Get the Farns Out.....

Has Kyle Farnsworth thrown his last hanging slider in a Cub uniform. After many years of failed promise and promiscuous activity around Chicagoland, it appears that he might have. I meant to get to this as my first real post but completely forgot about it till I came accross a blurb on it this weekend. Apparently on the last day of the last game of the year, Sammy Sosa was not the only guy who left early...Kyle Farnsworth didn't even bother to show up(bottom of article). And what shows something more about the team than i think i want to know, nobody even knew about it until Baker called the bullpen to get him up to pitch. How do you not realize that a key man in your bullpen is not even at the stadium until you call him into the game. Or maybe this is common practice in MLB, i do not know as I do not run a team or am a MLB player, but it does seem to me that you would know if all the players showed up or didn't for a game.

Farnsworth used to be a notorious partier till around the end of the 2002 season when the Cubs apparently gave him an ultimatum of getting to bed at a decent hour or getting out of town. Maybe he fell back into his old ways after the season was rendered meaningless that Saturday afternoon, or maybe he just didn't feel like showing up anymore...we'll probably never know due to the giant thing that the Cubs made out of Sammy Sosa's disappearance. Maybe he was pulling a Nuke LaLoosh from the begining of 'Bull Durham' and the clubhouse attendents couldn't find him. We will probably never know the real reason for the Farns not being there, and apparently, the media, the ones who can really get this question answered, do not care because they have the bigger Sosa fish to fry.

It will be really sad if the franchise gives the Farns away this offseason, and they will be giving him away at a deep discount with this last incident and with breaking his foot the way he did late in the year. He was poised to be the teams closer of the future, and he still can be, with his 100+ heater. In the beggining of the year he was throwing the ball with some of that Maddux-type movement over the corners of the plate, but that disappeared as the season went on. If he could ever get his slider to be really dependable and gets that corner movement back for the coming seasons, he could be a great reliever, but his window for that happening in Chicago might be up. On a positive note he did lead the league in recorded pitches of 100mph or higher, more than doubling the next closest man on the list.