When your losing streak hits four games, when you find yourselves on the business-end of two back-to-back bitch-slappings by the perennial AL East cellar dwellers, when one of the most destructive offensive weapons in your arsenal is ailing, these are the times that it’s good to have a Josh Beckett in your rotation. Because you just know he’s siting in the corner, tattooing his body with multicam, doing some of those weird-ass jujitsu gyrations like Martin Sheen at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, and burning effigies of Akinori Iwamura and Carl Crawford. I have little doubt that Commander Kickass will come out fully strapped this afternoon, guns blazin’, hell raisin’ and generally reminding the Tampa Bay fans that any team with a guy named “BJ” in the line-up needs to know its place in the MLB food chain.

Here, again, I feel the MLB mugshots tell you everything you need to know about today’s starting pitchers:


“The blood of my victims. The tears of their fans. The lamentations of their women. These are things that please me.”


“Mom, is my Slayer T out of the wash yet?”

Cue Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” folks. The carnage begins at 1:40pm.