J-Rod the Washburninator

Washburninating at Safeco Field,
Washburninating the payroll,
Washburninating all the peoples,
In their word-pressed BLOGGAGES!
WORD-PRESSED BLOGGAGES!

I wasn't going to comment on the whole Washburn deal because I was afraid I'd end up going Batgirl on y'all, and someone would probably kill me. I'm not going to say he's one of the best pitchers in the league, and I do realize his low ERA last year is misleading, and they are paying him way too much, etc. I am, however, going to say that in my opinion, he's the cutest left-handed pitcher in the American League except for maybe Barry Zito. The Mariners had a press conference to announce the signing today, and the pictures from it are so CUTE! His eyes are so very, very blue.

A somewhat amusing thing to me is that Jeff Shaw has given J-Rod the nickname of "Lurf", which is how one pronounces the acronym LHRF, or Left-Handed Ryan Franklin. I went back through my bullpen pictures to find some of the ones I took of Washburn earlier this year, and one of my sets is from May 2, 2005, meaning I took warmup shots of both Jarrod Washburn *and* Ryan Franklin that day. Ha! The wackiest part is, looking at those pictures, it almost does look like they have mirror-image mechanics.

(That was the game of the Holy Crap Ichiro Spiderman catch, by the way, in case anyone's curious)

Anyway, the Mariners have this tendency to turn cute pitchers into uncute pitchers -- take a look at Gil Meche just a year or two ago when he was a cute adorable brown-eyed boy, and now you can see that he's become a haggard haunted shadow of his former self. It's so very sad. So, if the same thing happens to Washburn here, you won't have to worry about my babbling about how cute he is!

By the way, if I need to offer a little bit of evidence that Jarrod Washburn is somewhat different from Ryan Franklin, at least in attitude, I'll repaste a blurb from an article about Washburn that I read several months ago:

He wouldn't complain about receiving the fourth-worst run support in the league, even after he was stapled with the Angels' 4-1 loss to the New York Yankees.

"What good is that going to do you?" he said. "All that does is tick off your teammates, and I like most of my teammates."

On the other hand, Washburn's going to be wearing Bobby Bowflex's old number. What are the chances he, like certain other former Angels to come to Seattle, may randomly feel a need to get a tattoo? (Hopefully, the answer to that is "absolutely none".)