Bye bye Burnie

In news so unsurprising that the Post Gazette hasn't even covered it, the Bucs are buying the second year of Jeromy Burnitz's contract out for $700,000. This is what Dave Littlefield said about the whole thing:

When we originally signed Burnitz, we felt that we wanted to sign someone to a one-year contract -- in his case with a club option -- with the idea of giving some other players time to see how they developed. Right now, our feeling is that we're going to look in another direction, whether that's internal or through a trade or maybe through another free agent.

What he meant was this:

Oh, damn. I should've listened to everyone that told me signing Burnitz was a bad idea. I mean, we offered him the same contract as the Orioles and he chose ours because our physical was less rigorous. That was a big red flag that I just kind of ignored there. Anyways, now that the fans know that Burnitz sucks, we can't really fool them into thinking he'll hit 30 homers next year. That means that we're going to have to move on in some way, whether it's relentlessly pimping Xavier Nady's abilities and hoping that no one notices that he's a less talented version of Craig Wilson, or making ridiculous "Paul Maholm for Mark Teixeira" offers, then telling the fans we tried to upgrade our bats but no one was interested so we're just going to have to settle for Ryan Klesko because hey, he's not too bad and he's left-handed too! Whatever you do, don't tell Kevin about this conversation. If we start off 2-0 in April I should be extended through the apocalypse.