Taylor was reported missing shortly after the Rule V draft procedure and was at first reported as having been taken by the Wichita franchise. This is where it gets confusing, as, a day later, a distraught Anna Taylor, the pitcher’s wife, found a letter addressed to her but getting her name wrong (“Hana”). Beyond that, the note was illegible as it was written on a used burger wrapper and in brown and yellow crayon.
“We think it said fork over $100K,” said YSPD deputy Sheriff Fife Barney. “But it might have been foo-foo-foo-x100.”
It turns out the truth is twisted and insane, that Joe Taylor was accosted while leaving a grocery store, bonked over the head and taken into a van of some sort. From there his memory is hazy, but Taylor reports being held in a small safe house that smelled like rancid baseballs and being forced to listen to broadcasts of last year’s Slugger games at such high volume that he thought he might go insane. “I thought: If I hear that damned Genius, Genius, Genius, We All Wish We Were Genius song they use between every inning one more time I think I’m going to hurl,” Taylor told one reporter. He also said it wouldn’t have been so bad, but that his captors contributed to the music--one singing at the top of his lungs and the other farting in time with the back beat. “It smelled like grease burgers,” Taylor recalled, shuddering.
The police are currently investigating, and are also taking into account that the carpet remnant Taylor was restrained in was rumored to have been brown and yellow, but stained so deeply as to make it difficult to determine the markings. “It looks like a bird,” one forensic specialist said. “No, it’s a plane,” said another. Law enforcement officials will not speculate at present as to the source of the remnant.
The reliever will likely pitch in AAA this year, though most suggest he’s ready to play and will be a quick call up in case of injury.
“I cant’ wait,” Taylor said, incessantly scratching his feet. “Anything to get this past me. It was horrible.”