walks a few feet and then slows down

turns around and looks nostalgiacly

nods head and walks back

I too will applaud him when he returns to SF in a Phillie uniform, but I wouldn't buy him a beer. He doesn't seem like the type to drink anyway. And I don't have any money. Everybody wins! Good luck, Pedro.

Pedro Feliz is like a loveless relationship. You're friends. You enjoy doing some things together. You fill in just enough of each others "gaps" that the partnership is justified year after year. But you know there is no love, you know there is no passion.

Deep down inside, you admit there is something better out there. Way better. Of course there will be nerves and maybe a little sadness upon the initial split. You've grown comfortable together. You've even shared some great moments. Maybe the sadness comes from a regret of all those wasted years.

Pedro Feliz is not the enemy, and deserves a very warm welcome back to Mays field. Feliz played whenever and wherever the Giants asked. He's gunna have a great season in Philly, but would have turned in his typical season in SF- so it's a mutually beneficial split. It's easy to get a little nostalgic right after the break up. But after a brief period of mourning, you realize there are more fish in the sea. And Giant fans can learn to love a third baseman again.

My old next door neighbor had that same car, but she's Filipino so it was an eighty-pour bolbo.

Feliz is like the annoying friend everyone has, where the friend constantly does things that make you feel uncomfortable and embarassed to know that person, but deep down you know he's a good guy. A lot of this isn't so bad. It's just dealing with the circles around you two that makes the friendship hard to maintain. And while people can crow "OMG FRIENDS FOREVER!" you know you can't always be friends with this person because they just drive you up the goddamn wall sometimes. Grasping for answers to the question, "why are you friends with him/her anyway?" etc.

So you apologize to alleviate your own guilt over judging another human being so harshly. And the friend sort of knows all along that they bug you, but since it's an awkward topic to breach for most people it never gets discussed. So you go on for years and years and years of periods of not speaking to one another, not because one necessarily did something bad to the other. Nothing outside of the minor offenses that caused this whole thing to begin with. It's just getting more and more awkward to let it go.

Feliz signing with the Phillies is the cut ties that people in this situation almost never get. While the friend in this scenario might move away or get a new job or something, they still might email or call and say hey next time I'm out there maybe we can get coffee, and then you find yourself making excuses to get out of it, or accepting because that pesky guilt comes back. However I don't think Pedro will want to have coffee with us anymore.

Guilt. Guilt keeps you together. Pedro is gone now, so the guilt stops on our end. Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe it'll manifest itself as the annoyance we feel when some dumbass writer inevitably calls the Giants stupid for letting Pedro walk after he hits inflated home run numbers in that band box of a ballpark he's headed to. Either way, we may never be completely free of our annoying pathetic friend. And that, friends, is why hell is other people.

Pedro Feliz is like that third baseman who came up with the Giants, showed some impressive power, but then revealed that he was 2 years older than everyone thought.  He was fitting right in as a super-sub with some pop, and generally not much of an issue.  Then some genius decided to hand him the full time 3B job.  

He was just like that guy who continued his hacktastic ways for YEARS.  It seemed like every year Pedro would be like that guy whom everyone said  "this off-season he learns how to walk".  But he's like the guy who never did.

He's similar to that guy who becomes an object of ridicule - a lightning rod of abuse if you will - but all the while he's putting up really a ridiculously superb defensive effort.

Finally, just when you think he might not be like the worst possible option, he's like the guy who signs with another team.

 

Feliz. Crede. Ensberg. Inge. This 3B used car lot is full of lemons.

My last job was with..Let us just say a multi-national consumer goods company. I was there for twenty years. In the beginning, it was great. The work was challenging, and there were moments of extreme bliss. Not the everyday stuff, but the "special projects" I was tasked to complete. In those moments, the brilliant light of accomplishment was so blinding it concealed the ugly flaws in the pure dark heart of the company. These rare moments were enough. For a while.

Over the ensuing years, the company always promised to change. To take the work that we the employees, had put into that promise of change, and make this the place they told us it could be.

Alas, the change never occurred. The promise of change continued to be offered, but the ugly flaws began to surface more frequently. Toward the end came my ephinany. They would not change anytime soon.  They were successful as they were. Why change? Very, very good at what they do, but missing the piece that would make them great.

We parted ways. They wished me luck and supported my decision. I still respect and admire the company. I still have contact with representatives of the company on a monthly basis, as we work in parallel industries. I do not hate them. We just went in different directions. They are successful and strong. I learned a lot from them. They were not the place I needed to be.  It was not a good fit.  

Adiós y buena suerte Pedro Feliz.

How long have you been waiting to use that title?

Your analogy is flawed, Grant. The "glove compartment" in your Volvo should have been the only thing that always worked pretty well.

