Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Adventures of the Moderately Stupid

Sydney Ponson is in his 8th season with the Orioles. His career record is 71-81 with a 4.73 ERA. In his first 7 seasons, he's averaged nearly 200 innings per (4 seasons over 200, 3 seasons under 200). Since 1998 (his rookie campaign) he leads all AL pitchers in Complete Games. In all of ML baseball, he trails only Randy Johnson in complete games (he is tied with Schilling). He's done all of this for a baseball team that has not posted a winning record during his career. After his big year of 2003 (17-12 ERA under 4) he was knighted by the Aruban Royal Family. He is "Sir" Sydney.

In the early years of Ponson's career he had an uncontrollable temper. Not the kind of temper such that he would throw a fit, but the kind of temper where when things went against him, he'd lose his cool and things would inevitably get worse. It took several seasons, but Sydney finally overcame this shortcoming and had his first winning season in 2003. It now appears, however, that Sydney did not conquer this "stupid anger" but has merely relocated it to other parts of his personality.

After the 2003 season, the Orioles signed Ponson to a free agent contract. They also signed Miguel Tejada, Javy Lopez and Rafael Palmeiro. For the first time in Ponson's ML career, the Orioles would have some offense. Ponson showed up for spring training 30 lbs overweight and started the season 3-12. The O's benched him for his last start prior to the All Star break and dropped him to fifth in the rotation after the All Star break which gave him 2 weeks w/o a start. He lost 20 lbs and went 8-3 the 2nd half of last year.

The O's hired the scout that originally signed Ponson to be his offseason trainer. Ponson did stay in shape this past offseason. However, he also picked a fight (a fist fight) with an Aruban judge on a beach in Aruba.

After this incident he decided he was too famous to live in Aruba anymore (i.e. he could no longer tolerate the spotlight there), so he moved to Florida permanently. Two weeks later he got arrested in Florida for DUI.

He missed several spring training starts while dealing with his legal troubles in Aruba and while he is 2-1 this season, he has not been impressive. Now, it turns out that he may miss his turn in Toronto this weekend because the DUI arrest in Florida has delayed his acquisition of a permit to work in Canada.

This dumb SOB is pissing me off. He not only could be good, he should be good. He is not good, he's just stupid.

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