Oh, my darlings, Batgirl is sorry to have left you for so long. Every moment was agony—and she is really not exaggerating. Extra special thanks to infield and RD for their excellent service during Batgirl's great time of need. It could not have been easy. We saw things—horrible things. Liriano down! Liriano out! Ass battery up the yin yang! But they performed admirably.

First off, everything on the east coast blows. Verizon is full of ass. When Batgirl called in July to order her service—and she uses that word lightly—she was assured that they would not mail the intertron tron until she arrived. Lo! What's this? A postcard from UPS, dated the day after Batgirl placed her order, with the totally wrong address on it, your intertron tron cannot be delivered to this totally wrong address, we will hold it in our warehouse for ten days, and then it will be shipped to China and turned into parts for this new line of robots we're making and those robots are going to seem like a really good idea until they evolve and decide mankind is evil and nuke the crap out of us. And so Batgirl calls to say YOU GUYS SCREWED THE POOCH and NO! DON'T MAKE THE ROBOTS IT WILL BE THE END OF US ALL and there's no option to press for that and gets put on hold and transferred around and put on hold some more and hung up on a couple of times and essentially the robots are already here, they're answering the phone and they are already trying to kill us softly with how much they suck.

And then it would be better to call Comcast Comcasst. Why, just today, Batgirl was to get her cable hooked up so the BatKitties could watch Animal Planet, not to mention Batgirl's MLB EXTRA INNINGS package, and she waited ever-so-patiently for the nice cable man to come and do the voo doo that he do, for he was to come between 11 and 1 and Batgirl waited and waited and finally at 1:15 she called and Comcasst said, "Oh, your order was cancelled," and Batgirl politely inquired as to why and Comcasst said, "Because the technician went to your service address and they said no one ordered cable there," and Batgirl politely said that that was absurd because Batgirl had, indeed, ordered cable—complete with Animal Planet and BBC America and MLB EXTRA INNINGS—and no one had, in fact, arrived at her service address that day and if they had she certainly would have let them in with a smiling face and sunny disposition and further more if there was a problem why on earth did they not use the communication device known as the telephone, because it can be quite handy when you need to ask someone where they live. And Comcasst said they did call and the phone was disconnected. And Batgirl said that was very silly, since she was talking on that exact phone at that very moment, which means one of three things have occurred: 1) Miracle (It's alive!) 2) Slipped Into Parallel Universe 3) Comcasst is completely incompetent. You be the judge.

To make a long story short, Batgirl has suffered. Oh, how she has suffered. And reports from Twins land have been enough to make a girl lock herself in a room with the Verizon phone robot—hello? Hello? What happened to my team? Where are my runs? CAN'T ANYONE SCORE ANY BLEEPIN' BLARGIN' RUNS? Batgirl had an anxiety dream that she was called into pitch—and Batgirl is many things, but a pitcher is not one of them. She does not have the disposition and her few attempts at it during softball were rather like something out of a JC Romero appearance with less velocity and more weeping. But the team needed Batgirl and Batgirl was going to saddle up even though she wasn't going to make it out of the first inning and everyone knew it. This, Batgirl imagines, is much like Boof Bonser went through when he was called up. TR said, when trying to make the decision between whether to call up Boof or Scooty Baker, that he opted for Boof because he has a better strikeout pitch. Batgirl does not believe this for a second—she thinks TR put their baseball cards up, threw some darts, and that was Twins fifth starter history.

So, it's been hard is the point and Batgirl must admit she was feeling a certain amount of despair on Sunday, as if she may not be able to go on. But then Brad Radke took her in his good arm and said, "Batgirl, sometimes times are rough, sometimes your arm is held together with fish glue and your heart is heavy and the pain it burns it burns and all you want to do is go find some place where the telecommunications companies are excellent and curl up in a little ball with your batkitties and hide from the cold, cruel, incompetent world, but you have to get out there because your team needs you, because the ass-bats are on the rampage because the sucking times are threatening, and because you are Brad Radke and you are here to pitch."

Yes, my dears, Brad Radke put his arm around all of us yesterday, and he showed us something about living. Sometime in the future you will be in a place of great struggle, you will have impossible odds before you, but you will remember Brad Radke on Sunday, and you will get out there anyway, and you will pitch seven beautiful innings without your arm falling off, and it hurts like a bitch but it doesn't matter because you have a job to do, and you do it.

(Now, if only Comcast/Verizon felt the same way…)

P.S. Don't understand waiver trades? McSweeney's Rick Paulas lays it all out.