Now, the guy seems surprised that the hay is blazing out of control and he's trying to put out the bonfires of his vanity with a water pistol.
This is a huge story in Toronto, of course. It is sometimes lost on Americans that the handsome city on Lake Ontario is the fourth largest north of the Mexican border, a cosmopolitan metropolis of 4.7 million. Only Athens has a larger ethnic Greek population than Toronto's Danforth (aka Greektown). Toronto's Chinatown - 2008 estimate 400,000 - has four times more residents than San Francisco's famed landmark.
And every ethnic group in North America's most diversified city, from Albanians to Zaireians, is afflicted with angered blood as J.P. Ricciardi delays the man with the blindfold and cigarette by trying to undo a terrible financial mess of his making by dangling his All-Star pitcher for a sack of Kobe beef sliders - choice young, inexpensive, high-ceiling prospects.
Here, of course, we have the pulse-quickening possibility that rookie GM Ruben Amaro actually has a chance to guarantee not only this year's World Series repeat, but to string October parades together like endless strands of red-hued spaghetti. The franchise that has won twice in 126 years is humming the theme from "Dynasty." The sports talkers are all over it 24/7. Guys who were spitting on the Phillies' chances a year ago are now ready to trash their painstaking and expensive rebuilding of a fallow minor league system for another jab at the golden ring. Overnight-shifters who wouldn't know Michael Taylor from Elizabeth Taylor speak authoritatively about a hole in the Reading - now Lehigh Valley - outfielder's swing scouts claim he has.
