No one tell Pedroia about this.

(Photo from Boston.com)

So, you know, not a lot happening in baseball world, as it were, other than the team is apparently ready to trek to Japan to, no doubt, start an international incident. So I've been trolling around for other baseball news and Greta sent me this from the Baltimore Sun.

Most of you know that Nick Markakis is premiere amongst my non-Red Sox baseball boyfriends so this was, you know, a treat.

"By now, a small group of Orioles had gathered around Markakis, challenging the outfielder to do more. So Markakis, wearing only his white sliding shorts, picked up a chair, lifted it over his head and balanced it on his chin, holding the wobbly chair upright for about 10 seconds."

Ten bucks says Kevin Millar is behind this.

Greta, an Orioles fan, had this to say: "It should be in his contract that he is not allowed to do these dangerous things. He is our Big Baby Jesus. And you know it would be just about right for the future of the Orioles franchise to suffer a career-ending injury balancing a fucking shopping cart on his face while wearing roller shoes."

She is not wrong.

Amy had more local concerns. "We cannot let Dustin Pedroia find out about this. If we do, he's going to take it as a personal challenge and we're going to end up with a second baseman who suffers a freak eye injury after trying to balance livestock on his face or something."

"Yes," I said, "we really need to be sure these two are kept away from each other."

Which really leads me to wonder, what the hell would we have been in for had Kevin Millar remained with the Sox? Can you even imagine El Bencho, Paps, Pedroia AND Manny on the same team? Maybe the Sox didn't bring Millar back not because they didn't want to, but because Tito begged and pleaded and threatened to have another fake heart attack if they did. He's a patient man but there's only so much he can handle. And clubhouse Cirque du Soleil using Tek's sliding shorts as a trapeze is really not something any one man should have to monitor.

The mind boggles.