Where will the the saga of Carlos Delgado take us this year?
It’s a long story, so you better grab a seat and sit yourself down for a spell.
The tale begins in April of last season, and takes us back to the old days of the "Wild, Wild West", when a town would hire themselves a gunslinger to help rid the town of all the riff-raff and make it respectable again.
Carlos Delgado was brought in to be our gunslinger. He was supposed to strike fear into the hearts of opposing pitchers. He had the quickest bat in the West (and East too), and his shots were lethal.
It was a great story in the making, even one Sergio Leone would have loved. Unfortunately, this gunslinger was a little long in the tooth as Clint Eastwood would say, and his horse is just about ready for the glue factory.
Carlos Delgado still packs a six-shooter, but these days it’s loaded with blanks.
Luckily for Delgado, he has a cozy relation ship with the town’s marshal, Omar and his loyal deputy, Willie. Both of them refuse to turn their backs on their gun for hire, despite all the evidence that he is at the end of the trail.
Yesterday, Willie had such high praise for the one-time gunslinger, that he said "It’s way too early for me to be overly concerned about Delgado, and I have no plans to take him out of the five spot."
Way to early? Omar and Willie are starting to sound too much like "The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight". They better be very careful or this town will "Hang ‘Em High".
The bottom line is that the local undertaker is already sizing up Delgado for a wooden box with a cross for Boot Hill cemetery in Tombstone.
Sometimes even the greatest gunslingers have to know when to call it quits, and this one is long overdue.
Maybe next season the Mets can come up with a "Fist Full Of Dollars" and get themselves Mark Teixiera "For A Few Dollars More".
Until then our poor town will be left unprotected as long as Carlos Delgado remains in the middle of the lineup.
It’s high time for Delgado to ride off into the sunset.
There’s a train headed for Hackensack pulling into the Willets Point platform at "High Noon". If Delgado knows what’s good for him, he’ll be on that train.
