Pierzynski no longer gets cheers

My wife and I said the word at the same time with the same inflection: “Pierzynski?”
It was a Saturday night. I’d grilled some chicken over the charcoal, and we were watching a baseball game. The Reds were playing the Atlanta Braves.
And A.J. Pierzynski was catching.
Pierzynski?
How many years have we been watching him? And with how many teams?
It started back in 1994 when he was drafted by the Minnesota Twins. At that time, the Twins lowest-level — A — affiliate was the Fort Wayne Wizards. And that summer A.J. Pierzynski was a Wizard.
He was a catcher, and he could hit. But it was also quickly apparent that he was a bit of a jerk. He was a hot-head and had an ego as big as all outdoors.
But he was a Wizard, so we rooted for him.
And we rooted for him when he was called up to the big leagues by the Twins. At that point, my brother Steve, a Twins fan, was also rooting for him, even though he too was aware of the player’s tendency toward being insufferable.
That lasted a few years, so we grudgingly continued to root for A.J.
But in 2003, the Twins traded him to San Francisco.
OK, I thought, I like the Giants. They’re one of half a dozen teams I follow casually.
But that didn’t work out at all.
A year later, the Giants released Pierzynski.
He then signed with the Chicago White Sox, and that truly irritated my brother Steve.
If you are a Twins fan, the two divisional rivals you watch closely are the White Sox and the Detroit Tigers. My brother has some grudging respect for the Tigers. But for Pierzynski — a former Twin — to now be a member of the White Sox was beyond the pale.
Not only was the guy a jerk, he was a Quisling. That meant that if Steve couldn’t root for him, neither could we, despite his minor league roots in Fort Wayne.
The boos were plentiful the entire time he played for the White Sox, from 2005 to 2012, when he was traded again.
For about a year, he was with the Texas Rangers.
And then a funny thing happened. He joined the Boston Red Sox.
With daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren in Boston, we have become — much to our surprise — Red Sox fans.
So, suddenly, jerkiness aside, A.J. Pierzynski was someone we were rooting for again.
It didn’t last long. He signed with the Red Sox in December 2013 and was released in July 2014.
That, we thought, would be the end of our relationship with A.J.
But who signed him? The Cardinals.
Another of those half a dozen teams we follow.
Connie has fond memories of her dad listening to radio broadcasts of St. Louis games when she was a kid, so there’s some loyalty at work here.
Fortunately, the Cardinal stint didn’t last long.
But A.J. bounced back.
He’s now with his seventh major league team, the Braves.
Does he have anything left after all this bouncing around? Who knows?
All I know is he’s playing against the Reds, so — once again — I’m rooting against him. Boo.