CONFIRMED: Pat Burrell is The Machine

A few days ago, dong-shot specialists Deadspin ran a video of Giants closer Brian Wilson doing an appearance with Chris Rose on his Fox Sports show Cheap Seats via satellite from his house when a man wearing a gimp outfit casually walked behind him mid-interview. Then later on, during a post-victory NLCS locker room celebration, Rose once again interviewed Wilson, but this time he referred to the leather-clad fella who mysteriously showed up at his house as “The Machine.”

Here’s some video to fill you in (wait until the :43 second mark):



So Deadspin asked, who is The Machine?

After narrowing down the suspects, they decided that the culprit was more than likely Pat Burrell, former left-fielder for the Philadelphia Phillies and Wilson’s current teammate. Now that’s some mighty fine investigative work by the Deadspin boys, because for the last couple of years, I have been sitting on a picture of Pat Burrell in all his gimp-outiftted glory, but never ran it because the guy who gave me the picture didn’t want to get caught.

Well, that was a few years ago when Pat Burrell was a Phillie, and since he’s now with the SF Giants, and it’s basically public knowledge anyway, I’m gonna go ahead and share the picture with everyone…

I don’t really want to go into detail about how I acquired this picture, but it was taken at Pat Burrell’s house in Arizona during a Christmas party in (I believe) December of ’04 (possibly ’05). According to my picture-taking accomplice, every year during his Christmas party — which is attended by a veritable who’s who of baseballers who spend their winters out in AZ — Pat wanders upstairs and slips into his assless-chapped gimp outfit to entertain his party guests while making them feel extremely uncomfortable all at the same time.

Another reason I never shared the pic is because the quality is just god-awful. It was taken on one of those ancient 1.2 megapixel camera phones from the mid-00′s. Plus, the person who gave me the pic put that little “man or machine” thought bubble in there which certainly detracts from the photo, but is kinda funny in retrospect considering his gimpy character name is now known as The Machine.

So, without further ado — here’s The Machine (Pat Burrell) from about 5 years ago wearing the same outfit that he wore in that Brian Wilson video:





(thefightinis.com)