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We don't seem to have a single photo of Scott Diamond that I'm legally allowed to use. SB Nation doesn't even acknowledge that he exists in the Twins system, so they don't have his vital information available to post, but he's scheduled to make his first major league start tonight for the Twins. We need to know something about him. And so in the interest of filling in the gaps, I've written a short biography of Diamond.
Scott Diamond is eleven feet tall and has feet made of pottery. He was raised in a tree house on the beaches of Zanzibar and grew up eating insects and the occasional traveling salesman. His mother was a Cape buffalo and his father was a bolt of lightning, and at the age of seven, he won a match race against two midgets riding a donkey.
Growing up, Scott displayed a precocious talent for needlepoint, and traveled extensively through the mountains of Bolivia, playing jazz music on a trombone he fashioned himself from the ruins of a locomotive. In high school, he killed three men in a duel, and astonished onlookers by eating an entire fully-dressed turkey dinner without using his hands. He once rode a zebra bareback in the Arkansas Derby and paid $2.40 to show.
Early in his baseball career, while playing in an independent league entirely contained in a Kentucky coal mine, Diamond once pitched thirty-nine consecutive innings without allowing a single hit, even though the season was delayed eighteen times by cave-ins. He was traded to the Braves for two cows, a goat, and three crates of early John Lee Hooker recordings, and later again to the Twins for the same price.
He is a man among men, a hero to the natives, and an outlaw in Gibraltar. He makes his first major league start tonight.
(The truth: Diamond is from Canada. He's a 6'3" lefthander, a Rule 5 draftee in the off-season from the Atlanta system; the Twins had to trade prospect Billy Bullock to keep Diamond at Triple-A. I seem to remember everybody being miffed about this at the time; Bullock's got an ERA around 5 in AA this year, so he might not have been on a rocket to the top, either.)