It's a shame. I think working with Carny Lansford, he would have learned to be more patient.

Pedro Feliz is like a truck.

BERSEEERKER!!!

i used to use glasses; my prescription was 20/750, which meant if they fell off while i was driving it was pretty much the end of me. the glasses fogged up, got dirty too easily and i misplaced them too often. they were also prone to striking out with a man on third and one out. they were, however, a better alternative to not seeing.

then i allowed a young technician to shoot a laser into my eyes for 60 seconds, and i never needed the glasses again. i wanted to keep them around, just in case. but we all knew it was time to move on.

if i saw those glasses make an amazing play for the phillies, i'll cheer. unless it's against the giants, then i'll throw them into the lion's club donation bin again.

Pedro Feliz is like a bunch of bananas.

You buy the bunch of bananas, even though it's still kind of green, because you really want bananas. You're craving bananas. You need a banana. You can't wait for bananas, so even though you know the bunch you got isn't ripe yet, you rip a banana off, peel it, and take a few bites. But it's not satisfying. It's still too hard and the sugars haven't really started coming out yet so it just tastes like paste.

You're disappointed, but you're sure that if you just wait one day, these bananas are going to be great. So you wait.

Next day comes, you head downstairs to grab a bite of that sweet, sweet banana. You look at the bunch, though, and it's still a little green. You figure, "I've got plenty of bananas here, I can eat one today and have plenty left over for when they're really good." So you take one, and it's only marginally better than the day before. The sugars have come out a little, but it's still hard as a rock made of hard banana, with two or three spots that show the potential to have been perfect with just one more day of seasoning.

This vicious cycle goes on for three more days. You only have 3 bananas left on your 8 banana bunch. You consider going out and buying a new bunch. A better looking bunch. You'd been out yesterday and all the bananas there had looked great. But you didn't do it. You didn't want to throw away the bunch you've been working on for five days. You didn't want to waste your money when you knew that what you had at home would ripen any day now and you'd be eating the best fruit you've had in weeks.

So you come back to the bunch at home. You get the banana the next day and take the ripest looking one there. You're done screwing around with this bunch. It's time to put up or shut up about bananas! The thing is mush, though. You can't believe it. You've been waiting for these things to ripen, and it looks like they passed you by in the middle of the night!

Still, you concede that this might have just been one bad banana in the bunch, and decide to give it one more chance. A one day contract, if you will. You know there are two bananas on the bunch, but you're only willing to try one of them. So you eat one the next day. The last one you'll have of this bunch if it's no good. It's disgusting. All brown and way way too soft.

That's it, you're done. You throw the last one out your window, but some guy named Philly picks it up. He's a chef, and this way too ripe banana is perfect for this thing he's cooking. He's thrilled. The two are a perfect match.

All you have left at home are pears and oranges. You don't really want bananas anymore, but you want to remember what a good one tastes like. You go to store and all those great bananas you saw the other day are spotty and old. You're freaking sick and tired of bad bananas. So you screw it.

You'll just have a Frandsen when you get home. I mean an orange. It's not really a banana, but it's freaking time to settle for a piece of fruit that has any chance of being ripe.

My first car (circa 1993-4) was a 1982 BMW.  The original owner did not take care of her.  She had been sitting for a couple years.  It also at one point was converted from a stick to an automatic.  She had some major problems.  But what the heck, it was dirt cheap & I had the first paychecks in my life burning a hole in my pocket.  I replaced a lot, put on some new tires, gave her a nice shiny paint job.  When it was done, I had a pretty nice looking car that could get me from school to work to home.  My friends that originally laughed at her were jealous.  Everybody wanted a ride from me.  I was the kid with the BMW.

After six months, it started breaking down on me.  It stalled constantly.  I couldn't give up on her.  I pumped more money into her.  But the damage was done long before me, there was nothing I could do.  I loved that car.  I was able to keep her going for weeks at a time.  My baby wouldn't die.  Then what happened?  One day I take off for the beach & some old *** in a cadillac runs a 5-way signal & crushes my baby (luckily on the empty passenger side).  I pretty much got my initial money back for her parts, but it couldn't replace her.  I was depressed, my baby was gone.

Then about 13 years later Pedro Feliz signed with the Phillies & I've been feeling a little better ever since.

What?

I'm gonna miss that guy. The single nicest ballplayer I've ever met. Just a good, solid guy. Definitely gonna miss watching him flash the leather @ 3rd.

Amazingly, this is not an effort to get myself banned, although given that most of you live in San Francisco, I'll bet most can understand this analogy (though none will admit it):

Pedro Feliz is Dorothy Zbornak from the Golden Girls.

Sure, always wanted something sexier at third, like the slut (Blanche).  You would have settled for a dumber-than-bricks but heavily-hootered airhead (Rose).  Hell, I'm sure enough freaks here have a granny complex or can at least appreciate cynical, sarcastic humor (Sophia).

