Gregg Zaun: Another Guy Who Retired

Man the light is shitty in the Dome when the roof is closed. Also, a bat!

Gregg Zaun retired yesterday, which is fine.  He's been around for kind of a long time.  He was a solid backup catcher -- which means you can start in Toronto -- who got on base a little bit.  But he's also, like, just a little bit of a douche, or at least he played one on TV in his role as Rogers Sportsnet in-studio playoff analyst alongside the ginger menace Jamie Campbell (who used to do Blue Jays play-by-play, and whose home run call sucked, and so he got shitcanned).  People seemed to like Zaun in really dumb pinstriped suits pontificating about whatever, but I generally didn't (who cares, I know, fine). He is partially redeemed by the Flash-intro genius of his personal website, which suggests an IRL Kenny Powers level of self awareness.  "Bring your Z-Game!"  Join the "Zaunbie Nation" fan club!  Etc.! 

The thing I like best about Gregg Zaun, though, is that he was named in the Mitchell Report, and handled it really, really badly. The accusation was that he'd bought steroids and paid for them with a cheque (who wouldn't? cheques are convenient as hell), and then when asked about it, said, first, "If you want to investigate what is going on in the game of baseball right now, fine, but what happened years ago, who cares?" and then, "You're talking about one check of thousands that I've written over the last seven years. I'm supposed to recall why and when and to whom and where?" Ahahahahaha awesome. Eventually he came out with a pretty plausible story, really, and I neither know nor care whether or not Gregg Zaun purchased or used performance enhancing drugs.  If that is something that you care deeply about you should ask yourself if you are spending enough time thinking about foreign policy, or, like, Proust. But that was the career highlight from my perspective, the aftermath of the Mitchell Report.  Zaun himself was probably way more into the 1997 World Series, but whatever.        

KS