FanHouse Grills

No word on whether Bob Howry was helping Manny Ramirez make a sale or not, but apparently the Cubs reliever tweaked his back on Friday moving a barbecue grill around his house.

Howry threw yesterday and felt much better, which is a huge relief for Cubs fans, who can always count on Howry to give away a lead in the seventh and eighth innings:

While it wasn't as strange as Kerry Wood's hot tub injury during spring training, Howry's incident still merits a mention on the all-time list of bizarre Cubs injuries.

Has the reliever learned a valuable lesson?

"Yeah, next time instead of moving it, I might just wheel it," he said. "I didn't want to take the cover off to use the wheels, so I just picked it up."

Howry threw off flat ground Saturday and said he's OK to pitch. Manager Lou Piniella is more concerned about his trio of left-handers than Howry's health.

"We need our left-handed bullpen to start getting the job done," Piniella said, referring to Scott Eyre, Will Ohman and Neal Cotts.

Like I said, this is a huge relief, because Howry is so good at baseball. Wait, no he's not. Sell some more grills with Manny, Bob. You'll be doing the Cubs a favor.

Previously on the FanHouse in Grill-Related Hijinks:
Manny Ramirez Wants to Sell You a Grill
Manny Ramirez Loses Auction But Gains Endorsement

(HT: Baseball Think Factory)

Although Manny Ramirez's attempt to help out a neighbor by selling his grill online didn't quite work out -- eBay took down the listing when they couldn't verify Ramirez as the owner and when the bidding reached $99,999,999 -- the whole episode may have resulted in Manny picking up another sponsor. From the Boston Herald:

eBay removed Red Sox Manny Ramirez's Jenn-Air gas grill from the cyber-auction site Wednesday because the webmasters couldn't smoke out whether the super-deluxe rig was actually being sold by No. 24. And that's against the rules.

But while eBay wasn't so thrilled with the sale of the grill, the Jenn-Air people, according to Manny, were fired-up about it!

"The grill people called my agent; they want me to do a commercial for them," he told redsox.com yesterday.

I guess Jenn-Air likes the publicity, but aren't they missing the point? He was trying to get rid of the grill. I'm not sure he can offer the best endorsement. (But bloggers, on the other hand, I heard they make the best endorsements. And they don't even want money, just a grill to use for, uh, testing purposes.)