Barry Zito

By Nick McCann

I’m really glad to see the Padres bring up half of their roster from Triple A Portland. This season is over and they know it. Sure, you can still hear executives talk about how they don’t know if they are out of it on Mighty 1090 in the afternoon, but that is just because they still need to sell some tickets. Basically the Padres have decided to become what the Giants were supposed to be at the beginning of the year: a team using the season to develop young talent.

However, the Giants realized this in the beginning of the season and now they are a semi-respectable team within the context of the least respectable division in baseball. Everything they do right is a surprise bonus, and everything they do wrong is excused; except one gloriously awesome mistake: Barry Zito.

Barry Zito is a good looking guy. I can say it. Today, when a little boy buys a pack of baseball cards (HA!) with Barry Zito in it and shows the pack to his heterosexual sister to see who she thinks is attractive, she will probably say Barry Zito is the hottest of the bunch. If the sister is in the process of discovering that she is gay, she can also easily imagine Barry with long hair and still think he is hot. Kids are amazing!

Barry Zito also believes he can play guitar like Dave Matthews. And in interviews-before becoming a shell of himself- he would constantly wax on about how he preferred surfing to pitching. He is basically David Wells minus the unapologetic drinking with a few Jack Johnson ripoffs in his (ahem) catalog.

As far as I am concerned, there are two types of native San Diegans: People who to went Uni High and people hate people who went to Uni High. Barry Zito went there, so the fact that his 126 million contract is setting up to be possibly the worst signing in the history of sports, is very exciting for me and people who didn’t go to high school with the Walton brothers.

The 2008 Giants are probably my favorite team in Major League Baseball right now because they no longer have Barry Bonds, they are not the Padres' rival, and they allow me to watch a Uni High Alum suffer at 4-12 while earning almost as much as the Florida Marlins combined.

The Padres signed Mark Prior (a high school teammate of Zito's) to a small fraction of Barry's contract, but at least he never tries to sing.

The Kept Faith officially endorses the San Francisco Giants as the acceptable 3rd place team in the division as long as they spoil things for the Dodgers and Barry Zito loses 20 games.