Is there ever a weirder day in fandom than when your team inexplicably signs a guy you can’t stand? There really isn’t anything in life that I can compare it to, and all the analogies I can think of seem wildly inappropriate (most of these involve either Nazis or people that still fly confederate flags.)  Yet, this phenomenon seems to happen more and more in our sporting world.

 

The basic situations is you spend X amount of years rooting against a guy. You yell things at him as if he had just stolen your car… right after he burned your house down… right after he slept with your sister. You wish that he would be in some sort of accident. It’s nothing that would kill him, but something that would make him unable to throw a baseball or swing a bat (I generally root for mononucleosis).

 

And then, just like that, your team makes a move and you’re supposed to root for this guy.

 

I’m not entirely sure if I hate the Cubs signing of Jim Edmonds or if my mind is just rejecting the idea because it has been programmed to think Edmonds is a complete jerk for the better part of the last seven or eight years.

If we take a somewhat scientific look at this deal, there are both pros and cons.

 

Pro: He’s not really costing the Cubs any money.

 

Con: The last time I saw Edmonds trying to get up after diving for a ball in the outfield, I thought he’d been shot.

 

Pro: He can’t be any worse than Felix Pie, another "five-tool" prospect who can’t seem to figure out how to use his "tools" to make a bat hit a ball.

 

Con: Edmonds started his major league career with the California Angels. Just think about that for a second. Somewhere, there’s an 11-year-old kid saying, "I can’t believe the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim weren’t always from Los Angeles Anaheim!" (In related news, this kid is also repeating the 5th grade because he thinks "Los Angeles Anaheim" is an actual city.)

 

I could go on. But at the end of the day, even I realize the Edmonds signing is a low-risk investment.

 

Still…

 

After one game, I can’t seem to break my opinion of him. To be honest, I don’t know what I’m going to do if this works out. I might just have to go back to hating myself.