Barack Obama took the week off from the health care debate to vacation with the First Family on Martha’s Vineyard, so it’s entirely possible that he got to watch Ozzie Guillen pull the plug on grandpa.
Guillen, the one-man death panel, sent Jose Contreras to the bullpen after his catastrophic outing on Monday night. Words can’t adequately describe the horror of witnessing that error unfold. It was like watching a baby crawl towards a cliff. There was no immediate sense of danger, but it developed so slowly that you still had time to fully realize that, hey, maybe that infant doesn’t have the ability to judge depth.
Is this what we'll remember Jose Contreras by? (AP)
Now, replace “that infant” with “Jose Contreras ” and “judge depth” with “field his position, even to the level of Clayton Richard,” and there you go.
It’s a new take on an old Mitch Hedberg joke: “I want to see a pitcher flop during a flop. It would be so damn literal!”
So Contreras heads to the bullpen, which is a vanity assignment for all intents and purposes. He won’t be available until Aug. 29, and rosters expand three days later, so Guillen is basically saying, “We hope we’ll never need you.”
That leaves the door open for Jake Peavy, who pitched well enough in his third rehab start but took a liner to his pitching elbow in the process. He was fine enough to finish, but he has to see how it feels in the coming days.
It also closes the door on the chance of Contreras returning for 2010, in all likelihood. That is, if you hadn’t already ruled it out by now.
When piecing together the 2010 roster in my head, I had the Count penciled in (very, very lightly) as the fifth starter at Bartolo Colon’s salary. They would receive all the benefits of Contreras, Cuban Idol at a fraction of the price, there were reasons to expect mild improvement, and since he couldn’t be counted upon to pitch a full season, he wouldn’t interfere with the progress of Daniel Hudson or anybody else who might be ready to make The Leap.
But it’s hard to treat Monday’s debacle like anything besides a watershed moment in his White Sox career. It feels too much like it did last year, when Javier Vazquez followed up a Guillen challenge (“I don’t have an ace here”) by immediately surrendering a lead in the September Metrodome series. Maybe it was 100 percent certain Vazquez would be dealt, but it was impossible to imagine how anybody — Vazquez, Guillen, fans, the media — would’ve dealt with it after Guillen branded him with the scarlet “U.”
If Guillen removed Contreras from the rotation after a run-of-the-mill shelling, I don’t think that would’ve cemented his fate in the same way. But now when I think of Contreras, I’ll picture him diving in desperation for the ball like an alcoholic trying to suck spilled beer out of carpet fibers. That image is burned in the collective memory, and it’s hard to see anybody overlooking it.
