Give 'em Some Stankeye!

The season is now less than a week away, which means no more scraping the bottom of the mason jar for stuff to write about.

On that note, former Giants utility infielder Cody Ransom was traded from the Cubs to the Rangers for a player to be named later, thus filling the Rangers' need for a light-hitting backup destined to become the playoff pariah. It'll be interesting to see if the PTBNL is anything worth mentioning, but more likely it'll just be an even crappier facsimile of Ransom or Wayne Franklin v. 2.0.

I remember a few years back when Ransom was being touted by Bay Area scribes and Giants front office folk as the SS of the future, the successor to Rich Aurilia, despite the fact that he was putting up ghastly strikeout totals at AAA Fresno. Ah, how the spindly have fallen. Mix an utter inability to make contact with some poorly-timed groundball muffs, and your ass is on the next train to Oklahoma. I don't think anybody seriously thought that Ransom was going to turn into a quality major leaguer, but when the alternative is a horrifying conglomeration of Neifi and 450 at-bats, you take whatever glimmer of promise comes your way. There was always this outside possibility that maybe Ransom could turn his prolific K's and reasonable power in AAA into an empty 20 home runs in the majors, like "the good" Alex Gonzalez of Florida, but even that proved too lofty a task. The fans turned on him when Felipe Alou developed a sick fascination with making him a late-inning defensive replacement, despite the fact that he was booting more balls than A.J. Pierzynski, and this led to the infamous blunder on October 2nd, but let's just avoid talking about that game shall we?

So now Ransom has turned into an MLB vagabond, and when you're going to struggle for time behind the charred remains of Eric Young, maybe it's time to go back for that law degree. So as you drift into the baseball sunset, Cody, I can tell you that, while the memory of you in a Giants uniform evokes the same kind of nausea as seeing Philip Seymour Hoffman in a speedo, I can at least say that, in the end, you were better than Neifi Perez.