Jacoby Ellsbury has been suffering from an “aggravated groin” (Fenway West). The other night at the ballpark, my friend asked me, “An aggravated groin? What’s an aggravated groin? How did he get an aggravated groin?” I replied, “I’ll have to get on that.” What I meant, was, I’ll have to figure that out. Badump-CHING! Tacoby Bellsbury should be back in the lineup tonight.

With Noah Lowry on the DL and Barry Zito headed to the pen, talk of a six-man rotation in San Francisco has died down. This pleases me, because six-man rotations are one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard of. Teams already have a tough enough time finding five decent starters, and as it is, the fifth slot on most teams is something of a revolving door. And the idea of a 25-man roster consisting of perhaps 13 pitchers is equally disgusting. But as Giants Win notes, the larger concern for the San Fran squad may be their utter and complete lack of offense—on pace to score fewer runs than a dead ball era team. Oh my God.

I, like many, thought Phil Hughes’ “oblique strain” was code for “needs to go work out his suckage in the minors.” But now they’re saying it’s a stress fracture in one of his ribs. Hughes says he has “no idea” how he got it. But how do you fracture a rib and not realize it? Given that he also suffered a strained hamstring and a sprained ankle last year, NYY fans have to be hoping this is nothing more than a run of bad luck. But on Bronx Banter, it sounds like hope (not to mention patience) is running out.

Lone Star Ball gives Mindy McCready’s dad an Inigo Montoya Award. Any cross-pollination between baseball and The Princess Bride is always appreciated.

I like the Brewers. I have three of them on my fantasy team. I picked them to upset the Cubs for the NL Central title. But I don’t see how they’re going to do that without Ben Sheets. His first three starts filled me with hope. His subsequent triceps strain, despair. Now I don’t know what to think. Fortunately, I have the Hardball Times and pitch FX to tell me what’s what. Unfortunately, they also think the triceps tightness could be related to a rotator cuff issue. Nooooooooooooooo…..

Did you see Frank Thomas hit that triple a few days back? Did you wonder, whoah, when does Frank Thomas hit a triple? So did MopUpDuty. My favorite nugget from this post: Mark McGwire had only 6 triples in his entire career.

This week’s Metro column, on why the Rays are for real, but the other April surprise in the AL East, the Orioles, are not.

And finally, the Nats have a song. So Bugs and Cranks came up with hilarious ditties for all the other teams, too! I will now joyfully sing along to the new, awesome, Red Sox fan song:

We’re rawkous (raucous!) for the Red Sox!
We’re rawkous for the Red Sox!
We’re crazy and we’re awesome, brah!
We’re rawkous for the Red Sox!

Sully and Fitzy and Paddy Go Bragh
We’ll cut yer fuckin’ face if you look at us wrong!
So let’s go Nation of Red Sox fans!
Let’s throw some pizza in the stands!

Let’s go Red Sox!

As the lyrics of Jonathan Papelbon’s warm-up song (that *Dropkick Murphys tune from The Departed) sort of sound to me like, “I’m a sailor BRAAAAAH! And I lost my BRAAAAAH!”, I’m happy to see the emphatic syllable making the rounds in other Sox-related shanties.

*The lyrics were actually penned by Woody Guthrie. The real lyrics are, “I’m a sailor peg and I lost my leg.” The leg part, I get—but peg? Is that like, “I’m a sailor, Peg” (as if to his girlfriend, Peggy)? Inquiring minds want to know.

Billy Beane has done it again. Frank Thomas has cleared waivers and will rejoin his old team, the Oakland A’s, for mere pennies:

The deal came together in a matter of hours Wednesday after Thomas cleared waivers…Oakland will be on the hook only for about $337,000 — a prorated share of the $390,000 league minimum — so this move was a bargain for general manager Billy Beane and a club looking to boost its power numbers.

Thomas will still get nearly $8 million this year from the Blue Jays.

This changes the picture a bit more in the AL West. A few renegade baseball watchers and some smart computers were already picking them as surprise division winners, but the addition of Frank Thomas makes them visibly more dangerous.

Billy Beane just continues to look even more like a crazy wizard genius with each move he makes. If he takes this team to the postseason after dumping both his best pitcher and his best hitter while getting another team to pay millions of dollars for his cleanup hitter…[whistles slowly]…damn. What do you think will happen?

