorry Outfield, but I’m guessing that ship probably sailed a looonnnngg time ago. Where was I? Oh yeah, fairy music. What does this have to do with baseball other than the band’s name? I know that all entrance music is supposed to reflect your personality (Mark Reynold’s is “Down” by 311. What?), so is that Eric Byrnes’ personality: cheesy 80s ballads?

Moving on. You know what else I hate about Eric Byrnes’ At Bats? Everything. He always gets under the ball and pops it up on the infield. 20.5% of the time he hits the ball in play it’s an infield popup. But that’s not the worst part. Every time he gets under the ball, he spreads his arms out wide and does a little hop like The Flying Nun (at right) as he leaves the box. This little dance only seems to magnify my frustration with his whole approach to hitting. I’m not sure if he’s aware of this, but he’s really fast. He stole 50 bases last year. 50! He stole more bases than Jimmy Rollins, and Chone Figgins, and the same amount as Carl Crawford. They’re fast, guess how often they pop up on the infield? Figgins 5.9%, Rollins 7.5% (last year’s numbers), Crawford 5.7% Shouldn’t someone mention this to him? Do you think he knows? Could we start a petition?

EDIT: If you haven’t watched that video already, please do so. It’s so amazingly bad that I loved every minute of it. Who has that much time to make a video like that. It reminds me of that line from The State, “Let’s go do fun things set to popular music.”

Good morning, friends of excellence, and welcome to the first edition of Panda Watch in this, the 2009 MLB season.  For those of you new to the site, Panda Watch provides the type of in depth analysis of The Panda* that would make Tom Brokaw weep with delight.

It’s been a rough year for the Panda, yet somehow he not only gets ABs, he’s actually started 4 of the 8 games the Dbacks have played this year.  Until last night’s heroic walkoff single (more on that in a minute), The Panda was 1-17 and had popped it up on the infield almost half the time.  You see, there’s nothing the Panda likes more than demonstrating his raw power by hitting the ball straight up into the air as high as he can.

But let’s get into last night’s events because this is important.**  Last night, Arizona really needed a win.  They entered the game 2-5 (all home games so far this season) and everyone’s looking angry because this is not the start of the season this young team anticipated.  Game gets off to a rocky start as the Cards jump on top 3-0 in the fourth but Arizona rallies back to take a 6-4 heading into the 9th where Chad Qualls promptly blows the save. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had a bunch of things I’ve wanted to talk about that aren’t really deserving of a full post, so I’ll just throw out a bunch all at once.  Enjoy.

Random Observation 1: The Panda’s habitat might soon become crowded:
All-time Diamondback favorite Luis Gonzales has expressed publicly that he would like to return to the Dbacks to finish his career.  He has said that he does not care if he doesn’t play, he would like to just help out in any way possible.  This would be a difficult task of course, because the Snakes have a set outfield of Justin Upton, Chris Young and Eric Byrnes.  Furthermore, Conor Jackson did an excellent job filling in for Byrnes in left field last year while the Panda was out at the Vet with a sore paw.  While Gonzo could take Tony Clark’s spot as the grizzled veteran, he would still have no spot in the outfield.  He also throws like a girl due to his age and arm surgeries.  The team could place him at first base, but is that a responsible allocation of resources?  Hef says no. Read the rest of this entry »

Panda had the night off last night so he didn’t do anything to sully his reputation. If anything, he added to his own credibility simply because the AZ Pandabacks simply can’t hit for shit right now, with or without the Panda in left field. That’s right, Pandabacks. At this point, they’re all a bunch of cute, cuddly, harmless plush toys with the way the offense has played in the past week. Against the Marlins, it was magnified simply because the three starters (Owings, Webb and Haren) each had a quality start. Once again, for empahsis: three consecutive quality starts from the AZ starters; three consecutive losses.

A quick look at their competition this week:
Miller: Before the game, an ERA of 6.52.
Last night: 7IP, 5H, 0ER, 9SO.
Ricky Nolasco: Before the game, an ERA of 5.18. He hadn’t gone 7 innings all season.
Against the Pandabacks: 7IP, 3H, 1ER, 7SO.

The Pandabacks struck out 35 times in the last three games. 35!! Every single one of their rallies was busted up by a strikeout. Bases loaded, 1 out. Men on the corners, no outs. Need an untimely strikeout? Call the Pandabacks.

So yeah, it looks like Panda Watch! is going to be working overtime for the next few days as we try to sort out which particular panda is in the worst health. Stay tuned.