It’s official: Kenny’s bored.
A week and a half ago, Chicagoans were bitching about how unseasonably cool, dry and boring the summer had been. We longed to have fun summers like the people on the East, West and Gulf Coasts were having. Kenny Williams, a native Californian had an especially troublesome time with the mild weather. Not only did he know what he was missing in the weather, he also knew that the weather was killing him at the turnstiles.
What a fox aye?
Harkening back to his days with the Appleton Foxes where the players had to get pretty damn creative to pass the monotonous summers, Williams decided he had enough and started to make his own fun. The first sign that Williams had a serious case of cabin fever was when he started trading the farm system to acquire a National League pitcher with an ankle injury serious enough to sideline him for more than two months that the Sox will have the joy of paying $48 million over the next three years with a $22 million club option for 2013 with a $4 million buyout.
Now usually this kind of trade and a quick trip to Beansnappers would have satiated the Appleton Kenny Williams for the rest of the summer. But then Mother Nature struck.
With heat advisories encouraging residents to stay inside if they did not have to go out this past weekend, Williams’ cabin fever flared up again. With his trusty bluetooth headset firmly implanted in his ear, Williams made a few prank calls.
First up, the Pirates. Williams called Neal Huntington and offered to trade him Gordon Beckham, John Danks, and Gavin Floyd in exchange for any combination of Nate McLouth, Adam LaRoche, John Grabow, Tom Gorzelanny, Freddy Sanchez, Jack Wilson, and Ian Snell. Unfortunately, Huntington didn’t understand the joke and told Williams to “hang on” as he furiously worked the phones to try and reacquire some of these players in order to trade them again.
Thinking that was too easy, Williams moved on to his next target. Lowering his voice even more than usual, Williams worked his magic. After fifteen minutes he had a tentative trade arranged with Chris Wallace of the Memphis Grizzlies involving Rudy Gay and OJ Mayo for DJ Carrasco, Mark Kotsay and PF Jim Thome.
After hanging up and giggling to himself, Williams quickly grew tired of this game. He went online to check on his Facebook page and found himself staring at Alex Rios, outfielder for the Blue Jays, sitting on the waiver wire. After collecting all of his babysitting money, Williams threw caution to the wind and agreed to spend it all and more for the next five years (forget that trip to Paris with his French class next summer) to snatch up Rios, he of the 0-5 with 5 strikeout evenings.
On second thought, maybe Kenny isn’t bored but is suffering from heat exhaustion instead. They always say that humidity is a silent killer. This is the GM that said earlier in the year that the White Sox couldn’t afford a guy like Jake Peavy with only 20,000 fans trickling into premium priced games against the Dodgers. What possible explanation other than mental illness could explain Williams picking up the tab on Peavy’s $48-70 million contract and Rios’ $64 million contract that runs through 2014?
Is Kenny taking a page from the President's book?
Some may wonder if President Obama has become too close with Williams and the rest of the team. It certainly seems that Kenny has adopted some of the President’s economic policies, electing to spend in the face of grisly future predictions for the state of the Sox economy. Kenny just agreed to take the Blue Jays’ clunker off their hands and will be paying a ton of cash over the next five years for it. Hopefully Rios’ emissions will be healthy for the Sox future, but it will be a sad day when 2005 World Series MVP Jermaine Dye or fan favorite Jim Thome is sent to the scrapyard at the end of this year or the next.
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