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Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Sodo No Mojo

Posted by on December 13 at 12:07 PM

The Seattle Mariners appear ready to sign outfielder/designated hitter Carl Everett to the team. In honor of this incredibly stupid move, here are some choice quotes from a Sports Illustrated piece on the troubled player.

Carl Everett is a man of conviction. As an Apostolic Christian, he believes that the Bible, interpreted literally, is the infallible authority on all matters. As the cocksure centerfielder for the Boston Red Sox he believes in taking on pitchers and questions alike with the same absolute assuredness. The man plays and talks with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Just ask.

Interleague play? “Don’t like it,” Everett responds. “They only have it because of two teams [the New York Mets and the New York Yankees]. It’s all about the money.” Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter? “Not a star.” The Mets, one of his former teams? “All those [management] people are hypocrites and idiots.” The Atlanta Braves’ starting pitchers? “You can run on them all day.” Big cities? “Hate ‘em. I need space.” American League baseball? “Boring.” Dinosaurs? “Didn’t exist.”

Uh, come again?

“God created the sun, the stars, the heavens and the earth, and then made Adam and Eve,” Everett said last Friday, before the Red Sox lost two of three in Atlanta. “The Bible never says anything about dinosaurs. You can’t say there were dinosaurs when you never saw them. Someone actually saw Adam and Eve. No one ever saw a Tyrannosaurus rex.”

What about dinosaur bones?

“Made by man,” he says.

There’s also this:

While with the Mets, Everett was kicked out of winter ball in Venezuela for going into the stands after some fans who Everett claimed were throwing beer at him. In 1997 he and his wife, Linda, were charged with abusing Carl’s six-year-old daughter, Shawna, and their five-year-old son, Carl IV. The charges were dropped, but a New York Family Court judge ruled that Linda, the girl’s stepmother, inflicted “excessive corporal punishment” on the children and that Carl did little to stop her. The couple retained custody of Carl IV — they also have three other children — but Shawna was placed in the care of her maternal grandmother, where she remains.

And don’t even get Carl started on the gays.

I know the Mariners are freaking out about back-to-back abysmal seasons, but if you’re trying to win back fans signing this dundherhead is not the shrewdest of moves.


CommentsRSS icon

As a former Bostonian, I am well aware of Everett's past buffoonery (note that article is over 5 years old). Having seen him play for the White Sox during the ALCS and the World series, however, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I'm not saying he's given up his bible-lovin', dinosaur-disbelievin' ways, but he's being hired to play baseball, not teach science, and he plays baseball pretty darn well. He also seems to have cooled off somewhat in the past few years. And I agree with him about Jeter.

oh, come on. the man has not been good since 1998. do we really need another al martin? oh that's right, he only beat one of his wives when he was in pittsburgh and then was a major contributor to the M's. i don't care much for his personal issues, but an aging left fielder is not what's going to get this team back in contention.

I laughed so hard at this, I peed my pants a little bit.

Unless you're a jock or a jock lover the best way to enjoy sports is to mock, heckle and ostracize the players. I say to Mr. Everett: welcome to Seattle.

Carl Everett also had a thing for hitting his kids. Some say it was just spanking with a belt, though one has to wonder when you see cuts and bruises on a child's face how hard he was 'spanking' them.

I can't believe an organization as allegedly family friendly as the Mariners would even consider signing a thug like Carl Everett, let alone be thisclose to signing him.

And like was said above, he is not that good a player anymore. I can almost see it if he was hitting .300 but not now. He hit around .255 this past season (below average) while playing his home games in U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago, a hitter friendly park, with the world champion White Sox.

I say someone take him out to Larry's to 'celebrate' before he puts pen to paper. For all our sakes.

bradley-

while i appreciate your concerns about carl everett's less-than-enlightened commentary, i have to agree with levislade that the m's are interested in signing him for baseball, not science.

everett's a gamer. he's got character, which is desperately needed for the m's. face it, the m's are made up of pretty boring guys who have lacked a clubhouse presence for the last few years.

what really bothers me about your post, though, is that you sound like you're channeling howard lincoln. you argue that we shouldn't sign him because he's a bad guy who would hurt the club's sparkling image as a family-friendly team. yes that might be a problem for the m's current business model. they're doing quite well right now as they lose 90 games a season. attendance has dropped a bit, but it doesn't really matter that much because people still come for the atmosphere that they've created where the game is secondary to the event.

the event is a part of why i like sports, but it's not the real reason why i watch sports. mariners fans are the worst in baseball because they don't care about winning, they care about the fancy dance routine that the grounds crew does in the 7th inning. they care, as you seem to, whether or not carl everett believes in dinosaurs (i think it's funny as hell that he said that. why wouldn't we want such an absurd character on our team? a-rod never said anything interesting.) because that might hurt the public image of the team. wtf?

bradley, signing carl everett might be the best thing we do this offseason. nope, he probably won't hit .300, but guess what? few players do. what everett represents is a change in the m's management philosophy. if we sign everett it means that we can have some players that are a little angry (hello gary payton?) because they like to win. it means that you have someone who's utter hilarity makes reading a sports column entertaining. it means that the m's really do want to turn the ship around. if that's what it really means than i'm all for that.

Can he hit a curve ball?????


Sorry, but once the M's take my tax dollars, and not just my ticket dollars, they have to be held to a higher standard. Even Charles Barkely agrees now, they are role models.

Carl and his wife beat his children so badly that the court took them away. One (WTF?) of them permanently.

Is this a new part of the M's and Children's Hospital partnership? Is Carl's job to make sure the beds at the Hospital are never empty?

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