So the Jays have gone ahead and eaten about $9 million by simply releasing Frank Thomas a day after benching him, apparently convinced that his recent 4-35 slump means that he is no longer the same player that he was last year, when he batted .277 and led the entire team with 26 HR and 94 RBI.

Well either that or they would rather eat $9 million now and get nothing than have to pay $19 million total including Thomas’s $10 million option for next year, which almost certainly would have vested if he had stayed with the Jays this year, since it only required 376 plate appearances to get locked in.

Actually, this decision is almost certainly more due to the latter reason. Which is a shame, because it seems like the Blue Jays are punishing Thomas for their bad decision to sign him to that deal, when he really wasn’t going to be in their plans.

The more one considers J.P. Riccardi’s track record as Blue Jays GM, the more one begins to wonder why he still has a job, as he never really seems to be able to figure out which direction he is headed, and this move is only the latest example.

Because looking at the numbers, Frank Thomas is almost certainly still the player he was last year, when he was a pretty valuable piece of the Blue Jays offense. His line-drive percentage is slightly down, but otherwise all of Thomas’s peripherials are right in line with last year, including his strikeout and walk rates, his pitches seen per plate appearance, his groundball rate, and his HR/flyball rate.

What is different this year is that his BABIP is at an unsustainably low .167. Given that Thomas posted a .377 OBP last season along with decent power, he should still be able to help an AL team in need of a DH, especially since he can probably be gotten for very cheap.

But given his age and the recent slump, and the fact that he can pretty much only DH, it is uncertain whether any other team will have room for him.

It would be really sad to see the future Hall-of-Famer have to go out like this, his great career uncelebrated and our final image of him being his getting rejected by the only team still playing in Canada.

The Big Hurt recently had a little visitor: a former munchkin.

Mickey Carroll, one of the munchkins in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, met up with 6′5″ Blue Jays DH Frank Thomas at the Jays spring training facility in Dunedin, Fla. on Sunday. The 4′7″ Carroll, 87, talked and exchanged autographs with the Big Hurt.

Now, when I think of spring training, this isn’t the first image that comes to mind. But, throughout a February that produced a frenzy of bizarre spring training storylines, this one was undoubtedly the most refreshing. Would Lou Piniella and Mark Prior already be scuffling if they had a munchkin in their clubhouse? Would anyone be worried about Curt Schilling’s weight problem if Carroll were stomping around Fort Myers declaring “We thank you very sweetly for doing it so neatly” (this in fact was one of Carroll’s lines in the movie…after Dorothy’s house fell from the sky and crushed the Wicked Witch of the West)?

It seems as if many of baseball’s biggest problems can be overshadowed by the mere presence of a small person. Just ask former Red Sox ace Pedro Martinez, whose frequent entourage included the late 1′9″ Nelson de la Rosa.

I congratulate Frank Thomas for recognizing the link between little people and baseball success. He is truly a man among boys…er…munchkins.

Ken Williams who?

After masterfully morphing into the Big Skirt during this year’s ALCS, Frank “The Big Hurt” Thomas is ready to cash-in with the Toronto Blue Jays.

Thomas had said he wanted to return to Oakland, where he enjoyed the A’s easygoing clubhouse and the relaxed atmosphere — such a change from the pressure on Chicago’s South Side. But Thomas, who has said he’d like to play until he’s 42, also acknowledged he had to consider to the best offer at this stage of his career to take care of himself in the future.

What can you do, man, you gotta get paid. Except, of course, if you patently whine about contracts even after the team you play for has shown gratitude for your services in, not only giving you boatloads of money, but also including you in post-season celebrations and such.

Don’t forget the A’s signed Thomas to a “Incentive-laiden” contract when no one was willing to wait for his ankle to show up for work.

So he gets their money, comes up limping in the clutch, turns down their extension, and is about to bolt to Canada.

Damn, I am spiteful, but frankly I just don’t feel as bad/bitter watching former Sox stars choking big time when it matters most. Kinda levels everything off very nicely.

So it’s all said and done in the American League. The Detroit Tigers keep on winning and nothing seems to contain their momentum. So much for my predix; I had the A’s in the Fall Classic; I had them going down to the Mets, but as far as I was concerned, they were playing in the World Series.

To be honest, I had more of a spiteful analysis of this year’s playoff picture simply because I felt frustrated that the White Sox hadn’t made it. And on top of that, two former South Siders, who were huge for the Pale Hose while in Chicago, were heading into the ALCS in opposite sides of the diamond.

