MLB Set For Showdown With Attention Whore Joe West

[UNHWildCats]

Earlier this week, Joe West’s personal publicist sent out a mass email offering up his client for interviews.

(Pause, to allow the proper spit-take at the fact that a baseball umpire is self-absorbed enough to keep a P.R. man in his employ. Now, clean up that screen.)

Such emails are not uncommon. With a resistance to the spam boxes in which they ought automatically deposit themselves, the blasts show up every few weeks. West is always promoting something. His country music CD. His line of umpiring gear. And, without fail, himself.

He seems to have forgotten the cardinal rule of umpiring: stay invisible. Anonymity is godliness to baseball’s arbiters, and Joe West is an infidel, an attention whore of Lady Gaga proportions whose proclivity for theatrics shames the umpiring profession.

Mercifully, Major League Baseball has tired of his antics. A source said the league plans to suspend or fine West, one of its most tenured umpires, after he solicited reporters this week to talk about the controversy he created in April when he called the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox “pathetic and embarrassing” because of their long game times.

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