A voicemail message from Planet Zito

To paraphrase Ulysses S. Grant, find out what Barry Zito is smoking so that I can give some to all of my pitchers. “The Unicorn Message” may go down in baseball lore as the stupidest, or possibly greatest, excuse to bail out on a radio interview ever. But judge for yourself. Following the jump is the link to a voice message left by the Giants’ pitcher to Mychael Urban, a weekend sports talk host on KNBR-680 San Francisco. It involves unicorns, a health quarantine, an angry stable manager … look, I would totally mock the guy for this, except he’s 6-1 with a 2.18 ERA and 0.2 homers per 9 innings pitched, so he could live in a tree with elves baking cookies all day for all I care.
Hear the Dr. Timothy Leary-inspired phone message following the jump.

Zito’s voicemail message here.

“Oh gee, uh, dude, not good, man. Ah, so I came down to the Unicorn Club to have some breakfast this morning, to see a couple friends, um, I went downstairs to the stables, saw a couple unicorns down there, and went up to this one that was my favorite, you know the one I told you about, Powder, and I just started playing with his mane, braiding it and stuff, and I don’t know what happened, the stable manager came in and started yelling at me, freaked out, told me he was quarantined because he had some kind of something and now I’m a threat to his health. And now they’re just holding me down here, and told me I could make one phone call. Luckily I have yours memorized, which is rare these days …”

And it goes on. I have a feeling that Zito’s Fathead just went back up a few more dollars, at least among stoners.
From Zito’s Wikipedia page:

Zito is known for his idiosyncrasies and his offbeat personality. He has earned the nicknames “Planet Zito” and “Captain Quirk”. He once made it a practice to buy his own autographed baseball cards on eBay; when asked why he bought them at auction for high prices rather than acquiring unsigned cards and signing them himself, Zito replied, “Because they’re authenticated.”

The legend lives on.
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Mychael Urban archive [KNBR.com]
Barry Zito leaves a highly entertaining voicemail message about unicorns [Big League Stew]