8/14/2009: TEMPE, AZ – Those looking to understand why it has been such a tough year for the Bakersfield Bears don’t need to look far.  Injuries to Jude Pew, Pat Lilly and Ted Boyd are three of the main reasons the Bears have underperformed and may be left sitting at home come October.  The most devastating was clearly the season-ending dislocated shoulder sustained by Pew.  After a vicious All-Star snubbing, Pew – who was hitting .323 (good for the second spot in the Sovereign League) with 20 home runs, 64 runs batted in, a .951 OPS and a 47.6 VORP, all in only 328 at-bats – was poised for a huge second half when he was hurt during a fluke base running incident in early July.  Injuries are part of sports and happen to every team, often without fault.  Sadly, many in Bakersfield believe that when it comes to this season and this rash of injuries, the cause is clear: His name is Glenn “Face” Harris, the Bakersfield Bears Head Trainer.

46-year-old Harris (who many of you know is the spitting image of his namesake, Dirk Benedict, who played the original “Face” on the A-Team) came to the Bears after a 12-year stint as assistant to the manager at Meadows Field of Bakersfield’s Taco Bell / Long John Silver’s / A&W Root Beer franchise.  Despite his good looks and quick cheesy burrito-making hands (or perhaps because of them), many believe that Harris is not qualified to be a major league trainer.  And truth be told, the results seem to back those complaints up.

In fact, many have questioned the perplexing hire since the day it was announced.  One popular theory is that the Bears front office meant to hire Dr. Glen (with one n) Harris.  Glen Harris is known as a world famous trainer and six-time winner of the Harris Award, named in his honor and given each year to best professional trainer.

Glenn (with two ns) Harris, meanwhile, not only has had no previous experience in the training field, his methods are anything but medically sound.  “I don’t believe in stretching,” declared Glenn at his inaugural press conference after signing a four-year contract (which includes three more guaranteed years).  “I have never had an athlete stretch before making a root beer float, I have never had any one on my team stretch before frying a hush puppie or a single clam strip and that is what I bring to the table.”  It only got worse from there.  “I don’t believe in exercise,” Glenn Harris recently exclaimed when questioned about the team’s poor conditioning. “Chet didn’t believe in exercise and you cannot argue with his results”.  Glenn was, of course, referring to Chester “Chet” McGee, his mentor and the tri-county district manager for the Yum Company.  Nobody in the Bears’ front office (or the media for that matter) knew what he was talking about.

Rumors have swirled since the hiring, but General Manager Jon Rosenblatt is not about to admit he had accidentally hired a man who left vocational school without a degree to “pursue his dream” (as he put it) when offered a position as head greeter at an area Arthur Treacher’s restaurant.  Still, even Rosenblatt had to be concerned with the team’s recently announced “revamped” dietary schedule of alternating days of fried chicken planks and fried fish nuggets .  Worse yet are some of Harris’s other unorthodox methods.  He once treated catcher Gabriel Camacho’s strained oblique with a “patented” mixture of mole and tarter sauce.  He has repeatedly used discarded deep fryer oil in post-game massages.  Finally, and perhaps worst of all, Harris was recently reprimanded by the team for requiring Danny Woodruff to work his 40 hour a week shift at the airport throughout April and May.  Harris claimed it was all a misunderstanding and that he merely believed the repetitive motion of manning the soda fountain would help with a tight shoulder.

Bakersfield has refused comment on the latest dust-up, which regards Harris’s decision that the Bears’ warm-up uniforms should consist of puffy pirate shirts, T-shirts exclaiming “Yo Quiero Taco Bell!” and foam domes full of A&W root beer.