A highly-paid doctor or two opened up Edgar Renteria's right arm the other day and found all that money he could have been saving with Geico, in the form of quarters and nickels. At least that was the size of the "significant bodies" that had separated themselves from his elbow-bone, and their discovery caused the Giants brass to gush all over themselves about Renteria's warrior-like behavior: pillaging villages, stealing women and killing livestock. That type of thing. But it's hard to ruin someone else's primitive civilization with painful bone spurs, mate.
All kidding aside, I commend Renteria for trying to give the Giants their money's worth -- and ours, too. I don't come here to bury Edgar. But the fact that he was, in Brian Sabean's words, "fried almost at the All-Star break" makes you wonder what the team docs were looking at when Renteria got his physical in December. Warrior-worthy bone spurs and chips don't appear overnight. Were they not detectable before the Giants pulled the trigger on the big hairy contract?
Then in July, the docs signed off on Freddy Sanchez, who admitted recently he knew before the trade he would need off-season knee surgery. And he didn't even have a rubber mallet and stethoscope. Presumably the Giant medical staff had all this, and more -- they even had Sanchez in town while the deal was going down -- and they still gave Sabes the green light. Or maybe not. We dwell in speculation land here. Perhaps they gave Sabes the flashing yellow, and Sabes floored it anyway. If the docs said Sanchez was good to go, they were embarrassingly wrong, and if they said proceed with caution, Sabean showed no signs of doing so when he probably could have at least extracted some cash from the Pirates to help defray the costs of Sanchez's contract.
Whatever the case, the Giants bought high twice on damaged goods, and it would serve Bill Neukom well to figure out who knew what and when before his general manager, whoever it might be, starts wheeling and dealing as the hot stove heats up.