But we were stuck wiuth Dorothy.  We didn't wanna admit it, but Dorothy showed us a good time quite often.  While there were things that Dorothy never once could get right, like looking good (like being able to hit with runners on base in close games), she did have other redeeming qualities.

She was the best at one thing: being responsible (playing Gold Glove defense).  And while being responsible isn't sexy, SOMEONE has to play good defense... err... be responsible.  It keeps the team - the household - together.  Everyone once in a while she said something funny (20+ HR per season) and she loved to help kids and people through charitable work and substitute teaching (never complained about changing jobs, place in the order, etc.).

Yes, it pissed us off that no matter how many times we begged her not to wear huge f-ing drapes for clothes (not to swing at the slider 3 feet outside even know we all knew it was coming), we still TRIED to love Dorothy.

Perhaps it was our fate for being Giants fans.  Perhaps it comes from chewing on the batteries before we threw them as kids.  Nobody wants to admit that Dorothy showed us a good time now and then.

But now that the lights are back on, thank god she is out of here.  Our shame is ended.

* I am now going to go cry a little, vomit a lot, and hit up the bar behind center field.

Feliz is like a dumb brother in-law. He'll swing by everyday at 6th in order with a bag of air when he promised to bring the kids home from third.

He'll talk constantly through the movie, eat your Ben and Jerry's and then lie to your face about being able to hit the curve.

Sure, he'll be there every now and then when your wife is in a jam and save her from a bullpen double, but most importanly....

Pedro Feliz is like a dumb brother in-law, because when your sister divorces him, he's no longer your problem.

Watching Pedro Feliz leave the Giants is like being trapped in a dark theater with your wife/girlfriend watching the worst romantic comedy you have ever seen in your life. Not only does the movie blow chunks, but there's a guy a few rows in front of you who 6-foot-6 and is sitting as tall in his seat as he possibly can. He is making disgusting noises while drinking soda and eating movie nachos, making him all the more annoying. It's not so much that he's making noise during the God-awful movie, but it's the actual sounds that are annoying.

The guy finishes his food, gets up from his seat, and leaves the theater. While you are still there stuck watching a horrific movie, at least the one distraction is gone.

This thread had to be posted while I'm at work and don't have access to my Pedro Strike 3 animated gif...  It'll have to wait until later.  With some modification!

My first car was a '69 Volkswagen Bug.  It was crap.  It didn't used to be, but my parents bought it in 1969 in Germany and had it shipped back to the States.  It survived a family of seven driving around in it as our primary car for a while, it survived five teenage drivers...  It was a warrior.  By the time I got it, it was like driving a big steaming pile of crap.  Among the many highlights of the car:

• It had, for a long time, an auto-shutoff feature.  When I stopped at a stoplight or stopsign, the engine shut off.
  
• The paint job was initially blue.  It oxidized so badly, though, that it became black.  Thus the color Bluck was born.
  
• My sister ran it into the back of another car and crushed in the hood.  Even when I finally bothered to replace the hood, it couldn't latch because the body was damaged.
  
• Shortly after putting on a new hood sans the gigantic dent, but still with the bicycle lock chain holding the hood down, a pipe from somewhere or another flew up and slammed into the new hood.  Thus, my SECOND dented hood was made.
  
• The tail pipes regularly fell off.
  
• My dad dropped a tree branch on one fender and scraped the other up on the fence in the backyard.
  
• When my brother drove the car, someone kicked the door and dented it.  To cover the wound, my brother put bondo on the dent.  It looked terrible.
  
• At another time when my sister was driving the car, someone keyed the door.  The key mark remained there until the day we sold it.
  
• The Oh Shit handle in front of the passenger seat was loose and could be pulled out.
  
• The ceiling liner was torn all over the place.
  
• The driver side seat was essentially busted, so one butt cheek sat lower than the other.
  
• The vents in the front somehow leaked, so if I was driving when it rained, I got a second shower.
  
• The window roller handle thingies both fell off.

I took terrible care of that thing, even if I didn't abuse it necessarily.  And yet, I drove that car all of my senior year of high school, and almost all of college.  Until I bought a new car, shortly before graduation.  We actually sold the Bug for over $1200, which amounts to legal robbery.

I have no idea how this could possibly relate to Pedro Feliz.  But I saw other people sharing their car stories, I thought I'd share mine.

So long, Pedro!  Best of luck in Philly.  I'm sure we'll miss you more as soon as Sabean sticks us with an even crappier third baseman.  But if it's Frandsen for the time being, I won't miss you THAT much.

I don't know about an analogy that would work.