Both Frank Thomas and Magglio Ordoñez left Chicago in bad terms and both were looking to earn some respect outside the Windy City. Maggs most definitely got his; big Frank? He’s wearing a big fat skirt.

Ordoñez deserves to go to the World Series. He was my favorite White Sox for a while (I still have his #30 stitched to the back of my authentic home J) and I remember reading he was sad to watch his former teammates win it all last year one season after he had left.

The Sox let Maggs walk after the ‘04 season not without exchanging words in the media over the nature of the contract negotiations. In typical White Sox fashion, they offered an undervalued contract, which he promptly turned down. There was also some animosity between him and Ozzie Guillen.

The injury he suffered during that year didn’t help the situation. Maggs later revealed he felt Kenny Williams had hurt his Free Agent value by talking up the injury to his knee and the subsequent treatment he sought in Austria (a procedure not allowed in the U.S.)

In other words, the Sox and Maggs were not best friends. Oh yea, and then there was that profanity-laced tirade between him and Ozzie.

It’s not uncommon for the Sox to alienate their former stars; they did it to Robin Ventura, they even did it to Ozzie himself. And of course, they did it to Big Frank.

Now, don’t think for a minute that I don’t/didn’t appreciate Frank. He was the first Sox I recognized (other than Michael Jordan); my first White Sox collectibles were a Frank Thomas poster, his posing action figure, a “Back-to-back MVP” banner from his two awards in 93 and 94 and of course, Reebok’s original Big Hurt shoes. Gotta have the shoes.

But after hearing Colin Cowherd whine about how Frank was now making it big in the Bay because he was free from all the Media Scrutiny in Chicago; I remembered all the disputes he had with former managers (specially Jerry Manuel) because he wouldn’t be treated as King Frank. He would continuously go on a media boycott, refraining from talking on-the-record with reporters because his tantrums were, according to him, portrayed as, well, tantrums.

But wait, Colin, last time I checked, Big Frank accumulated all his power numbers while wearing a giant S-O-X on his chest; he won two MVP awards and could’ve easily won a third in 2003 if it wasn’t for our favorite Benign Tumor, Jason Giambi.

He merely was eligible for come-back player this year; sure he got his swing back but he had been badly injured last year. And even though he was good ol’ Frank of old in the ALDS, he pulled another Big Skirt, going O-Fer in the ALCS. Oh Why Does That Sound Familiar?

And now, after hitting the ALCS-clinching home run, Maggs is going to the World Series in true superstar status.

But dude, what’s up with the hair?

OK, I’m officially torn. I can’t help but cringe to see the “Big Hurt” Frank Thomas belting two home runs (one being the game winner) against the Twins today, when back in 2000, he did his best “Big Skirt” impersonation, going O-fer. (Thomas was injured during last year’s playoffs).

But I also can’t help but be ecstatic that those Twinkies (the damn piranhas) were beaten by the sheer power of one man – even while throwing Johan Santana up on the mound.

Now, let’s see here, the A’s have Loaiza going up against (?) Bosner tomorrow.

The Twins were 1 and 0 against him during the season, scoring 6 runs in 4 Innings of his pitching. Loaiza, though, had rebounded towards the end of the season.

Rich harden pitches on Saturday. Sweep anyone?

Somewhere in the ChiSox parts of the blogosphere, pundits are ranting (not really) about the return of the Big Hurt to the Windy City as a member of the Oakland A’s for a three-game series.

I, for one, will be watching all three games, but I guarantee you, I didn’t give two Big Skirts (as that buffoon Jay Mariotti would like to say) about it until I witnessed (through my handy, albeit expensive MLB.TV subscription) the lack of love, and utter disrespect the fans in Cleveland had for Jim Thome.

I won’t be in the stands, hell, I’m not even in Chicago, but rest assured I would’ve been clapping while standing on my two feet.

While healthy, Thomas was a monster for the Sox. He was one, if not the most dominant hitter in ChiSox history. Back-to-back league MVP in ‘92 and ‘93, and arguably, the best player ever to wear the South Sider’s shade of pinstripes as well.

I won’t get into the stats, but I know that I appreciated him, even last year when he was hampered by injuries and still managed to slug out 12 homers in 105 AB.

Heck, me and Frank go way back.

Read how after The Jump.
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