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Sunday, February 28, 2016

Dear Commissioner Manfred: Aroldis Chapman needs to be suspended for 46 days

Dear Mr. Manfred,

Latest scuttle-butt from Tamptown says tomorrow, you will hand down your long-awaited ruling on girlfriend-choker/garage-door-shooter/Yankee closer Aroldis Chapman. Even though the Chapster wasn't arrested by police, news coverage of his "incident" dictates that you must suspend him for enough time to get the message across:

Major League Baseball will not tolerate anything less than the highest moral caliber from its players and team employees, (owners and executives notwithstanding.)

Sir, Chapman deserves 46 days in the penalty box.

Why 46? Well, for starters - 46 is the number of human chromosomes, so there's the cool symbolism thingy. Secondly, 46 is a Wedderburn-Etherington number and a centered triangular number - the sum of the totient function for the first twelve integers. In fact, while we're jellin' on 46, it's the largest even integer that cannot be expressed as a sum of two abundant numbers!

Yep. In other words, if an even integer (Chapman) is pushing around an abundant hot number (his girlfriend), well - mathematically speaking, 46 is the bomb. Forty-six, baby! Slap it in the books, and the message will get heard: Don't choke your honey. Don't shoot your garage. Don't do drugs. And don't be cruel... to a heart that's true.

The perfect suspension - divorcing ourselves, for a moment, from the horror of domestic abuse - would be 46 days. As an aside, such a suspension would mean the Yankees get to keep Chapman not only this season, but next. That has nothing to do with this.

My guess is the guy has two good seasons in him, because nobody throws 104 mph forever, and he might be just the kind of fellow who should factor alimony payments into his financial future... so come 2017, he'll probably want a 10-year-day with three opt-outs... unless he's lashed to the Yankees for two years like Ahab to the whale.

Of course, the Yankees will have to pay him for two years. That means Food Stamps Hal Steinbrenner will serve margarine instead of butter at family functions... but get this: he will be lowering his cholesterol!

Sir, give Chapman 46 days, and I bet the Yankee franchise won't even appeal your decision.

It's win-win... 46 times! Forty-six days, Commissioner! Put it in the books!

5 comments:

JM said...

I take issue with this post, Duque.

Stick margarine contains trans fat, which has to be worse for your cholesterol than the tasty dairy fat found in butter. The Mayo Clinic says only go with tub margarine, which is less dense and only has vegetable fats in it.

Of course, all margarine tastes like crap compared to butter, with the exception of that stuff made with yogurt that's really good on my mother's homemade Polish bread (and nowhere else). Now, there's a match made in heaven.

At any rate, the cholesterol issue has been questioned by a good many people, since levels seem to be determined overwhelmingly by genetics as opposed to edibles, which is why nobody on earth can reach the ever-lowered 'ideal' levels without taking a prescription drug. Just don't get me started on the racket our medical system has become. If you read the fine print on those drug ads, by the way, you'll see that they decrease the risk of heart attack by 30% or something, but what they don't tell you is that is based on a typical 3 out of 100 people having a heart attack, and the pills bring it down to 2 point something out of 100. Whoop dee doo.

There's a line of medical thought (mavericks and ne'er-do-wells, I'm sure) that also says it's the triglycerides you have to worry about, because they're the things that catch onto your blood vessel walls and snag the cholesterol, causing build-ups and blockages. And you can drop a triglycerides reading of 300 down to 200 in no time by taking six or seven lecithin capsules every day, and if you want to go lower, just keep swallowing a handful of the 1250 mg capsules every morning. It's painless and doesn't screw up your liver like the racket drugs. Livers are meant to be screwed up by booze and booze alone, and we should not mess with God's master plan there.

Meanwhile, pass the butter.

Anonymous said...

JOHN, DON'T FORGET THE MILK THISTLE CAPS FOR LIVER CLEANSING..........ABOUT CHAPMAN, A 46 DAY SUSPENSION WOULD BE IDEAL..... BUT IT WON'T HAPPEN...... WHY?......BECAUSE THE PLAYERS UNION WILL FIGHT IT TOOTH AND NAIL, AND SENSING THAT, I BELIEVE MANFRED WILL MAKE THE SUSPENSION WAY SHORT OF 46 GAMES......MY PREDICTION IS LESS THAN 25 GAMES, WHICH OF COURSE, WON'T HELP US AT ALL.......................NOW, PICTURE THIS......CASHMAN DEALS ANDREW MILLER (LIKE HE'S DYING TO DO), LATER IN THE SEASON, OR EVEN BEFORE NEXT SEASON, AND CHAPMAN BECOMES A FREE AGENT, AND WE LOSE BOTH OF THEM LEAVING ONLY DELLIN IN OUR BULLPEN.....POTENTIAL DISASTER....

JM said...

Thanks for the milk thistle tip. Considering what the coming season looks like, my liver is going to need all the help it can get.

Alphonso said...

Was it a Colt 46 he emptied into her garage?

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