All I do know is, I cannot fathom the amount of strikeouts coming out of the NL East this coming year. Santana in the same division as Ryan Howard and Fleas? Let the K-count begin.

Pedro's biggest problem wasn't the low OBP, it was the fact that he was a very good glove who was expected post 2002 to be an offensive cog. I am sure in a good line-up like Philly has, he won't be the goat in their fans eyes like he was in SF.  That is not to say that the Phil fans won't wear him out with boos, they boo Santa Claus. The Phils will bat him 7th or 8th always.  A change of hitting philosophy may help him too. I think 25-30 HR's in that bandbox is a given. That is probably 20-25 more than your God-like Kevin Frandsen.

Okay, so my first car was a '90-something Ford Aerostar minivan. It was one of those things where I got my license and my parents said, "Here, you can drive this." The list of things that were wrong with it was longer than the list of things that worked: the passenger window wouldn't roll down, there were a few seatbelts missing, you had to snake your arm around the front passenger seat in order to open the sliding door from the inside, the brakes were bad, one of the taillight covers was broken (the result of my first accident) and there was no climate control. You had to have a blanket in the car with you in the winter and drive with the window rolled down in the summer, which wasn't so bad until a fly ended up coming in through the window at 40 mph and hitting me on the lips.

But it was effectively mine - my Ford Battlecruiser. (Probably because nobody else wanted to drive it.) I could go where I wanted to go, and I could take lots of friends along with me.

Eventually though, it got to be that the car stopped producing. The brakes got worse, and I almost spun out on a particularly rainy day. Basically, it had outlived its usefulness. My parents traded it in and got $500, which was about all it was good for, and I got a '97 Chevy Lumina. It was my baby. It had a CD player, and I could actually decide how warm or cool it was going to be inside. But then I left for school, and now my sister drives it more than I do, and she just doesn't understand the level of gracefulness needed to steer such a darling. (Yes, I'm a girl, and I'm getting poetic about my car.)

Draw any Pedro Feliz connections you will. Here's wishing him good luck in Philly.

Pedro Feliz is like a mid-80s album from any classic rock greats.  You start listening and you think "Alright Paul McCartney.  This isn't your best song.  But maybe the next one will be good."  Then you get to the next song and you think "Oh come on, Neil Young.  You don't suck now, right?"  Then you get to the next song and you're like "You might have totally lost it, Bob Dylan."  Then you get to the next song and it's decent.  Not great, but decent enough that you think "Hey George Harrison.  Good job."  Then you get to the next song and it's like "Oh, Jesus, Eric Clapton.  What in the name of God is wrong with you?"  Then you get to the next song and it's like David Bowie isn't even trying, it sucks so much.  And then on the next song, you think "This isn't as good as Pink Floyd should be.  It's not terrible, I guess, but it's  not really good and I'm sure there are better things out there."  You hear the Stones and you think they should just quit because it's never getting any better.  You hear the Kinks and, you know, a lot of this isn't anything special but Living on a Thin Line is stunningly good.  Who knew they still had it in them to do anything you'd like?  And then that '84 Who live album comes up and you're just like, "No.  Get out.  Just.  Get out."

That's Pedro Feliz.

Feliz is like crystal meth....there would be the times where he got 30 RBI's in a month, and played gold glove defense.....just like there were times when you'd sit in the back of your friend Tony's Acura Integra and soak up 120 bucks worth of billywhizz and have the most amazing conversations where everything you have to say, and everything you hear is the most insightful, amazing thing you could imagine.

And then there were the times when you spent your 2nd shift at the budget grocery store wondering if you would ever be able to eat again. And Pedro Feliz would flirt with the wrong side of the Mendoza line and the manager would wonder if he had any options left.

My first car: 1987 S-10 Blazer.  It was my grandpa's car that he gave to me.  Well, ok, I "payed" $1 for it.  It was a pretty high model when he got it.  But by the time I got it, it had gone a bit.  It did have Air Conditioning (vent).  It also had a heater (vent until about 20 minutes of running).  The headliner had been coming down always.  The seats were worn and torn.  And it had a stuck lifter rod (happened sometime after I got it...I swear it wasn't me) so essentially it was running on 5 cylinders.  Total gas mileage: in the 12 MPG range.  Also it wouldn't go on the freeway either, or else I'd be one of the people going around 50-55 in the slow lane.

I tell you though, when it was nice out before school/work, I'd open up the tailgate, lay back against the back seat, and just listen to some music.  Those were the perfect times with that car.

Hey, I guess it was an analogy.  Or were we not doing those anymore and just talking about our first cars?

Pedro Feliz is like this thread. Solid in some ways. A few great moments here and there. And yet, prone to meandering away from the strike zone with a lot of wasted, disappointing posts.

Come to think of it, my posts are sort of like Pedro Feliz, save for the great moments.