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For as great of a postseason as Major League Baseball had in 2011, the winter signing season has gotten off to a rocky start. On the day St. Louis Cardinals demigod Albert Pujols was introduced in front of the gleaming smiles of Orange County Angels fans after signing a 10-year, $254 million contract, news broke that reigning National League MVP Ryan Braun had tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug of some kind and faced a 50-game suspension. Needless to say, these were not the kinds of issues baseball fans growing up in the 1950s and 1960s had to deal with. In order to comment on these stories, we here at Wezen-Ball have enlisted the help of Grumpy Old Man, a stalwart of 1990s "Saturday Night Live" who has been in retirement these last 15 years or so. Take it away, Grumpy!

I'm a grumpy old man and I don't like things the way they are now compared to the way they used to be!

Nowadays they got a thing called "steroids", where players take pills and inject things into their butt to make them bigger and stronger and better. Phooey!

In my day, players didn't care about getting stronger or better. They had their flabby, billowy bodies and they liked it! Every time someone wanted to get stronger, they tied themselves to the nearest pair of cars and pulled and pulled until their muscles shredded in their arms. It was a mess, with players arms flapping around like an elephant's ears. If players were caught by the league, their chicken salad arms were stapled to their foreheads, leaving their forearms to flop around like a trunk!

And players didn't just get to choose where they wanted to play for however much they were worth! Flibbity-flobbity-floo! Progress! Ha!

In my day, players were lucky to wear a jersey anywhere! Scouts grabbed players off farms all over the country and stashed them into their travel trunks, feeding them with the droppings of their pet parrots. When they got to the club's city, the players were thrown into a dark, moldy pit below home plate and made to catch rats with their teeth! The star players would show up to the locker room with blood-stained lips and flecks of rat meat stuck in their hair. Bench-warmers would be lucky if they hadn't spent the night gnawing on their own flesh for sustenance.

That's the way it was and we liked it! We loved it! Because we were idiots. We were rubes. Just a bunch of fools living in moldy pits under home plate with our permanently damaged arms stapled to our foreheads and our forearms flopping around like elephants' trunks chasing rats around in the dark, hoping to be lucky enough to taste bird shit!

And that's the way it was and we liked it!

Thank you for reading

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bossfan101
12/13
Fantastic.
mcquown
2/09
Testing Baseball Prospectus Comment Notification system.