July 29, 2015
SAN FRANCISCO-
If you thought a ballpark hotdog was the most overpriced chunk of meat in baseball, you haven't been hanging around the dumpster adjacent to San Francisco's Bayside Comprehensive Cancer Center where former major league baseball slugger Barry Bonds was admitted earlier this week for removal of an enlarged pituitary gland. Normally the size of a pea, Bonds' baseball-size gland is expected to fetch between 4 and 6 million dollars at auction, according to broker Samuel Blatzstein, who handled the recent sale of Bonds' deteriorated L4 and L5 vertebrates. "The pituitary gland is often called the 'master gland' because it controls all the other glands of the endocrine system The pituitary, in turn, was controlled by Bonds and his team of sports physicians. It's the cream of the crop as far as collectors are concerned," Blatzstein explained.
Within hours after the procedure was announced in a Monday afternoon press conference, excited fans lined the inside of the medical waste dumpsters outside the Cancer Center, eagerly awaiting a chance to get their hands on Bonds' master gland. Among the fans was Ron Ellis, who in 2011 snagged Bond's left testical and hypothalamus on consecutive days. "Imagine the odds," Ellis says, "just finding Bonds' teste was like finding, say, a small raisin in, say, a dumpster full of medical waste." At Bonds' request, Ellis, a longtime Giants fan, returned the testicle to the Giants in exchange for memorabilia and a chance to meet and have his picture taken with Bonds' oncologist. He sold the hypothalamus for $47,000.
Fan Emily Zrebek says she doesn't care so much about the money but enjoys the camaraderie of camping out in the dumpster and expects fans to remain civil when the specially-marked glandular mass is discarded among them. Several fans, however, required medical attention early yesterday morning following a scuffle that ensued when a prankster hurled what appeared to be the "golden gland" into their midst. Major League officials later determined the object to be a balled-up Thickburger.
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Above: Giants fan Emily Zrebek climbs out of a medical waste bin with a bag of potential pituitary glands for examination by league officials
Below: Torrential rains flooded the medical waste containment bins outside the Cancer Center on Tuesday afternoon, forcing fans aboard whatever flotation devices they could find
