Afternoon Baseball

USAToday.com
This is Matt Lawton's reasoning behind taking steroids:
"Lawton took the steroid injection Sept. 20 in New York. Because he hadn't been tested for steroids all season, he figured he was safe."

Actually, that would make it the least-safe time to take steroids, since as far as I know, every player gets tested at least once a season. It's not like they forget these things just because a player's been traded twice in a year. Now if he had been tested twice already, or even once, that would be the time to figure he was safe.
With logic like that, hopefully Lawton hasn't ever tried to figure out the rhythm method with his ladies. Good luck to the Mariners; Lawton might decide to make a Japanese joke in September because he hasn't heard Ichiro speak English all season and he figured he was safe.

Now onto me. While I still defend the notion of considering giving Frank Thomas a call, I completely blew the whole post, and Mike called me out on it (click on comments), on forgetting about Andy Phillips. The guy's put up huge Triple-A numbers, which is as good a sign as you can get from a guy without big-league playing time. Also, in assessing Bernie, bumfromjersey did a far better job in the comments. So I sucked.
Now, I think that signing Bernie has messed up the whole situation. Without him, Bubba is the fourth outfielder without question and you could pursue Thomas to split DH/1B time with Phillips (and Giambi, technically). Against lefties, if you wanted to give Giambi a day off, you'd have two powerful righties to toss in there and still have a big lefty bat on the bench. Bernie's signing complicates things now, and I didn't give that enough consideration.

I'm not sure what they can do with that roster spot, because a bench that includes two 1B (assuming a Thomas signing) and two CF is not one that's going to help.