Is it really only Wednesday? Alas, so it would seem. Let’s have some lunchtime linkage:

Barry Zito needs himself a slumpbuster. BabesLoveBaseball has some suggestions.

If that doesn’t work out, the Fresno Beehive would like him to come to Fresno. The AAA Grizzlies need an ace, Barry!

Another installment in Deadspin’s excellent series of horrifying moments in sports journalism, this post features a deaf Ken Griffey Jr, a naked Jay Buhner, and a mostly-naked Lou Piniella.

The 25th anniversary of Lee Elia’s famous tirade (Eighty-five percent of the f*ckin’ world is working. The other fifteen percent come out here!) brought you by FanIQ.

Do-gooding HBW alert: Kelli Pedroia.

Beyond the Box Score says Ryan Zimmerman’s not sucky, just unlucky.

Some great ballparks to check out for that minor league road trip you’ve been planning, courtesy of Bus Leagues Baseball.

Boston’s DL payroll exceeded the payroll of the entire Marlins ballclub. But hey, at least it was cheaper than New York’s DL payroll. (Center Field)

And as always, I like to read good stuff. So if you have some, share it.

Earlier this week, I was hustling to make dinner so that I could get going on this week’s Metro column. Yanking my bowl of soup out of the microwave, I suffered a freak Joel Zumaya-esque accident as the steaming liquid spilled all over my right forearm. I was wearing a wool sweater, which soaked up the scalding soup like a sponge and kept it simmering against my tender forearm flesh for second after agonizing second. I of course did the only rational thing: I flung down the bowl, screamed like a banshee, and stripped off half my clothes.Now, writing seems like a placid, harmless pastime, where one is exposed only to a slight risk of carpal tunnel syndrome or, if one is old-school, a paper cut or two. So what could ever stop one from writing?! No physical limitation could do it—when Milton went blind, he just composed Paradise Lost in his head. No time-management problem is a sufficient excuse—after all, Jane Austen managed to knock out six novels while shoving her drafts in a drawer every time someone walked into the room. And the truly dedicated cannot be deterred even by a growing sense that maybe it’s time to get a real job—Virgil spent 10 years writing the Aeneid (working at a painstaking rate of three lines per day) and still hadn’t finished it when he died (quitter!).

But I defy anyone to write a sports column while their right arm is covered in blisters and submerged in a bucket of ice water. (Unless, of course, you’re left-handed.) Oh, I ultimately got the column done. But it wasn’t pretty. And I had to scale back my blogging, leaving Team UmpBump in the lurch. (Unfortunately, there’s no Jed Lowrie in the UmpBump farm system, largely because we don’t have a farm system.)

So to the 120 baseball players on the disabled list and the dozens of others who are day-to-day and playing through their bumps and bruises, I salute you. In a new and quite literal way, I feel your pain. And tonight, I’m popping some Advil and coming off the DL. I’m liveblogging the Red Sox-Yankees game, busted arm or no. We can call it, “The Bloody Sleeve.”

LOS ANGELES–In a last minuted trade deadline deal, the Disabled List reacquirered longtime fan-favorite Nomar Garciaparra today from the Los Angeles Dodgers in exchange for triple-A first base prospect James Loney.

Garciaparra had developed a devoted following among fans of the DL with memorable performances in several previous tours of duty, including a gorgeous wrist injury and a spectacular groin tear.

Garciaparra fills a hole in the Disabled List’s lineup with Derrick Lee likely to be forced back onto the active list any day now and longtime starter Dimitri Young having been dealt to the Tigers last week.

Meanwhile Loney, despite being a highly touted prospect, had put up feeble numbers this season, unable to produce even a single high ankle sprain let alone a career-threatening degenerative hip injury.

“Nomar has always performed well for us in the past, and we are happy to have him back,” said Disabled List GM Steve Phillips. “Although his injury production has declined a bit in recent years, we feel that he still has the ability to do some real damage to his body and help our team down the stretch.”

Although there is a chance that Garciaparra will only be a two month rental for the DL, as he is in a free agent year, Phillips indicated he was hopeful the team could resign Garciaparra to an extension before the end of the season.