Sidney "Poison" Ponson

As I remarked in my blog when he was released, Sidney Ponson has brought his teams little but grief to go with his occasionally adequate pitching. When the Rangers released him, I’d hoped that would be the last of Sir Sidney.

The nickname comes because Sidney was actually knighted in his native Aruba by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands (Aruba is offically part of the Netherlands). This knighting either signifies the paucity of suitable candidates in Holland, some wacky Monet-distance-effect that makes Ponson’s scurrilous deeds actually honorable, or the inevitable mental deterioration that comes with an inbred monarchical family with roots stretching back to the 13th century.

It seems the Yankees, however, want to give him another chance in the bigs, either dazzled by this royal imprimatur, truly desperate for pitching, or because of the inevitable mental deterioration that comes with an inbred baseball family with roots stretching back to the 1970s. For whatever reasons, the Yankees signed Ponson to a minor-league deal yesterday, with GM Brian Cashman saying the move was “an obvious one.”

Hardly.

It’s only obvious that the Yankees need starting pitching depth, with Chien-Ming Wang joining nine other Yankee pitchers on the DL, including future hotshots Ian Kennedy and Phil Hughes. That leaves them with a rotation of Andy Pettitte, Mike Mussina, Darrell Rasner, and a still-developing Joba Chamberlain, with Dan Giese expected to step into the fifth starter role.  That’s a shallow rotation, weighted at the older and younger ends like a barbell. Hurry up, C.C. Sabathia.

The Yanks could be forgiven for making a desperate play for a tried-and-true guy like Sabathia, even if I think his long-term career prospects aren’t good. But to bring a clubhouse poison like Ponson back to the Yankees is like the castaway so thirsty that he resorts to drinking seawater—it looks enticing, just like what you desperately need, but it’s gonna kill you.

Given the delusional state of a Yankees organization ready to bring back a guy whose record with the club in 2006 was 0-1, with a 10.47 ERA. According to Cashman (and the statistics), Ponson was pitching better than that at Texas. But numbers aren’t everything, and Ponson was enough trouble that the Rangers—even more starved for pitching than the Yankees—couldn’t stand him.

The magical pinstripes of the Yankees can do a lot of things for a guy, but for a knight who already thinks he can do whatever he wants without repercussions, the ego boost from putting on a Yankees uniform is likely to make Ponson think he’s even more untouchable. My friend Johanna talks on her June 9 blog about how Ponson behaved at a bar in Minnesota. Johanna’s no prudish schoolmarm, likes to hang with the boys, and has plenty of experience with pro ballplayers, but she was totally shocked not only by Ponson’s attitude towards women (including his mother and sister) but also by his belligerent behavior when confronted about how he was talking. Neither his teammates nor the presence of women could dissuade him from his loutish, profane tirade.

This is the same kind of guy who assaulted a judge in Aruba over a complaint about Ponson’s speedboat handling. That’s right: he went after a judge over the aquatic version of a speeding ticket. In a year when we’ve seen Josh Hamilton turn his life around to the straight and narrow, we know that rehabilitation is possible; like they say on the investment commmercials, past performance is no indication of future returns. Sidney clearly has a behaviorial problem, one that's fed by alcohol, and as we've seen in cases like John Daly's, public professions of having a drinking problem mean nothing unless you actually follow through on them.

But we have yet to see Ponson do anything more than pay lip service to the notion that he needs to behave himself, and has never publicly admitted to having a drinking problem, let alone promised to do anything about it. In Texas, he was not only in trouble for off-the-field incidents in bars, but for showing up his manager and players on the field when he felt they weren’t being sufficiently supportive. This isn’t the kind of guy the Yankees need, even if he’s got a triple-digit fastball (he doesn’t) or even a winning record for his career (he doesn’t).

It’s no accident that “Ponson” and “poison” are only one letter away, and we can all (Yankee fans or not) that he continues his stupid, selfish, reckless behavior at the minor-league level and never gets brought up to the bigs. No matter how desperate the Yankees might be for starting pitching, they can’t be desperate enough to allow Sir Sidney to return to the major leagues.

Whether you like the Yankee uniform or not, seeing this guy in any major-league uniform should turn your stomach. And if you are a Yankee fan, you may be starting to realize that life under Hank is starting to look a lot like life under his father: win at any cost, even if it means poisoning the clubhouse and desecrating the uniform.