Voila_Capture597Stop the presses. Stop them now! CAN THEY BE STOPPED? WHY DO WE STILL USE THESE THINGS?!?!?!

Anyway, big news: David Murphy, that highest of high cheeses, and I agree on something– Ruben Amaro’s backward incompatibility.

Today, Mr. Cheese wrote the following about Amaro’s justification for signing a 36-year-old PED user who came off a mysterious career year just a year after being suspended for taking medicine to prevent him from growing post-‘roid tits (excuse us for being skeptical, Mr. Amaro!):

Said Amaro: “I have to trust my scouts on it.”

There it is. Print it out, highlight it, and hang it on your refrigerator with the 2014 schedule magnet that implores you to purchase tickets. Because here’s The Thing: Amaro does not have to trust his scouts on it. This is not 1998 anymore, and the way that decisions need to be made in Major League Baseball no longer calls for an exclusive reliance on the expert testimony of three or four men. That is not meant to diminish the abilities of those men. They are skilled people, good baseball men, the kind of employees every organization needs.

But if Byrd flops in his second go-around with the Phillies, it won’t be for the lack of some critical scouting insight, for some identifiable flaw that somebody missed while sitting behind home plate with a radar gun and a notebook. It will be because the evidence that those scouts provided was misused by the people to whom it was provided, the people who are responsible for deciding what amount of weight to assign to that evidence, the people who are responsible for placing that evidence into the context of all of the other evidence that is available to a major league front office in the year 2013.

Good stuff, David!

One reader, however, didn’t appreciate Murphy’s long-winded rant. Here is the email exchange, so dutifully encapsulated by the Outlook 2007 on Murph’s machine [read backwards]:

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Dammit. He goes and blows all that goodwill with a douchey response, workshopping the different between stating and making a point. I’m back to hating him now.