Wash, Rinse, Repeat

Shank's down on Red Sox third baseman Will Middlebrooks:

BALTIMORE — He’s a real Nowhere Man.

Will Middlebrooks broke his right index finger trying to catch a screaming liner off the bat of Ian Kinsler May 16. Four days later, Stephen Drew signed a $10 million contract to play the rest of this season with the Red Sox.

After signing Drew, the Sox brass sat down with Xander Bogaerts and gently broke the news to the rookie that he’d be moving from shortstop to third base for the rest of the year.

Nobody in the Sox front office said anything to Middlebrooks after the Drew signing. And no one really notices him now as he travels with the Sox and hopes to be ready to DH in the minors some time soon.

Those of us who connect dots for a living assume that Middlebrooks’s days with the organization are numbered. It’s as if his time has come and gone before the age of 26.

As Mike noted with yesterday's column with respect to Stephen Drew, Shank writes a lot of this column with a template that shifts ever so slightly from the last one - start the column with a lame song lyric, conveniently ignores what he wrote two weeks ago when he bitched about the lack of farm system help and then mentions two of them in this column, briefly recaps Middelbrooks' career, then raise some questions that are, in part, designed to create controversy.

Classic Shank, with a twist of lime!