Puttin' On The Pits

There were five or six reasons why this page lay dormant for ages and none of them are all that interesting. But there's two reasons why I'm back. To talk Diamondbacks' baseball and bear witness to the horrors metastasizing at azsnakepit.com.

The horrors, I tell you.

The Pit's set forth a sweeping censorship campaign disguised as some civility overhaul, and I got taken off guard - and offline - during a pomp and circumstantial Changing of The Mods.  This adolescent and uncivil power grab they dub "A New Hope" more closely resembles "The Phantom Menace" with hints of The Spanish Inquisition. Mainstream remarks magically disappear, sometimes en masse, and the funniest part is sinister warnings are issued after you're punished and your comment is killed. 

These after the fact "warnings" or chilly online icebergs, lock up one's screen with all the inherent charm of pop up malware, except there you might at least momentarily glimpse something useful, like an indecent girl or decent mortage rate, instead of being laboriously told what you already know isnt true: that YOU HAVE BEEN ISSUED A WARNING!!!

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In club news, somehow this free postgame storytelling confab completely eluded the Pit's paltry eight man editorial staff.   Bound to happen, I suppose, when they're up to their epaulets, restricting all speech requiring restriction. 


One thing I did see over there was this magnificent slideshow of Jeff Moorad's 16,100 sq foot house in PV.  Apparently, it's up for sale again. You may remember Moorad. He was Kendrick's partner, whose mlb ownership application here was a long, drawn out, contentious struggle. When he finally two timed his way out of Phoenix, he and Kendrick squabbled for two more years over Moorad's outgoing share. Then his failed attempt to buy the Padres took another couple years. Now he's trying to dump his Queen Mary of the Desert for the second or third time.

I cant find evidence Moorad's tried to actually kill any of his adversaries, but it seems reasonable to conclude from this litany that one of his negotiation strategies is hoping some of them will simply die of old age.

And take a look at that house!   Maybe if he had downsized a tad, to nine or ten bathrooms, he'd have saved just enough to buy the Padres.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Turns out the Pit did note the storytelling bit, in the ninth paragraph of one of their roundup columns. And I missed it. One of their typists was kind enough to bring that to my understandably sporadic attention ;-).