Phoning it in

 Now that my Pittsburgh Pirates ("Not again!" you're saying) are back in their ancestral home, the NL Central cellar, it might be instructive to consider why they are the superlative Cruds they are.

("No it wouldn't!" you're saying. "We don't care!")

Well ... we're gonna do it anyway.

That's because something happened yesterday that was perhaps uniquely Crud-like, as the Buccos took on the Arizona Diamondbacks in another losing effort. What happened was, second baseman Rodolfo Castro slid safely into third base at one point -- and so did his cellphone.

See, he'd stuck it in his back pocket and forgot about it. And when he slid into third, it popped out of his pocket.

Third-base umpire Adam Hamari spotted the phone with his well-trained umpire's eagle eye and pointed to it. Presumably he did not also say "Hey, look! A phone!" 

The chagrined Castro said later he'd forgotten he'd put the phone in his pocket, and, boy, what a stupid I am, and also, geez, what a knucklehead. He did not answer the relevant question, which was why he had his phone in the dugout to begin with.

Meanwhile, the Cruds manager, Derek Shelton, could only shake his head.

"You stay around the game and you see things you haven't seen before," he said.

"Do this mean you guys are phoning it in?" some wiseguy reporter asked.

OK, so no one asked that. But it would have been cooler if they did.