Last January, Joe Blanton signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Blanton had spent 11 seasons as a starter for various teams and in only a couple of those years did he post a league average or better ERA, with the last time being 2009. From 2010-2013 he was downright awful. He didn’t pitch in the majors at all in 2014. He bounced back in a major way in 2015, however, pitching spectacularly out of the bullpen for the Pirates in the final two months of the season and respectably as a swingman for the Royals before that.
The Dodgers made a $4 million bet on Blanton’s rebound being the real deal, but a Dodgers fan many of you may know from the wonderful land of baseball Twitter, TheAmitie, bet against him:
Blanton, in fact, pitched 80 innings of 2.48 ERA baseball, which was substantially above league average (158 ERA+). Which means . . .
I made a bet that Joe Blanton wouldn’t pitch league average ERA+ for 75+ innings this year. This was a terrible mistake on my part, as he did it, and now I have to follow through on my bet to eat one of everything at Dodger Stadium.
He got the money to buy the tickets to the games and the concession items via Kickstarter and today he paid his debt to the gambling gods. Go check out the most recent set of tweets at his friend’s Twitter feed to see some video updates, which are enough to make me queasy. If, for no other reason, than this was prominently featured:
Thoughts, prayers for our soon to be very sick comrade at Chavez Ravine.
