All-SCUM Team 1 - Sidney Ponson

I was inspired by the blog-created cards that are found at Badwax and the amazing Lebowski cards at Achiever Card Blog (and many others), so since I had a few moments, I dashed off a card to write about my most hated players . There are many little personal gripes and grudges I have against players (including an insignificant slight by Patrick Chewing that makes me hate him to this day) but I'm going to try to focus on players who I hate not just for their terrible attitudes and general personality terribleness, but also for their ineptitude on the field. Introducing the 2009 TMYH All-SCUM team.

A bit about the SCUMs. At first, I thought I'd try to be all clever by making it an acronym (you know, something like So Can't Use in the Majors), but scum is a good word to describe these guys. They're the guys who are unsightly on a roster, terrible space fillers who's every action irritates a fan. They're also hard to get rid of and end up staying with a team or in the bigs FOREVER.

So who better to inaugurate the SCUMs than my own personal Oriole scum-bucket, Sir Sidney Ponson (stats here). At first, he was an underachieving, potential star pitcher with a plus-four ERA. Then the tubby schmuck had a pretty good 2003 where he was dealt to the Giants at the trade deadline, for the awesome load of Kurt Ainsworth, Damian Moss, and Ryan Hannaman (nobodies), and then, like a true cancer, returned to give two years of terrible pitching and controversy. Knocked around on the ball field (6.21 ERA in his final season with the O's, 7-15 in the years since he's left the O's and sticking inconceivably with four different teams), he also knocked a judge in Aruba, DUI'd in Florida and in Baltimore, and was banned from international play for testing positive to a banned substance. He's fat, he's always had a terrible work ethic, he's a douche... Sidney Ponson is our first All-SCUM.