Five Reasons Wagner Hasn’t Submitted Retirement Papers Yet

Hello again from the snow-tipped flatlands of Michigan!

Just because there’s like two feet of snow on the ground here doesn’t mean that the investigative reporters from TomahawkTake News haven’t been hard at work airing out the dirty laundry behind the mysterious failure of Billy Wagner to submit his retirement papers and thus open up a valuable spot on the Braves 40 man roster. In fact, their relentless reporting has uncovered 5 reasons for this otherwise inexplicable event. Here they are, presented in the order they were discovered:

5) We were reluctant to air this, but there is a lot of dirty laundry involved. In fact, it appears that Mrs. Wagner assigned the retired Billy laundry duty, and he’s at least a month behind. Busy, busy, busy!

4) Financial irregularities have been discovered. While money laundering was suspected, it was found out that Billy had never had to balance a checkbook before. He is now enrolled in full-time remedial math classes. Busier yet!

3) It appears that Billy may have had a run-in with local law enforcement. Incredibly, there is a local ordinance against running off nosy reporters with 95 MPH thrown rocks. Billy may be too busy with community service to fill out the retirement papers.

2) Billy has been spotted behind his barn, staring at the wall. At the time this article went to press, he still hadn’t decided if he wanted to pursue a new career watching paint dry. Did we mention how busy he is? And, finally,

1) When pressed for an answer as to when he was going to send in his papers, Billy kept mumbling things that sounded like “on advice of counsel…”, “I have no specific recollection…”, and “Fifth Amendment”. Go figure!

If any of these reasons seem far-fetched to you, need I remind you that, while losing a player in the Rule 5 draft that perhaps could have been protected with Wagner’s roster spot, the official Braves response has been to brush the whole thing off, saying it’s just a formality. Can you figure it out?