I am Powerful

I'm a little late to mention this, but Jorge Cantu was named NL Player of the Week on Monday. Both he and Josh Johnson have had this award bestowed upon them this season. What else do the two have in common? Both have been honored with crappy Marlins Die-Hards Photoshops (Johnson, Cantu). You know what this means: I need to make a crappy Photoshop image for every player on the team. Leave your ideas in the comments.

While we're at it, here is This Week in Schadenfreude, courtesy of Jonah Keri:

In a nutshell: With the game on the line, Mets Manager Jerry Manuel decided he didn’t want Ramon Castro (a pretty good hitter and easily the Mets’ best option at the time given their multiple injuries) to bat. Instead, Manuel decided to go with Omir Santos, a lifelong bush leaguer with a career 651(!) minor league OPS. Santos had a few days earlier hit a grand slam, you see. Also, according to a few plugged-in writers in New York, Manuel hates Castro and wanted to undermine/humiliate him to the point where he’d demand to be traded or released. So whether the reason was ignoring years and years of blatantly obvious statistical evidence, fixating on a personal grudge at the expense of his team, or the BS excuse Manuel actually used (Santos has “a shorter swing” so he’d fare better against Marlins hard-throwing closer Matt Lindstrom), Manuel went to Santos in the big spot.

But that wasn’t even the end of it. To get Santos up to the plate, Manuel had to summon him…FROM THE BULLPEN. WHERE HE WAS IN FULL CATCHER’S GEAR, WARMING UP A PITCHER. The switch took roughly an hour and a half, or about as long as it would take the Mets to summon a fan from the top row of the upper deck, train him for a decade to learn how to hit big league pitching, sign him to a contract, then put him up at the plate. There was a 0% chance that Santos was going to come through in this situation. The Mets did the Marlins a gigantic favor. HUGE.

Go here to read Jonah's IM conversation with his blogger buddy Rob about the managing prowess of Jerry Manuel.


Image via UPI