Professor Griff knows (J.P.'s signings are toast!)

We've done our best to avoid any discussions of Richard Griffin lately. Really, who needs that level of aggravation?

But Griff's assessment of Frank Thomas as the team's worst ever free agent pick up seems a bit daft to us. Thomas wasn't great last year, but he was certainly good enough that he shouldn't rate as the worst when compared to Erik Hanson's execrable three-year tour.

Plus, Griff's supposedly authoritative top five list of the worst pick ups seems to skew a bit too much towards the J.P. era. Really: Is it fair to call Dougie Burnett a monumentally bad signing?

What about Mike Stanley? Dick Schofield? Ken Dayley? Frank Viola? Danny Darwin? Lance Parrish? Mike Flanagan? Benito Santiago? Doug Bair? Darnell Coles? Mike Huff? Ozzie Virgil? Juan Samuel? Are you trying to tell us that A.J., er, Dougie, and Frank were worse signings than those?

Hell, we could even make a case that A.J., er, Gord Burnett was a better signing than Dave Stewart over the course of his contract.

We know that those signings don't necessarily fit Griff's ongoing narrative ("J.P. is the Devil! Ruining baseball in Toronto! Nor respect for the good guys! Je me souviens des Expos! Vas-y Youppi!") But this article seems to be a pretty opportunistic hatchet job on a move that was really for the best.

UPDATE: Griff's decided to open up the mail bag two days early, because there were so many reactionary douchebags - you know, Griff's peeps - who wanted to pass judgement on this move immediately.

(*Editors note: We accidentally published an early version of this post with all sorts of grammatical errors and nonsense, and have been scrambling to fix it. So if you read this once and it didn't make any sense, or if there were more fautes d'orthographe than usual, we hope we've been able to fix it to your liking. We sincerely regret the error.)

Pitching staff merry-go-round

So here's the newest latest and the band of brothers in the bullpen:

Randy Wells gets sent back to Chicago: Thanks for your time, but you're just not what we're looking for.

Brian Wolfe goes to the DL: Somehow, you had to figure that one arm was going to get mangled in the first month of the season, and after pitching three times in four days, Wolfe blew his tricep.

But most importantly, David Purcey gets the call!!: We know we shouldn't get overly excited about a few early season Triple-A stats, but still, a 1.89 ERA and a 21/6 K to BB ratio in 19 innings is nothing to sneeze at. The baldfaced speculation has Purcey taking the mound on Friday, with last night's late night losing pitcher Dougie Burnett* getting moved to Saturday.

Now the only question is who gets to carry the Dora the Explorer bag o' treats out to the bullpen.

(*NB: We think we might start calling A.J. Burnett "Dougie" or "Gord", because we believe it will make him a more relatable, cuddly figure to Canadian sports fans.)