(Not) Veterans’ Day

Wow. It’s been a rough few days for veteran pitchers.

First came the word that Matt Morris had been cut loose by the Pirates. Which should so send them to first place in the division.

In truth, the Morris deal was one of the Pirates’ most puzzling moves in recent years. And this is a team that’s had 15 consecutive losing seasons. A team that clearly should have been rebuilding traded to bring in an above-average veteran (at the time) with no hopes that he would put the Pirates over the top.

And team president Frank Coonelly said: Don’t let the door hit in the butt on the way out. Or words to that effect.

“The decision to acquire Matt Morris last July did not turn out to be a sound baseball judgment,” Coonelly said in a statement issued by the team. “Ownership’s willingness to acquire Matt’s contract … demonstrated ownership’s commitment to fielding a championship team. I am confident that the investments that we are now making in this club will be far more productive.”

Classy guy, that Coonelly. Must’ve learned his personnel-handling skills from Jim Bowden.

But wait! There might be a place for Morris anyway.

“We’d like nothing more than if Morris would like to continue his career in baseball with this organization in some sort of role,” general manager Neal Huntington said. “The preliminary groundwork has been laid and the ideas have been formulated. We’ve expressed our interest to him already.”

Um, are we all on the same page here?

You suck. Please teach our pitchers.

That would probably be a more graceful exit than that of Barry Zito, who just blew away Mariano Rivera’s status as the highest-paid reliever in baseball.

Of course, when the San Francisco Giants signed Zito to a 7-year, $126 million deal, a bullpen role probably wasn’t what they had in mind.

“I know it’s fun to run with stories — ‘Oh, is Zito done?’ — or whatever you guys are going to say. Go say it,” he said. “But from my standpoint, it’s a bump in the road — a big bump. It’s a battle. It’s stuff that I’ve gone through, but there hasn’t been the kind of scrutiny around it because of the market or the contract.”

It is, though, a fair question. With few exceptions, Zito has not pitched well for the Giants and hasn’t really returned to Cy Young form since he won the award in 2002.

Zito was the case study for whether long-term, big-money deals for pitchers could work. Right now, it’s not looking so good. But if he really needs a strikeout, he could always wait for a chance to pitch to Geovany Soto.

Both those problems pale in comparison to the latest problems for Roger Clemens, who reportedly had a ten-year affair with Mindy McCready. Which would be bad enough, even if McCready wasn’t 15 years old when the affair began. Which, of course, she was.

I would spend more time on this, but the jokes really write themselves. The two partied with Monica Lewinsky and Michael Jordan, and McCready got Jordan to give her a cigar for Clemens. Again, writes itself.

The moral of this story: Never sue your personal trainer.