Way to kick off 2006 with a bang

Happy 2006 everyone, hopefully this year will be better than the last (for the Pirates especially, but Pittsburgh sports in general).

To kick off your new year with a bang, Rowdy provides a link to Listin Diario, some kind of Dominican website that curiously has a Rob Rossi (presumably the one from the Trib) article about the Pirates pursuit of Sammy Sosa. Using one of the commenters' translations from Bleed Cubbie Blue (a Cubs blog that Rowdy found the story at) the story starts off with:
Joe Randa came back to the Pirates to play third base; now, Sammy Sosa might be joining the club to play right field.
With Eric Byrnes in route to Arizona, the Pirates have turned their attention to sign the Dominican homerun hitter, who's a high profile free agent already reached by many teams.
This is curious for a couple reasons, the least of which involves Sammy Sosa (namely because I won't be that surprised if we try to sign him). First off, it's curious because it's credited to Rob Rossi, the Trib writer, but is nowhere to be found on the Trib's site at the moment. I would assume that it hit the wire before it hit the Trib's site by some odd circumstance, but the article is dated yesterday. I would think that if it was written sometime yesterday it would be on the Trib's site by now, unless they took the day off (which they didn't judging by the Steelers/Lions articles I'm finding there now). That leads me to draw one of several conclusions:
  • There's a guy from the Dominican Republic named Rob Rossi who was in Pittsburgh and filed a story about the Pirates interest in Sammy Sosa.
  • The Trib secretely canned Rob Rossi and he immediately found a new job in the D.R. and broke the story armed with inside information he gathered before his firing.
  • Rob Rossi's in the Domincan for the Winter League (do we even have anyone there, I know we have guys in the VWL and MWL, but the DWL?) and is moonlighting for some Domincan paper to make some extra cash.
  • Listin Diario made some shit up and slapped a local reporter's name on it.
  • (and this is the most likely) The Pirates are really truly interested in Sammy Sosa and that article will show up on the Trib's site (in English) around midnightish. Which is a good time for nightmares to start.
I won't lie, it's probably the last one. I'll keep my eyes peeled for it to show up somewhere else, though.

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