This year, as with many past years, I moronically agreed once again to participate in a fantasy baseball draft. My team is called the Tearful Apes, and year after year, they continue to live up to the team name, mainly because I am a horrible baseball fan. I came late to the game--1995, to be exact, the Mariners' "miracle year" where they won 25 out of their last 36 games to make the playoffs for the first time and then after miraculously beating the Yankees in the ALDS were then bounced by the fucking Indians, for Christ's sake--and I am terrifically lazy about, well, everything. This in a league where the other "owners" routinely do things like create intricate spreadsheets prior to the epochal draft days, and which they cannily use to draft odd gherkins with improbable names like Gruntin' Cody Stubb and Yeast "The Beast" Fennel, the Licorice-Flavored Phenom, usually to cries of "Great pick!" and "I wanted Zell "Tubular Bells" Wells!" Meanwhile, I sit mutely, knowing that never in my life will anyone cry "Great pick, Skot!" after I do something like pick up some guy who just got diagnosed with meningitis.

So my shame is annually great and widely celebrated by the lovely arseholes who play in our league, and I am regularly treated to derision and contempt when I do things like pick up free agents with dubious nicknames such as "Shit-Arm Jones" and "He Died In 1978 Baker" or attempt to propose trades along the lines of "I'll give you Scott Podsednik for seven pounds of stale rye bread." And then they laugh at me, because I didn't know that Scott Podsednik is a one-legged Klansman with rubella. Or so they tell me. I don't know.

Anyway. I thought you might like to meet the Apes. Because they want to meet you. You, the fans. Here is a transcript from a recent ad spot I filmed, and is now showing on the Home Mopping Network in between Carlos Mencia spots where he's hawking his new line of joke-telling Swiffers.

(Fade up on DAVID ORTIZ, one of our finest clutch-hitting sluggers.)

Ortiz: Hello! If you can hear this, please get me on another team. I can't take this much longer.

(Ortiz is cruelly sapped from behind by what is revealed to be Gerald Laird, the .129-hitting Rangers catcher. Ortiz slumps to the floor and begins snoring mightily.)

Laird: Hi, I'm Gerald Laird, and contrary to what you probably haven't heard at all, I exist in this world. I'd like you to meet some of the other Apes. Here's the frequently-injured sociopath Milton Bradley!

Bradley: HULK'S BACK HURTS!

Laird: Thanks, Milton.

Bradley: NAAAAAAAAAAAARRR!

[At this point, the video is crudely edited, most likely by my wife.]

Skot's Wife (V.O.): Let's not forget about Johnny Damon! He's dreamy.

Damon (grainy video): Uh, hi. I, uh, I'm dreamy. Listen, lady, maybe if you put down the gun--

Skot's Wife (V.O.): YOU'RE DREAMY!

Damon: I'm dreamy! Please don't kill me.

Skot's Wife (V.O.): Take off your clothes. Now eat this pineapple.

Damon (brokenly weeping): Please, lady . . .

[End clumsy edit. Fade up on Barry Zito and Dontrelle Willis, seated on thrones made of human tibias.]

Willis: So tell me again how you're going to get me off the Florida Marlins by filming this?

Skot (V.O.): I have no recollection of promising you that.

Willis: Every fucking year I hear that.

[Suddenly, Barry Zito flings a fastball through a nearby window.]

Zito: My bad.

[Zito begins flopping around on the carpet spasmodically, his eyes rolling back into his head. He mindlessly fires baseball after baseball into the plaster walls and some players. Milton Bradley roars madly, adding to the chaos, and several representatives from the San Francisco Giants frantically enter the room to offer Zito another contract extension while Joe Morgan calls for sanity before falling asleep in a beanbag chair in the corner.]

[Cut to Carlos Lee, aka "El Caballo" ("The Horse"), who is posing uncomfortably in bed with a severed horse head.]

Lee: I've got to get off this fucking team.

Bob Wickman: You're not kidding.

(Pause.)

Lee: Do I know you? You look familiar.

Wickman: Yeah. I'm the closer for Atlanta.

Lee: Didn't you die in 1978?

Wickman: Yeah. At least I got picked up before fucking Podsednik.