Twitter is a pretty great place, and these are the salad days.

In the past three days I’ve gotten into a Twitter argument with my old nemesis @jacquejones11 (here), I predicted to the second when Chip Caray (@kapaya1234 – here) would Twitter ban me, and just a few minutes ago, the aggrieved party in the “Ryan Dempster doesn’t want to go to Atlanta because he wants to live in Ted Lilly’s guest house in LA–even though we all know that’s where Ted keeps the bodies” thing, Braves pitcher Randall Delgado took to Twitter to first post a confusing tweet about the trade “Nothing happened Abt go to Chicago.”  (Apparently he meant nothing happened about him going to Chicago.  Then to clear it up, he posted maybe the greatest five word tweet of all time.

“They don’t did a trade.”

The fucking morons at Bleed Cubbie Blue are completely off the rails (comfortingly, and predictably, so) about the whole Dempster trade thing, and some people have taken to blaming Dave O’Brien of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for the trade not going through.  That’s ludicrous.

It all stems from Dempster claiming he was “blindsided” by the trade.  That’s bullshit.  The reason Dempster is mad isn’t that the Cubs and Braves worked out a trade.  He wanted to use his 10-5 rights to try to force his way to the Dodgers.  Even though he had told the Cubs he would go to Atlanta (which is why they got as far as they did in the trade talks) they are clearly his backup plan.  He figured he could quietly put that trade on hold…and if it died, it died…and try to get the Dodgers back in.  What he didn’t count on was that the world would know he had refused to go to Atlanta and that he’d suddenly be the bad guy.

Dempster’s entire act is that he’s the funny, everyman who every fan should love.  For two months he’s been trying to act like a saint about a potential trade saying he wants to play for a contender, but that he wants to make sure any trade for him really helps the Cubs.  What he never expected was that he’d get called on his bullshit.  But he did.

He’s going to get traded in the next six days, and he’ll probably get his way and go to the Dodgers (his refusal to go to one of the TWO teams on his list has taken all the leverage away from the Cubs in these trade talks), and chances are whoever gets him will wish they hadn’t bothered.

His numbers had taken a very consistent and precipitous decline over the last four years.  He’s 35, and he’s been on the DL twice this year.  When he’s pitched, for the most part he’s been very good, but at his best at this stage in his career he should be pitching to a 4.00 ERA, not the 2.25 he currently has.  But he’ll have two months to regress to the mean, and some poor contender is going to get to witness that.

Yahoo’s Tim Brown tweeted that the Cubs are telling teams they can have a window to negotiate a contract extension with Dempster as part of the deal (likely one way the Braves could convince him to say yes) but the problem is that teams don’t want him next year or the year after.  He’s old.  His appeal is right now and the fact that they aren’t on the hook for him in future years.

The best part of this fiasco is that while it was unlikely that the Cubs would want to bring him back next year (thought Dempster is, I’m sure, convinced they did) before, there’s no chance they’ll do it now.  He’s already cost them a high-ceiling 22 year old (our buddy Randall Delgado) and that’s sealed his fate.

What is it with Cubs players, that they can’t even leave right?